The Bridge Research Cooperation Fund represented a unique opportunity to form science and technology links between the UK and Russia.

In this phase of the BRIDGE project, we extended our community of Russia-UK partnerships to include research cooperation. From our experience of working with BRIDGE HEIs on collaborative programme delivery partnerships, it is apparent that a key motivation to forming these bilateral links is the desire to develop long term research links across the partnership.

Our aim is to foster science and technology links between UK & Russia through bringing together scientists working within HEIs. With this strand of the BRIDGE project we provide networking opportunities for academics and researchers so that they can go to develop enduring partnerships between UK and Russian HEIs.

The aims of this strand of BRIDGE are to:

			Strengthen Russia UK science & technology links by providing support for  HE Institution based teams of academics and research students
			Further develop human capital, skills and international research experience thus contributing to the capacity building at HEIs
			Raise the profile of Russia and UK scientists collaborating together and promoting research results
			Facilitate and build effective institution partnerships based on S&T research agendas
			Provide replicable models for future collaborative research between Russia and UK

In the first year of the Science and Technology strand, we funded two programmes leading to dual awards and provided seed corn funding to seven research collaborations.

For the final year of BRIDGE, 2007-08, we funded three dual award programmes and research collaborations.

We are also organising a Policy Dialogue to give managers of research in the UK and Russia the opportunity to discuss the changing research environment in the two countries. We plan to publish outputs from this on our website.