EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies COST action. Status of infrastructure, governance reinforcement, and institutional continuity under adverse conditions. Call for experts in security, forensics and law to join us.
https://beacon.health.int.eu.org/p/op...
Further information at https://health.int.eu.org
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Each COST action is an independent, bottom-up network initiated by researchers who identify a shared scientific or societal challenge requiring coordinated action. An action brings together experts from universities, research institutes, public administrations, enterprises, and civil society. It supports exchanges, schools, and communication activities that build the intellectual infrastructure for future research and innovation. Every action must demonstrate openness, interdisciplinarity, and balanced participation, integrating medicine, veterinary sciences, public health, computer science, engineering, law, anthropology, sociology, economics, pedagogy, policy, and ethics into a collaborative ecosystem. Near Neighbour Countries may participate in networking activities but cannot coordinate them.
COST is funded collectively by the member states through contributions integrated into the Horizon Europe framework under the oversight of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. The programme is administered by the COST Association, a Brussels-based international non-profit organization that executes the budget and ensures compliance with European financial regulations. The COST Committee of Senior Officials, composed of national delegates, defines strategic priorities, approves annual work plans, and makes the final decisions on which actions receive funding. Proposal evaluation follows a rigorous, transparent procedure. Calls for new actions are open continuously, with periodic collection dates. Independent external experts assess each submission for scientific excellence, expected impact, and quality of implementation. The Scientific Committee ranks them, and the Committee of Senior Officials approves those that meet both the criteria of excellence and geographical inclusiveness. Selected actions receive a four-year networking grant that finances the coordination activities but not salaries or laboratory costs.
The framework is part and complements Horizon Europe, which finances research projects. Horizon supports experimentation, infrastructure, and technology development, while COST provides the collaborative scaffolding that connects those efforts. This structural duality ensures that innovative research emerging from Horizon-funded projects circulates rapidly through COST networks, extending participation to researchers in smaller or less resourced states. Horizon Europe is open to international partners, including the United States, particularly within health-related clusters such as the HaDEA 2025 Cluster 1 Health programme, which funds work on disease partnerships, brain health, AI-assisted diagnostics, and educational technologies. COST actions operate within this framework to integrate the human and institutional cooperation essential for these scientific ambitions to succeed.
The COST area population in 2025 is approximately 1.18 billion. The EU component represents about 450.4 million people, the full COST and cooperating area roughly 679 million, and the Near Neighbour and partner countries around 497.7 million. Eurostat’s January 2025 demographic release and the United Nations World Population Prospects 2024 data confirm these magnitudes. Across the area, child-to-adult ratios range from 0.23 in Italy to 0.45 in Türkiye, and higher education attainment among adults averages 34 percent, reaching 52 percent in Ireland and 16 percent in Albania. These numbers represent the human foundation of Europe’s research and innovation ecosystem that COST mobilizes through inclusiveness and capacity-building.
BEACON One Health Education via new technologies is one such action. It converges education, medicine, environmental and computational sciences to design open curricula, artificial-intelligence-driven tutor systems, and participatory governance frameworks for learning. Its mission is to rewire educational and scientific systems to reflect the interconnected nature of human, animal, and environmental health, building a foundation for a truly integrative one health paradigm within Europe and its partner regions.
We invite researchers, educators, clinicians, engineers, economists, and policymakers committed to open, science-based education and the integrated advancement of human, animal, and ecological health. Please join us in.
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