“We invited our co-applicant from Israel to give a talk in our institute, and spend a week visiting (funded by our institute) to explore potential collaboration. During these discussions our main idea appeared and after further distant discussions we decided that the International Exchanges scheme would be an ideal platform on which we can continue collaborating.
"During the time of the grant we progressed significantly in the project and published an influential paper. Our collaboration become stronger and evolved into other projects. We now collaboratively supervise students and Postdocs. We started collaborating with additional groups (NPL, UCL) submitted several applications for funding and one of these was recently awarded (an EC FET Open).
"I can say with certainty that the International Exchanges scheme was decisively the enabler to this collaboration, giving it the momentum that it needed.”