What is the PCI?

Project summary

The future of humanity depends on plants and they are threatened, more than ever, by the sheer speed of change across ecosystems. We need unprecedented cross-discipline cooperation to tackle complex plant-related issues facing the world’s population. We propose the creation of the Plant Cell Institute (PCI). The PCI aims to be the first distributed institute where researchers work on plant cell-inspired solutions to solve today’s most challenging problems. The PCI’s visionary structure relies on its four strong foundations: distributed collaboration, open science, support to early career researchers and community-driven projects. We strive to establish a network of labs that collectively support innovative research and embrace our mission to improve the quality of living standards worldwide. The PCI’s Ambition 2035 scientific programme is strongly connected to existing research groups and is designed to empower and maximise collaborative research. The open and interdisciplinary approach of the PCI intends to translate research into real-world impact and accelerating the pace of discovery. The PCI pursues collective knowledge, and distributed science is at the heart of our strategy to find revolutionary solutions for urgent problems.

We should not forget that life relies on plant cell🍃So we'd better get to work!

Key takeaways

Collaborations among scientists and institutions are necessary to address increasingly complex challenges in science. The PCI’s unique collaborative and distributed structure envisions to bolster the success in securing research funding, create new opportunities for early career researchers and maximise the research impact.

The PCI’s four central pillars

Distributed collaboration The PCI uses technological advances to break the current research silos and capitalise on a broad range of expertise across its network. The platform ensures data accessibility and proactively reward cooperation among projects.

Open science The PCI aims to address humanity's pressing problems, and this can’t be achieved without shared knowledge. Our open source commitment guarantees the availability of research results.

Support to early career researchers The PCI strives to help talented young researchers develop their novel ideas.

Community-driven projects The PCI supports ideas rather than individuals. Projects are coordinated by the PCI and selected through a community-based evaluation process.