Thank you for the question.
We have launched the first competition from the budget awarded in 2008-09. I'm pleased to say that in this first round there were 800 applicants, of which 70 will be chosen. They're in the process of being chosen. Those 70 applicants will be forwarded to the board of the Vanier scholarship program, which will be provided with their rankings.
The Vanier scholarship's board will be responsible for making the final adjudication of 55 for CIHR. There will be 166, because the other two granting councils—NSERC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council—will also be recommending 70 applicants, with 55 adjudicated by the board for each of these two other councils.
Obviously, this is a very important and very prestigious program. It's in its first year, and we've already seen quite an interest from the research community, from the student community, in applying for the program.
As well, we've had applications from foreign students. It's the initial year of the program, and at this point in time we haven't had as many foreign applications as we would have liked—although we did get a significant number of applications. But it's in the first year, and we still have to do more to make the program known outside of Canada.
With regard to the foreign study stipends, here again it's a program that will permit graduate students from Canada who are actually participating in collaborative research with those outside of Canada to have a chance to go abroad and to do part of their training in that environment. This is very important, because it gives invaluable experience to students to go outside of the country to see a different way of doing research, to be trained in that environment, and to bring back to Canada that experience. So this is also ongoing.
Actually, we will be getting the results within the next few weeks. These will be released within two weeks, I guess. In the case of the Vanier program, the results will be released in either late April or the beginning of May.