Please note that the call for proposals at the Flemish agency FWO ends on 2 April 2024 while the call at the Czech GAČR and Swiss SNSF agencies acting as the lead agencies ends on 3 April 2024.

If a joint proposal is submitted to the Flemish FWO acting as the lead agency, an NCN proposal must be submitted electronically via the OSF submission system as soon as possible, by 9 April 2024, 11:59 p.m. at the latest.

If a joint proposal is submitted to the SNSF or GAČR acting as the lead agency, an NCN proposal must be submitted electronically via the OSF submission system as soon as possible, by 10 April 2024, 11:59 p.m. at the latest.

Once the work on an NCN proposal has started in the OSF submission system, the Polish research team will have 45 calendar days to complete the proposal and submit it to the NCN. After that, the proposal will be blocked for editing, in which case the Polish research team that has not sent its proposal to the NCN will have to draft a new proposal and complete it in the OSF submission system.

Proposals are now being accepted under OPUS 27, our call for researchers at all career levels, and PRELUDIUM 23, for pre-PhD researchers. The total budget of the two calls is 490 million zlotys and proposals may be submitted until mid-June.

Under the new calls, researchers can apply for grants to fund basic research projects in any scientific discipline.

Of all NCN calls, OPUS has the broadest formula: it is open to researchers at all career levels, including those who have not yet earned a PhD degree. The applicants must demonstrate a track record of at least one paper published or accepted for publication or, for research in art, at least one artistic achievement or achievement in research in art.

OPUS 27 grants can be used to fund projects with or without the partnership of foreign institutions, as well as those that require the use of large international research equipment. The spring iteration of the OPUS call does not include the lead agency procedure (LAP).

OPUS projects may take 12, 24, 36 or 48 months and involve post-docs and senior researchers, as well as students and PhD candidates. Funds from the project budget may be used for the purchase of research equipment, devices and software, materials and small equipment, outsourced services, business trips, visits and consultations, as well as compensation for collective investigators. Although there is no upper limit of funding available to a project, the budget must be compliant with the call terms, and the costs must be reasonable and crucial to the project.

PRELUDIUM 23 is targeted at researchers without a PhD degree. Grants can go toward funding projects to be carried out at Polish host institutions over 12, 24 or 36 months, with budgets of up to PLN 70,000, 140,000 or 210,000, respectively. The subject matter of the project may, but does not need to, be related to the subject of the doctoral dissertation.

The PRELUDIUM project team may consist of up to three members, including the PI and the mentor. The project budget may go toward funding the salary of the research team members (except the mentor), research equipment, software and devices, materials and small equipment, outsourced services, business trips, visits and consultations, as well as compensation for collective investigators and other necessary costs crucial to the project provided that they are in line with the Types of costs in research projects funded by the NCN.

More funding available

The total budget of OPUS 27 to be distributed among successful applicants is 450 million zlotys and that of PRELUDIUM 23 – 40 million.

“This is the first time in a while that the budgets are higher than in previous iterations. This is thanks to the announcement made by Minister of Science Dariusz Wieczorek that the NCN will receive an additional subsidy of 200 million zlotys before the end of this year”, said Prof. Krzysztof Jóźwiak, Director of the National Science Centre.

The Minister of Science, Dariusz Wieczorek, announced his decision to provide the National Science Centre with additional resources to fund research projects at a press conference on 14 February. 

“This is a step in the right direction; it will allow us to fund more valuable projects and, in the long run, boost the competitive edge of Polish science in the international arena”, Prof. Jóźwiak emphasised, “I am hopeful that, thanks to these higher budgets, the success rates in OPUS 27 and PRELUDIUM 23 will also go up significantly”, he added.

Evaluation procedure and call results

OPUS 27 and PRELUDIUM 23 proposals may be submitted until Monday, 17 June, via the OSF system.

Proposals may be submitted by universities, research institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences, research institutes, scientific and industrial centres, research centres of the Polish Academy of Sciences, scientific libraries, companies and legal entities with registered offices in Poland. Individuals who are not employed at any institution may also apply as long as they are going to be employed from the grant resources.

