A team of scholars from the University of Cambridge led by Prof. Sir Brian Heap, an ATPS Board Member has scheduled meetings with a number of organizations in Kenya, including the ATPS with the aim of discussing plans relating to a substantial grant that has been provided by the John Templeton Foundation in the area of Genetics. The Foundation, which is an independent organisation, takes a particular interest in how major advances in genetics might serve to empower inpiduals, leading to social and cultural changes as described at: http://www.templeton.org/what-we-fund/core-funding-areas/genetics. In addition the Foundation is about to announce the outcome of a competition which will fund numerous additional relevant projects worldwide, and in African countries in particular. These projects will start later this year – see http://www.templeton.org/what-we-fund/funding-priorities/can-gm-crops-help-to-feed-the-world The team will have a meeting with the ATPS Secretariat on Tuesday, 14 February 2012 to learn more about ATPS and see if there are areas of possible valuable synergies. The team comprises of Professor Sir Brian Heap, an ATPS Board member and President of the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC), Dr David Bennett, a Guest at the Kluyver Laboratory for Biotechnology of the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, Dr Bernie Jones who is based in Strasbourg, France, and was Interim Executive Director for the InterAcademy Panel (IAP), the global network of over 100 science academies, and the InterAcademy Medical Panel (IAMP) and Dr Claudia Canales Holzeis, based in Oxford, United Kingdom. She has nine years’ experience in Plant Genetics Research at the University of Oxford.