The SUPPORT project aims to strengthen health research systems in sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries affected by poverty-related pediatric infectious diseases. This goal will be achieved through a comprehensive fellowship program designed to train and mentor early and mid-career researchers. The consortium comprises clinical research institutions, academia, and stakeholders from both SSA and Europe. Makerere University in Uganda will act as the scientific leadership hub, with fellows stationed at leading SSA research institutions, fostering South-to-South collaboration. Additionally, short-term internships at European institutions will complement their training. The selection of target host countries, including Mozambique, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Senegal, was based on their research capacity needs and disease burden, encompassing Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone nations. The impact of SUPPORT will be the establishment of a competent and innovative community of scientists and healthcare professionals equipped to actively investigate and address pediatric infectious diseases, including epidemic management, in SSA. By strengthening research capacity and promoting collaboration, the project contributes to long-term improvements in morbidity and mortality associated with infectious diseases in children from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). SUPPORT will train 8 early-career fellows and 5 mid-career fellows, developing a new collaborative clinical study based on two ongoing EDCTP projects, EMPIRICAL and UNIVERSAL. The fellows will undergo a rigorous training program that combines online and face-to-face components to develop essential research skills. This training will be integrated with their individual research projects, which address critical research questions related to pediatric infectious diseases in SSA. The fellows will take the lead on these projects with guidance and support from mentors affiliated with African and European institutions.

SUPER will train 15 doctoral Fellows as transdisciplinary leaders to develop and promote sustainable, equitable physical activity and sports that prioritise both human and planetary health in the face of world finite resources and a changing climate. The network will bring together sports and physical activity industries, organisations and practitioners with leading researchers and experts across fields such as sports & behaviour sciences, human health, education, social science, planetary health, circular economy, environmental sciences and sustainable development to conduct empirical research and cascading skill-building with the following objectives: Objective 1: Establish the theoretical and evidence base as well as a research roadmap on the impact of sports and physical activity on planetary health, resources and climate and, conversely, the impact of climate change on sports and physical activity. This, to support policy, practice and novel solutions. Objective 2: Develop novel solutions for sports and physical activity policy, infrastructures, equipment, practices and promotion that bring co-benefits by simultaneously increasing population resilience to climate change equitably and lowering the impact on the planet and planetary limits. Objective 3: Test and demonstrate these novel solutions in key sectors through living labs: Health Care, Professional and Amateur Sports, School/Education, Urban Design, Workplace/Occupational Health. Objective 4: Provide evidence-based guidance and scientific support to future generations and all stakeholders who promote, manage, or use sports and physical activity: industry, practitioners, organisations, policymakers, funders, and the public, on making sports and physical activity sustainable and equitable. Objective 5: Build capacity for future generations and among the sports and physical activity industry, organisations and practitioners for developing innovative, sustainable and circular solutions and practiceTBD

Our aim is to create a platform that makes the normative framework governing Research Ethics and Research Integrity (RE+RI) easily accessible, supports application in research and evaluation, and involves all stakeholders in a participatory way, thus achieving sustainability. The platform will foster uptake of ethical standards and responsible conduct of research, and ultimately support research excellence and strengthen society’s confidence in research and its findings. This project has three unique features: 1. Stakeholder participation and community engagement The first unique feature is the iterative, ‘bottom up’ approach, making explicit normative experiences of local stakeholders and principles embedded in local standards, rules and practices, and enabling a structuring of data that fits research and evaluation practice, providing useful, accessible information for local users. 2. Focus on (diversity of) RE+RI practices The second unique feature is acknowledging the diversity of practices within and between countries and disciplines. Through normative analysis, differences wil be made explicit and open for comparison and deliberation. By using various methods of case analysis, prominent RE+RI cases from practice will be made accessible and scenarios will be developed. This will result in a structuring of data, based on their relevance for actual use by researchers. 3. Interactive self-sustainable Wiki-platform The third unique feature is the development of an online platform that is dynamic, customer-tailored, up-to-date and self-sustainable. Based upon the MediaWiki approach, committed to open source and open data, the platform steers a user through its content based on what he seeks and what he needs to know. The platform will be adapted and further developed using the latest novelties in knowledge engineering (data mining). It will be owned by the RE+RI community, which will ensure that it is up-to-date and sustainable.

Cancer is the first leading cause of death by non-communicable diseases in children in Europe. During cancer treatment, patients’ morbidity is increased due to physical inactivity, cancer-related fatigue (CRF) and reduced health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Adapted exercise training in cancer patients, called exercise oncology, is an increasingly recognised, promising health care intervention. In adults, exercise oncology revealed notable effects on tolerance and completion rate of cancer treatment. However, in childhood cancer patients, strong evidence for exercise efficiency is lacking. Thus, precision exercise training is not part of standard care in paediatric oncology and does not reach the majority of patients. By pooling the leading expertise on a European and cross-Atlantic level, the FORTEe project aims to evaluate a personalised and standardised exercise intervention for children and adolescents undergoing anti-cancer treatment. In the randomised, controlled FORTEe trial, high evidence for an innovative, patient-centred exercise treatment will be generated. FORTEe promotes exercise oncology that aims at making patients “stronger to fight childhood cancer”. Supervised exercise training intents to increase muscle strength and reduce muscular atrophy due to bedrest. CRF and HRQoL can be improved and in the future, these benefits may help to fight childhood cancer by increasing therapy efficiency and survival rate. Within the project, digital, innovative technologies such as augmented reality will be developed and applied to make the exercise training more effective, age-adapted and personalised. Moreover, FORTEe will stimulate translational research to provide access to paediatric exercise oncology as a new health care intervention. As a progress beyond the current state-of-the-art, FORTEe has the ambition to implement paediatric exercise oncology as an evidence-based standard in clinical care for all childhood cancer patients across the EU and beyond.

With an increasing number and diversity of potential drone operations, managing the airspace to accommodate these drones will become an increasingly sophisticated task, especially in densely populated urban areas encompassing restricted zones with dynamic environmental and operational influences. Due to the associated higher probability of conflicts, and ultimately collisions, such areas require management of dedicated structured airspace, operations, and services to help mitigate these potential hazards. Several projects are currently working on defining ConOps for U-space services. Corus and Corus-XUAM have defined a possible capabilities model, such as airspace organization and services. However, a holistic framework is necessary to create an effective and efficient flow of information between the various capabilities in order to systematically organise the airspace usage. Such an automated Air Traffic Management System will be essential for the introduction drone operations at scale. AI4HyDrop evaluates the various stakeholder needs, delivering validated concepts, defining a methodology for an airspace structure organisation and associated U-space services. The framework considers the information from other services such as meteorological and separation provision, which can then be used for flight planning approval process, prioritization. In addition, essential elements such as surveillance and contingency planning can be addressed. The framework incorporates various AI based tools and associated information flows necessary to addresses the complexity, safety and scalability required for implementing such U-space services. The proposed framework represents a digital step change in ATM, using AI as a means to overcome many critical barriers foreseen in the introduction of automated U-space services. The findings could later be expanded to support general airspace management.