OPUS and PRELUDIUM proposals are evaluated by Expert Teams set up for each panel (e.g. HS1, NZ1, ST1). Merit-based evaluation consists of two stages: first, the proposals are evaluated by experts appointed to the Expert Team by the NCN Council, and then evaluated by external reviewers. Both at stage 1 and 2, the final decision is agreed on by the Expert Team as a whole, based on individual evaluations made by experts and reviewers, following a team discussion.

Call results will be published once the evaluation procedure has concluded, at the latest in December 2024.

Dr Mateusz Sikora, Head of the Dioscuri Centre at the Małopolska Centre for Biotechnology, Jagiellonian University, has developed a revolutionary method for the fast visualisation of proteins and sugars, which relies on GlycoSHIELD, an algorithm created within the framework of Polish-German scientific cooperation under the Dioscuri Programme. The paper that describes the algorithm was just published in the prestigious journal “Cell".

Sugar chains (glycans) that coat the surface of proteins in our bodies also influence how they interact with other molecules. This is why a robust understanding of glycans plays such an important role, e.g., in new drug development. Because of their mobility and variability, experimental research into sugars is very complex. Computer simulations that allow imaging of how glycans coat proteins normally require hundreds of thousands of hours on purpose-built supercomputers, which means they cannot be routinely used in the process of new drug development.

A solution to these challenges has now been proposed: GlycoSHIELD, a very efficient algorithm that takes just minutes to predict how sugars will behave on protein surfaces. It was developed within the framework of Polish-German cooperation at the Max Planck Dioscuri Centre established in 2023 at the Małopolska Centre for Biotechnology at the Jagiellonian University. The centre is headed by Dr Mateusz Sikora, who previously completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics. On the German side, Dr Sikora has partnered up with a team led by Prof. Gerhard Hummer from the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt. The research project has also involved contributions from the Taiwanese Academia Sinica, the French Inserm Insitute, and the University of Bremen, Germany. The scientists have just published their method in the prestigious “Cell” journal.

Dr Sikora emphasises: “Our approach reduces resources, computing time and the necessary technical expertise. Anyone can now calculate the arrangement and dynamics of sugar molecules on proteins on their personal computer or our online app within minutes. There is no need for specialist knowledge or high-performance computers”. The software may help develop new vaccines, drugs and advanced therapies, such as, for instance, cancer immunotherapy.

More about the method developed at the Dioscuri Centre for Modelling Post-translational Modifications

Dioscuri programme

The Dioscuri Programme was launched on the initiative of the Max Planck Society with an aim to create research teams throughout Central and Eastern Europe that would be able to compete with teams at the international level.

Four calls for proposals for the establishment of Dioscuri Centres of Scientific Excellence in Poland have been announced thus far, with 8 out of 114 submitted proposals selected for funding. Scientific excellence is the only assessment criterion under the call. The exceptional programme has attracted eight young researchers to come to Poland; they have received funding to set up and develop independent research groups in the form of Dioscuri Centres in the country. To date, five Dioscuri Centres have been established at PAS institutes in Warsaw; three more are active at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków. Each Dioscuri Centre receives 1.5 million euro in funding over five years. The costs are split evenly between the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (previously: Ministry of Education and Science) and the Ministry of Education and Scientific Research of the Federal Republic of Germany, while host institutions in Poland provide the necessary research infrastructure.

The Dioscuri Programme was implemented in cooperation with the National Science Centre from 2017 onward, until it was suspended by the decision of the previous Minister of Education and Science. The NCN continues to reassert its readiness to organise the last iteration of the Dioscuri call.

Researchers from Rzeszów and Opole have just won grants under the international IMPRESS-U call. For the next two years, they will be working on ambitious research projects in cooperation with US and Ukrainian scientists. The NCN will fund their research with a total of nearly 1.5 million zlotys.

The IMPRESS-U (International Multilateral Partnerships for Resilient Education and Science System in Ukraine) call was announced in August 2023. Its objectives are to (1) support excellence in science and engineering research, education, and innovation through international collaboration and (2) promote and catalyze integration of Ukrainian researchers in the global research community.

