Nanoforum - Nanotech Regulatory Document Archive

3.2. National programmes and Networking
The national research program on Nanotechnology opened the first call for proposals in
the late autumn of 2002 (November). Thirty-two proposals were considered for funding
and two of them were announced as successful in September 2003: one project was
based at the University of Sofia, and another - at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
The average number of collaborators per proposal was 21, and the number of
institutions was 3.
The researchers, working in the field of nanotechnology, organised themselves in 1998
a network, which became the basis of the National Centre on Nanotechnology (NCNT)
established in 1999 under the auspices of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The host
institute of the NCNT is the Central Lab of Electrochemical Power Sources (CLEPS-
BAS). The NCNT has three types of partners: research institutes (16), university (6), and
SMEs (3). The structure of the Centre and the names of the thematic-group-leaders can
be found in http://www.bas.bg/nano/.
The density of projects and researchers working on nanotechnology in the period 2000 -
2003 has been reported in the report for 2003 of the NCNT. Concerning to number of
projects, In 2000 there were 65 project, this number has increased from 71 projects in
2001 to 122 in 2003. The report presents as a measure of the researchers in
nanotechnology the number of participants in the annual workshops of the NCNT. This
number has also increased in this period. In 2000 and 2001 there were 131 and 132
participants while this number has growth to 203 in 2002 and to 300 in 2003. Additional
information of this report is shown in Figure 7: the support of the government and nongovernment
organisations to the projects within NCNT and the researchers who have
participated in these projects.
Integration of researchers from NCNT-BG
with reserachers from EU, USA, Japan, a/o
year Bulgarian authors Foreign authors total
1 2
2000 103 78.6% 28 21.4% 131 100.0%
2001 112 84.8% 20 15.2% 132 100.0%
2002 155 76.3% 48 23.7% 203 100.0%
Support of research projects elaborated within NCNT-BG
year Budget National Bulgarian Foreign Total
support programs SMEs partners
1 2 3 4
2000 34.0% 15.4% 4.6% 46.0% 100.0%
2001 34.0% 15.5% 4.2% 46.3% 100.0%
2002 27.9% 15.6% 2.5% 54.0% 100.0%
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