11 Polish teams are all set to carry out ten bilateral projects with partners from the Czech Republic and one trilateral project involving researchers from the Czech Republic and Austria under the OPUS 24+LAP/Weave scheme. The NCN has slated a total of more than 13.7 million zlotys in funding for their research.
Researchers from Bydgoszcz, Kraków, Poznań, Warsaw and Zabrze will carry out 10 bilateral Polish-Czech projects: 6 in Physical Sciences and Engineering and 4 in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. This round’s winners include Prof. Tomasz Jankowiak from the Poznań University of Technology, who will work on a land engineering project devoted to the response of structures and materials to dynamic actions during fires. His material of interest is structural steel, as its properties at high temperatures and high strain rates have not been well-researched to date. Jankowiak’s team will answer a number of questions and gather experimental results to understand the mechanism of fire-induced building collapse, including incidents such as falling elements, impacts and explosions. This will allow them to develop models and principles for designing structures exposed to a combination of thermal and dynamic actions. The research will be conducted in cooperation with Prof. František Wald from the Czech Technical University in Prague.
Funding was also awarded to one trilateral Polish-Czech-Austrian project, submitted by researchers based in Wrocław. Headed by Prof. Elżbieta Gumienna-Kontecka from the University of Wrocław, in tandem with Prof. Elżbieta Wojaczyńska from the Wrocław University of Science and Technology, the team will work on a trilateral Polish-Czech-Austrian OPUS LAP project entitled “Artificial siderophores for molecular imaging applications”, looking to enhance medical tools and methods used to detect the development of diseases, e.g., to track tumour growth. Specifically, the researchers will be searching for contrast agents, which can effectively support combined imaging techniques: Positron Emission Tomography (PET), computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and optical fluorescence imaging (OFI). The Polish team will join forces with Dr Petřík Miloš from Palacky University in the Czech Republic and Prof. Clemens Decristoforo from the Medical University Innsbruck in Austria to design and develop synthetic biomimetic analogues of natural hydroxamate siderophores with a potential as basis for novel non-invasive in vivo imaging agents.
List of all projects qualified for funding in the OPUS 24+LAP/Weave call
List of Polish-Czech bilateral projects
Polish teams under these projects will be funded by the National Science Centre, while their Czech and Austrian partners will get their funding from the Czech Science Foundation (GACR) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), respectively.
Lead Agency Procedure – LAP
In the latest OPUS 24+LAP/Weave call, which concluded in May, the NCN received 1921 proposals with a total budget of nearly 2.7 billion zlotys. Researchers could request funding for projects conducted without international partners, as well as bi- or trilateral LAP projects involving foreign cooperation or access to large international research equipment. The call was open to researchers at all career levels.
LAP is a new proposal evaluation standard adopted by European research-funding institutions, designed to facilitate the funding application process for international research teams and streamline proposal review.
OPUS LAP projects were reviewed at the same time and by the same expert teams as other OPUS proposals, but also underwent an additional evaluation that looked at the research record and the previous projects of the principal investigators in foreign partner teams. Experts also made sure that the contribution of all teams to the project is balanced and complementary.
Decisions and their delivery
The decisions for OPUS LAP proposals qualified for funding under OPUS 24 in bilateral cooperation with the Czech Science Foundation and trilateral with Austrian Science Fund (FWF) have already been sent out. Please remember that the decisions of the NCN Director are delivered to the applicant electronically, to the e-mail address indicated in the proposal. Learn more about how decisions are delivered
Results of the OPUS 24+LAP/Weave Call – bilateral projects in cooperation with Austria
Results of the OPUS 24+LAP/Weave Call – bilateral projects in cooperation with Luxembourg
Results of the OPUS 24+LAP/Weave Call – bilateral projects in cooperation with Belgium/Flanders
Results of the OPUS 24+LAP/Weave Call bilateral projects in cooperation with Switzerland