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 The French National Research Agency
The French National Research Agency (l'Agence Nationale de la Recherche), the ANR, was founded in 2005 and is a funding agency for research projects. Its aim is to increase the number of research projects issued from the entire scientific community, and to provide funding based on calls for proposals and peer review selection processes. The ANR addresses both public research institutions and industries with a double mission of producing new knowledge and promoting interaction between public laboratories and industrial laboratories through the development of partnerships.
 
 
For the year 2007, the ANR had a total available budget of 825 million euros for research projects having a maximum duration of four years. Projects are selected after competition and peer review with an independent selection procedure. French and foreign experts are chosen for their scientific expertise from the academic and industrial research community. The projects are ranked by a scientific evaluation committee and then selected by a strategic panel. About 25% of submitted proposals are funded.
 
 
The ANR funds all science and technology areas via two major families of programmes:
  • The non-thematic programmes, “blanc” (blue-sky), “young researcher” and “chairs of excellence”, for which the only selection criterion is scientific excellence, cover all disciplines.
  • The thematic programmes correspond to strategic priorities in major areas such as “Sustainable energy & environment”, “Biology-Health”, “Sciences & technologies for information & communication”, etc. Projects in the thematic programmes are selected on the basis of scientific quality as well as strategic and economic relevance.
The Biology-Health department is headed by Dr Patrick Chaussepied and runs interdisciplinary thematic national and trans-national programmes (14 in 2007 and 13 in 2008), allocating yearly about 140 M€ to more than 300 French research teams working in both fundamental and applied academic laboratories as well as in private companies.