Overseas Special Training Programme (OSTP): Special Call

Recognizing that scientific knowledge and its applications are central for national development at all levels, the National Science Foundation in alignment with the National Science Technology and Innovation Strategy has introduced the Overseas Special Training Programme (OSTP) to financially assist scientific and technical personnel, (science administrators, science educators, S&T policy makers & science communicators) as well as full time research students to acquire overseas training.

The objective of the OSTP is to enhance national capacities by providing opportunities for training to obtain advanced laboratory & research skills, industrial, technical experience, science teaching and communication skills. The main premise is that such skills development and industrial experience would not be available in Sri Lanka in the foreseeable future.

With the current economic context and government regulations of Sri Lanka, moving abroad in person for overseas training, whilst spending government funds is not permissible or justifiable. Accordingly, it is expected that OSTP could be utilized to train and build capacities of the scientists and technical personnel through facilitating short term online training programmes rather than for overseas visits in-person.

The scheme is available as NSF Training Scholarships - for technical personal, S&T aligned personal and full-time research students to obtain training in specific areas.

Preference will be given to national high priority areas given below with an aim of facilitating economic development of the country thereby consolidating limited resources in a frugal manner.

1. Eco-friendly and climate change resilient agriculture
2. Improving agricultural productivity and quality
3. Food quality and safety
4. Reducing post-harvest loses
5. Health and indigenous medicine
6. Value-added high quality products based on medicinal plants for export markets
7. Biomedical innovations
8. Climate change
9. Disaster mitigation and management
10. Waste management, circular economy and environmental sustainability
11. Water security
12. Energy security including green energy.
13. Food and nutrition security
14. Value addition to natural resources
15. Community development and social innovations
16. Emerging technologies (IoT, Data Science, AI, Block chain, etc.) and transforming to 4IR
17. Enhance innovation capacity of SMEs
18. Biotechnology applications/solutions addressing high priority concerns/needs
19. Import substitution
20. Promoting high-tech exports

Interested applicants are first requested to fill the Google form through the following link to express their interest on a particular online training programme that they identify. NSF considers the Expressions of Interest (EOI) thus received case by case basis to select requests for further processing.

Link to the Google form on EOI:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1GMkzRgtZpnvmMO02ICNMvkzsPu0oEsa2lMYcmDWZFzQ/edit

Applicants from private sector organizations will also be considered on a matching funds basis.