 IMPRESS-U opens up new opportunities for cooperation between Polish and Ukrainian researchers and their colleagues in the US and, optionally, the Baltic countries: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) is the initiator of the call and its lead agency, which means it is responsible for the merit review of all international proposals, while the other partner agencies approve the results of its review and award funding to their respective research teams.

The IMPRESS-U initiative now gives Polish researchers an opportunity to actively participate in the effort of integrating Ukrainian researchers into the global research community and help rebuild the scientific ecosystem of Ukraine.

Enhancing deep neural networks

One of the first two winners of the call is a team led by Dr hab. Anna Lytova from the University of Opole, who will be working in collaboration with Dr hab Radosław Adamczak from the University of Warsaw. The team will carry out a project entitled Random Matrix Theory and its Applications in Deep Learning together with 10 other participants from the United States and Ukraine. Their US partner is Prof. Leonid Berlyand from The Pennsylvania State University, while research on the Ukrainian side will be headed by Prof. Victor Slavin from the B. Verkin Institute for Low Temperature Physics and Engineering of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kharkiv.

Dr hab. Anna Lytova Dr hab. Anna Lytova is a professor at the Department of Physics of the University of Opole. She earned her PhD at the V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University and has lived and worked in Poland for the past 7 years. Her research is centred on random matrix theory, random graph theory, asymptotic geometric analysis and statistics.

“It was Prof. Berlyand who approached me with his idea of submitting a joint proposal under the IMPRESS-U call. I was familiar with his research record and his work – we had met previously at various seminars – but the IMPRESS-U project will be our first collaboration”, says Anna Lytova, “we really wanted to take advantage of this funding opportunity to support talented mathematicians from the so-called Kharkiv school of mathematics in these difficult times of war”.

Their IMPRESS-U project is dedicated to random matrix theory. Put simply, matrices are rectangular or square tables of numbers, which represent a phenomenon through different parameters, many of which are unknown. In particular, matrices are used to solve systems of equations. Random matrix theory is a subfield of mathematics, which studies the spectrum of large matrices with random entries selected from different probability distributions and with different types of symmetry. Random matrices are very useful for modelling complex systems and can be applied in various disciplines and contexts. In recent years, they have found applications in the rapidly growing field of machine learning, e.g. in deep neural network theory. Scientists now face the challenge of understanding and improving the efficacy of these network learning processes. In their project under the IMPRESS-U call, the Opole- and Warsaw-based team, in cooperation with their international partners, will analyse the spectral properties of random matrices related to neural networks with analytical and numerical methods; they will also work on developing tools to improve accuracy and reduce the complexity of training algorithms.

“Besides doing research, our project also aims to support the educational initiatives undertaken by talented young mathematicians, students and graduate students who, despite the ongoing war, continue to hold classes with the children from competitive maths clubs and teach the next generation of Ukrainian mathematicians, Dr hab. Lytova emphasises.

The NCN decided to award nearly 360,000 zlotys to the Polish part of the project.

Developing regenerative medicine

The other researcher to be awarded NCN funding under the IMPRESS-U call is Dr Olexandr Korchynskyi. He is a molecular and cell biologist, who has been working on methods of regulating stem cell differentiation and function for more than 20 years. His research record includes papers in “Nature” and “Science,” and he is currently employed as an Associate Professor at the University of Rzeszów.

Dr Olexandr Korchynskyi Korchynskyi heads a Polish team that will use the IMPRESS-U grant to fund a project entitled “High-throughput agile interfaces for cell sorting (HiTACS)”. The US partner is a team led by Dr Sergiy Minko from the University of Georgia, and, on the Ukrainian side, Prof. Yaroslav Ilnytskyy from the Institute of Condensed Phase Physics in Lviv. The budget of the Polish part of the projects is nearly 1.08 million zlotys.

Aging societies, diseases, disorders and armed conflicts pose a growing challenge to regenerative medicine. Scientists around the world are working on new methods that would allow specific therapeutic stem cells to quickly proliferate and increase our ability to reconstruct tissue deficits or grow entire organs that could be transplanted into patients. The greatest challenge in this context today is to be able to separate therapeutic cells from those that could be potentially dangerous quickly and effectively.

