What+is+INTERCROSSING?

= INTERCROSSING is a consortium of universities and SMEs (small to medium enterprises) = We are an EU funded ITN that has employed 13 Early Stage researchers for 3 years each. They are receiving PhD-level training. We accepted candidates from any Country in the World and the final composition of the ESR team is as follows

Origin (country of first degree) Sex Only two of the successful candidates had studied with one of the partners. All candidates have moved to a position in a different country. The projects started in Nov 2012 +/- one month
 * USA, Russia 2, France, Croatia, Germany 3, Pakistan, UK, Greece, India 2
 * Male 7, Female 6

Qualifications see : []

The ESRs are receiving rigorous training in three disciplines hardly ever found together any one young scientist:  population genetics, informatics and statistics.

=OUTLINE OF THE NETWORK'S AIMS = The principal strategic objective of INTERCROSSING is the cultivation of a new type of early stage researcher (ESR) to deal with challenges of exploiting the latest Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies

The need for this supra-disciplinary combination of skills reflects the extraordinary new demands produced by technologies that allow us to sequence whole genomes, and to quantify their regulation and expression in many samples from the same species in multiple locations. This torrent of data overwhelms current computational, genetic and statistical approaches for distinguishing the biologically relevant patterns from the background noise.

The consortium behind INTERCROSSING – including 5 universities and 7 SMEs spanning 9 EU countries – are all using the NGS technologies, but have found the recruitment of appropriate Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) a major obstacle to building on their innovations. This fundamental shortage in the EU research community is slowing the scientific and industrial exploitation of these groundbreaking new data streams; the shortage of key talent occurs worldwide, and has attracted major investment in other regions (e.g. at the Beijing Genome Institute).

A combination of industrial and academic partners will deliver training courses equipping the ESRs to traverse the barriers between these disciplines. Taught courses will provide practical experience of NGS data acquisition, computational methods, model-based statistical inference and population genetics. These skills will allow the ESRs to implement state-of-the art methods to the new data. The ESRs will also be trained in a suit of research skills to deploy this understanding across the industrial and academic sectors, and will be employed in a project in which they move between the sectors.

The projects
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The INTERCROSSING training programme builds on a set of seven joint research subprojects. In initiating this ITN, each SME/charity identified a problem that is a barrier to its progress, which they wished to overcome using appropriately trained ESRs who can access to the broader expertise of the INTERCROSSING network.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">For each project is set out in the menu to the left
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Each project pairs one SME/charity partner, and one at a university partner. Each partner will host at an ESR involved in the project.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">We have specified three objectives for each project, which will be achieved by the pair of ESRs. Each ESR will lead on achieving one of the objectives, and they will collaborate on the third, which involves the transfer of expertise between the two sectors.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The range of topics spans from medicine to agriculture, and from genomics to epigenetics. They are individually challenging and were identified as being of economic importance by the SMEs or a key to understanding biodiversity.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Taught Courses:
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In the design of INTERCROSSING there is a series of seven residential training courses (see home page) each delivered by a combination of private/charity and university partners. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This balanced contribution shows that the private contribution is integrated into the taught course element of the training.