A total of €240,000 awards were recently presented from the University of Malta Research Fund to support the conducting four research projects and the employment of support staff over a two-year period from January 2019 to 2020. This was the second year that the University awarded these funds.
The four projects, which were awarded €60,000 each, were the following: a project entitled ‘Maltese Speech Recognition’ proposed by Prof. Albert Gatt, director of the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology; a project entitled ‘Characterisation of atypical non-autoimmune diabetes mellitus in the Maltese islands’, proposed by Dr Nikolai Pace and Prof. Josanne Vassallo from the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery; a project entitled ‘Force’, creating a national framework of student competence in English in bilingual Malta, proposed by Dr Odette Vassallo, director of the Centre for English Language Proficiency; and a project entitled ‘Developing innovative tools to aid accurate monitoring for biodiversity conservation in Malta (BioCon_Innovate)’, proposed by Dr Adriana Vella from the University’s Conservation Biology Research Group.