– Our American and Ukrainian partners have worked on stimuli-responsive biomaterials for over a decade. On the other hand, since 2020 we have worked with researchers in Ukraine to create computer-based models of biomedical processes. Owing to the IMPRESS-U program, we discovered an ample opportunity to turn our preexisting collaborations in a larger multidisciplinary research project addressing emerging regenerative medicine technologies. My team has a lot of experience in this area, so we enthusiastically extended our collaboration and jumped on board to apply for a grant under the IMPRESS-U call”, says Dr Korchynskyi.

Their international IMPRESS-U grant consortium will work on developing advanced “smart” multi-trait surfaces that could be used for high-efficiency sorting of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS). The researchers will use simulation modelling and experimental methods.

“IMPRESS-U is an education and research programme all rolled into one. Since research on the Polish side will be done in Rzeszów, a town in close proximity to the Ukrainian city of Lviv, we will be able to serve as an effective hub for the educational exchange between Ukrainian and Polish youth”, stresses Dr Korchynskyi.

About the call

Proposals are still being accepted under the IMPRESS-U call. Funding is available for projects that involve research teams from Poland, Ukraine and the US, as well as, optionally, Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia. The PI of the Polish team must hold at least a PhD degree and the Polish part of the project may be planned over a maximum of 24 months. In addition, projects must address the requirements of the EAGER type of special NSF proposals. The Polish partner institutions under IMPRESS-U are the National Science Centre, which has a total budget of 17 million zlotys to distribute among new projects prepared by Polish teams, and the National Agency for Academic Exchange, with a total budget of 7 million, which will be used to fund the expansion of US NSF projects already underway to include cooperation with Polish teams under the so-called International Supplements opportunity.

Foreign teams may submit their applications to the US National Academy of Sciences (US NAS) – for Ukrainian researchers, the Research Council of Lithuania (LMT), the Latvian Council of Science (LCS) and the Estonian Research Council (ETAG).

“We can now confirm we are ready to launch funding procedures for projects that were put on waiting lists in OPUS 25, PRELUDIUM 22, MAESTRO 15 and SONATA BIS 13”, said NCN Director Krzysztof Jóźwiak, “this will be possible once the NCN has modified its financial plan”.

In November 2023, in connection with the NCN’s efforts to have its basic research funding budget increased, the NCN Council passed a resolution that allowed for waiting lists to be drawn up in the OPUS 25, PRELUDIUM 22, MAESTRO 15 and SONATA BIS 13 calls. This solution paved the way for the possibility of allocating any additional resources to research projects at Polish host institutions as early as 2024.

Projects that made it onto waiting lists were highly rated by experts and deserved to be funded but could not receive a positive funding decision because there were simply not enough resources in the NCN budget at the time when the calls were concluded.

All the calls in which waiting lists could be created by expert teams have now concluded. Their results have been published on the NCN website, and applicants whose proposals were put on waiting lists have received relevant decisions with a note to that effect.

On 14 February, Minister of Science Dariusz Wieczorek announced that, in 2024, the budget of the National Science Centre would be increased by 200 million zlotys. This means that researchers working at Polish institutions will receive more resources for their research projects as early as this year. This is very good news for the research community, which has appealed for greater investment in research funding via NCN grants. The minister’s decision will allow the NCN to launch funding procedures for projects on waiting lists, but for this to be possible, the NCN first needs to modify its 2024 financial plan. We are currently waiting for the Minister of Science to approve that modification.

Once it is approved, the NCN Council will pass a series of resolutions to increase the budgets of individual calls. Subsequently, available resources will be divided between different disciplines or discipline groups in accordance with the previous NCN Council resolution on the possibility of compiling waiting lists for OPUS 25, PRELUDIUM 22, SONATA BIS 13 and MAESTRO 15 calls. Proposals will be awarded funding in accordance with their ranking order on the waiting list until the budget allocated by the NCN Council is exhausted and the NCN Director will issue new funding decisions for the proposals in question. All decisions will be taken, and procedures will be launched, as soon as possible.