A total of twenty-six applications were received by the European Aurora University Network following a call for incentive and collaborative research projects. Aurora's Scientific Council finally selected seven innovative projects, among them NUTRIAGE24, whose coordinator is the Faculty of Health Sciences of Palacký University.
The annual call aims to offer young and established academics the opportunity to further strengthen research collaboration across the Aurora network universities. Research proposals funded under this call were assessed against a rigorous list of criteria, including their scientific quality, originality and feasibility. The Aurora Research Council, based at the Université Paris-Est Créteil in Paris, finally selected seven potentially innovative projects from the twenty-six applications received, which will receive a total of more than 100,000 euros.
In the field of health care, the NUTRIAGE24 project, whose coordinator is the Faculty of Health Sciences of the UP, was a success. The partners of the project are the Spanish Universitat Rovira i Virgili and the University of Iceland. "The main goal of the NUTRIAGE24 project is to create an inter-university consortium that will start a pilot study. This should help to better understand the relationship between nutrition, health and the environment in older people, taking into account their living situation and social factors that also affect the availability of adequate nutrition," explained the main researcher of the project, Romana Klášterecká. Marika Svrčková, Miroslav Kopecký, Petra Pičmanová, Irena Jedličková and Tereza Schovánková also participated in the initiation and delivery of the successful project.
The funded projects will start in autumn 2024 and will run for the next two years.