Objectives & Aims

Objectives
The general concept behind ARCADE is to strengthen the Institute's capability in areas where its research has been recognised as excellent. Like other research institutes in Greece, since 1995, the
IOPC undergoes an external evaluation every five years by evaluators from outside Greece and it has twice been funded as a Centre of Excellence at a national level. The most recent evaluation of the IOPC, completed in 2005, rated its research activities highly and specific recommendations were made to continue lines of research which were rated as "of international quality". These lines of research form the scientific basis for the ARCADE project.
The overall concept of the proposed project, therefore, is to initiate certain measures to enable the IOPC to establish itself as a centre of excellence at a European level for state-of-the-art research into bioactive compounds and materials, and to be able to contribute to the development of research into functional compounds in a convergent region of the EU. The specific objectives of the ARCADE project thus follow those encompassed by the REGPOT call

Aims
- personnel exchanges with well-established partner groups in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Slovenia, Switzerland and the UK to reinforce and transfer necessary
know-how
- acquisition of new equipment and upgrade of existing infrastructure with the aim of providing state-of-the-art support for the IOPC's research objectives and advancing its capability in Mass Spectrometry and NMR spectroscopy
- recruitment of experienced researchers to fully exploit the newly acquired equipment and to provide added impetus to the IOPC's research potential
- organisation of an international conference and a number of workshops in close collaboration with the heads of the partner groups, with topics related to core activities of the IOPC
- dissemination and the promotion of the objectives of the project to the wider public through a range of diverse activities.