Mobilizing a European partnership for brain health through one health education and embodied cognition
Invitation to every reader, members and institutions to join the Horizon Europe proposal on nutritional brain health from school grounds to policy reform
Reading time: 25 to 120 minutes, in full.
Executive summary: please read and reach out to the authorities and experts in your networks, both to invite to the proposal and our action itself, in case of interest. Poll to decide next week’s meeting time. Page 67 of the Horizon call document, linked in the post, brings all details missing here. We will not submit unless holding a winner proposal, and we work to achieve so within the time-frame before the deadline. All contacts done need to benefit the network long term, and the rest of action goals.
https://doodle.com/group-poll/participate/dJWV1x9e
Please, note: not me, neither any of my beloved ones, will engage or receive financial benefits from this proposal, nor our EU BEACON One Health Education action itself; our role is strictly to facilitate and strengthen member-led initiatives through coordination, capacity-building, and scientific dissemination. Members and anyone you wish, trusted experts and colleagues, are therefore invited to activate engage as third parties or consortium members on your own, through institutional and professional networks. Please, propose contacts, assist in securing expressions of interest or formal engagement from public authorities, including those responsible for education, health, child protection, nutrition, and care systems. It all will benefit the network by strengthening capacity and excellence, uplifting each other career prospects, increasing our uppermost level skills and experience. All contributions at this stage are critical to the success and credibility of the partnership and should be shared promptly through the designated coordination channels.
EU Beacon One Health Education, Horizon call proposal on Brain HealthHorizon-HLTH-2025-02-DISEASE-01: European Partnership for Brain HealthHealth cluster.
Deadline 16th of September: 46 days, 6.5 weeks, left to go. Principal investigator: medical doctor Anupoma Pinky Haque, AustriaEmail: dr.anupoma@gmail.com Myself coordination aid, reachable by email as well: henning.garcia@urv.cat for the time being, as I am proudly switching to University of Almería to focus on the action.
Total indicative budget for this topic: 150 million eurosMinimum support to each third party engaged is 3 million euros, and is an explicit requirement to be selected. The funding rate is up to 30% of the eligible costs. The timeframe of our partnership, its ongoing work and implementation of measures is seven to ten years.
Expected outcomes: achievement of the sustainable development goals related to neurological and brain health, by strengthening the EU and associated countries as drivers of research and innovation in the topic. Cement a strong research ecosystem involving all stakeholders. Foster transnational interdisciplinary open data research collaborations. More timely diagnosis and prevention for all affected by brain diseases and debilitating health and living, socioeconomic burdening conditions. Personalized timely treatments made available in higher quality healthcare systems resulting from this consortium actions and outcomes. Publico-private and the entirety of civil society engaged in an efficient collaboration. We must include social sciences and humanities, gender parity, affected patients input, and bring evident health societal impact by every one of the proposed partnership activities.
The selecting criteria are excellence, impact and implementation. Beneficiaries may provide financial support to third parties. Our EU BEACON One Health Education action is aiding, before the official inauguration, in yet another round of consortia formation to uplift the career and prospects of its most in need members, individually and institutionally, mentoring young talent in Horizon proposals completion and implementation. It also, as a funded COST action, will support scientific communication, dissemination and sustainable exploitation of results beyond the reach of the proposal itself. The action benefits by improving the skills of all involved, ensuring the excellence of the network, and strengthening its member base, as well as the action reach and impact through cumulative results, deliverables and shared milestones. We aim to ally with schools, deepening the collaboration with international bodies, regional and national governments, and other specialized organizations. The action brings one health education as a transversal topic and value, it being the all encompassing sustainable development goal, while pedagogy stands as the most essential foundation to ensure its respect and widespread adoption of this urgent approach to wellbeing, peace and prosperity for all. The partnership needs to contribute to the Healthier together EU non-communicable diseases initiative (2022-27) focus area on mental health and neurological disorders, the Communication on a comprehensive approach to mental health (COM(2023) 298 final), the Pharmaceutical strategy for Europe, and the EU4Health programme. On the dissemination and popularization side of the outputs, the partnership needs to contribute to the Communication on the European care strategy for caregivers and care receivers (COM(2022) 440 final), strictly following FAIR and open data principles and protocols, working under the European health data space (EDHS).
https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/funding/funding-opportunities/funding-programmes-and-open-calls/horizon-europe/cluster-1-health_en
https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021-2027/horizon/wp-call/2025/wp-4-health_horizon-2025_en.pdf (page 67, on brain health)
By creating these synergies, the partnership has to reach a critical mass and implement resources from a long-term perspective and objectives viewpoint aligned with the Strategic research and innovation agenda (SRIA) and the work of the Coordination and support action BrainHealth. It all should facilitate the sharing of samples and analysis using best practices and harmonisation standards among regions and disciplines, aiding in the translation of scientific knowledge into the daily work of practitioners, legislators, educators and everyone involved, providing training, retraining and organizing dissemination activities. Embodied mind, at the one health level. We are requested to build on and go beyond, be keenly aware, of previous related initiatives, such as ERA-NET, the Network of European funding neuroscience research (NEURON), the digital research infrastructure EBRAINS, and the support actions BrainHealth and the European brain research area (EBRA) within the Human brain project, one of the few European flagships. To achieve so, we must familiarize ourselves with the Coherence and synergies of candidate European partnerships under Horizon Europe, and explore further collaboration opportunities at the global stage too. It is an excellent opportunity to attract new talent, young and from most in-need regions, as well as increase parity and gender equality, disability presence in power positions. It all required to ensure a functional medico-scientific landscape, and proper ethical, trustful, efficient and effective governance at all levels, along the open science methods and best standards to ensure and triple check. I repeat, we bring one health through the embodied mind in bettering milieus.
