Spanish researchers are feeling the budget squeeze — until now restricted to creditors of Spain’s regional governments — as the country scrambles to negotiate a 2012 budget.
Last November, Diego de la Fuente, a graduate student in astronomy at the National Aerospace Technical Institute in Madrid, made a bet. He would gamble travel costs and two months’ living expenses of his own money to visit the United States in March and April this year to work with astronomer Donald F. Figer at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. At the time, the bet seemed a safe one: de la Fuente’s name was on a provisional list of mobility-grant winners under the Research Personnel Training programme run by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.
By the first week of January neither de la Fuente nor any of the roughly 1,200 other provisional winners had received confirmation of their grants, according to Pilar Navas-Parejo, a graduate student in geology at the University of Granada and a spokeswoman for the Federation of Young Investigators (FJI)/Precarios advocacy group. Provisional winners of the previous year had their funding confirmed by the end of December — although payments typically arrived later. Continue reading Funding uncertainty strands Spain’s young scientists→
Teresa Riera Madurell, member of the European Parliament from Spain, was appointed last month as the rapporteur responsible for establishing Horizon 2020, the next European Union (EU) research-funding programme that will run during 2014–20. The former computer scientist leads five other parliamentary rapporteurs who, over the next year, will craft four legislative documents that will dictate the structure of Horizon 2020 and related European research initiatives. She tells Nature how she hopes the programme will develop.
Spanish scientists have collected more than 32,000 signatures in less than a week in support of a petition that urges Spain’s tax authority to adopt a novel way of raising funds for research: adding a checkbox to income tax forms that would allow taxpayers to direct 0.7% of their contribution to science. Continue reading Spanish researchers petition for taxpayer donations→
A flagship biomedical research facility in Valencia, built during the heady days of the last economic boom, is now going bust. It is a casualty of Spain’s deep spending cuts and, some say, of poor management.
The Prince Felipe Research Centre (CIPF), which hosts 260 scientists and has produced high-profile publications in regenerative medicine and biochemistry, announced an emergency financial plan on 19 October that would see about 100 research staff lose their jobs, and roughly halve salaries for those who remain. Continue reading Spanish institute faces cash crisis→
Journalist covering global development by way of science and technology.