AAAA Coalition started from a simple observation: the least-resourced institutions are often the ones that need effective research-funding tools the most — and they're the ones with the least access to existing commercial platforms.
International programme leader with fifteen years of experience in programme development, governance, and institutional cooperation — higher education, TVET, blue and circular economy, climate action.
Also: Founder and Director, Economic Development Board Association (EDBA) — an independent organisation (CLG, Dublin) that has acted as AAAA Coalition's international-cooperation secretariat since 2022 · External Expert Evaluator, Horizon Europe Cluster 6, European Research Executive Agency.
AAAA Coalition is the network itself — 60+ higher education institutions, 1,400+ academics and researchers, across 10+ countries. EDBA is a separate, independent organisation that provides secretariat and programme-management support to the coalition; it is not the coalition itself. AAAA OS is the knowledge and collaboration platform (AI Librarian, registries, digital twins) the coalition makes available to its members. Project Factories are the labs, hubs and working teams that member institutions run, distributed across partner organisations — closely linked to AAAA OS but a distinct thing in their own right. Their AI-assisted co-writing tool, Proposal Factory, serves those labs and hubs directly.
Researchers running a live funding pipeline are often doing it alone, alongside teaching, evaluation and institutional duties — tracking call deadlines, redrafting sections under pressure, and re-checking scoring rules that change between calls. Digital Brain is our name for a persistent AI assistant paired with one person, extendable to a small team of human and AI collaborators working the same programme together.
The part we consider non-negotiable: a Digital Brain drafts, monitors and flags — it does not silently decide on a person's behalf. Every recommendation is marked as a recommendation; approving, rejecting or rewriting stays a human action, logged and reversible. That distinction, more than the automation itself, is what member institutions are actually adopting.
Our partners' data and documents are never entrusted to a commercial third party. Every tool we build is self-hosted, with explicit access control — cooperation is built on trust, not vendor dependency.