Experts: please, add your names and institutions to the living open document linked; invite all you trust and want in. We are requested to engage research funders, health authorities, citizens, healthcare providers, innovators, policymakers, interdisciplinary experts in the relevant topics and areas of specialization and implementation. Ministers in different portfolios must be engaged, as well as national and regional healthcare authorities, organizations and providers, academic researchers and institutional infrastructures, patient organizations, research and technology development industry and other private organizations, including charities and other non-profit bodies. Also vote using this poll, to attend our next week’s meeting:
https://doodle.com/group-poll/participate/dJWV1x9e
Time-slots polled are from 4th to 8th of August, since we are in urgent need for mobilization. I apologize for slowing down the process due to the abuses and much harsher torture myself and beloved ones have been enduring. Crimes, still ongoing, in direst need to ensure violence never debilitates any one of us again, none of us. It is one of the main goals of the action: to teach one health, not one against the other. Be there with the power and authority, never leaving those again in the hands of any sort of criminally oriented individuals and organizations, vicious, corrupt, cruel, inept.
Proposal draft (please, add your input and insights to the living document; please, also state needs on how we can help you achieve, i.e.: sending emails to contacts):
The partnership will mobilize its resources through a structured, multilevel alliance encompassing institutions, sectors and populations across the full range of governance and implementation. Membership is determined not by prestige or size alone, but by strategic relevance, operational capacity, and ethical alignment with the goals of preventive, personalized, and pedagogically embedded brain health. Participation is open yet rigorously selective, designed to guarantee long-term institutional commitment, interoperability, and equitable benefit distribution across Member States and associated countries.At the core of the partnership must be top echelons, as required, including Ministries of Health and Education from participating countries. Their role is central to enabling structural reform, data integration, policy alignment and national-scale implementation.
These Ministries will coordinate with regional authorities and local service providers to ensure that the interventions developed and tested within the partnership are scalable, institutionally anchored, and reflected in regulatory frameworks and strategic plans. Their engagement also secures alignment with national research agendas, budget allocations, and public health infrastructure.Public schools, particularly those serving vulnerable or underserved populations, are targeted as primary implementation nodes. These schools will host pilot studies, provide real-life environments for nutrition-health-education integration, and become early adopters of curricular and procedural innovations developed by the partnership. Selection of participating schools will be guided by indicators of structural inequality, nutritional insufficiency, and educational underperformance, with priority given to those institutions where the structural determinants of cognitive health are most impaired.
This ensures that the partnership not only generates high-level knowledge but acts as a compensatory mechanism for systemic educational and health disparities.Hospitals, pediatric clinics, and primary care networks are included as clinical endpoints and referral partners, enabling comprehensive assessment of medical outcomes and longitudinal follow-up. Their inclusion allows for biomarker collection, neurodevelopmental screening, comorbidity monitoring, and professional feedback loops, connecting the preventive and educational dimensions of the partnership with clinical precision and accountability. Nutritional therapists, pediatric neurologists, and general practitioners will collaborate in the translation of school-based data into health-relevant metrics. Care centers, foster homes and residential institutions for children in precarious or state-supervised conditions will form a critical component of the partnership. These settings are often excluded from long-term research yet concentrate high-risk profiles for poor brain health outcomes due to trauma, neglect, poor nutrition, and educational exclusion.
By involving such institutions as full members, the partnership acknowledges and addresses one of the most urgent ethical gaps in current health and education systems. Their participation will generate essential data on structural adversity and the efficacy of integrated support models. Civil society organizations, patient groups, and parental associations will also ensure that the perspectives of children and families are structurally embedded in design, implementation and evaluation. Research universities and teacher training institutes will contribute to methodological development, teacher upskilling, and data analytics. Agricultural institutions and local food governance bodies will support the traceability, quality control and contextual adaptation of the nutritional interventions. Finally, international organizations, including those working on children’s rights, food sovereignty and public health, will provide oversight, policy resonance and global replication potential.This consortium model ensures that the partnership is not vertically imposed but horizontally distributed, intersectoral, and structurally inclusive. Each member brings specific knowledge, resources and responsibility into a coordinated system that recognizes that brain health cannot be delivered through healthcare alone, but must be co-produced across schools, families, communities, and the ecological systems that feed and sustain them.
Next steps: all members involved are strongly encouraged to support the identification, outreach, and engagement of national and regional Ministries of Health, Education, and other relevant public bodies across European countries and Horizon associated states, as an immediate priority in the development of the Horizon Europe Brain Health proposal. Given the nature of the partnership, funding requisites and limitations, and the magnitude and scope of the objectives, governmental participation is essential to meet the structural requirements of the call and to ensure long-term implementation, scale, and policy integration, as explicitly stated in the proposal instructions by Horizon authors. Thank you all!
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