Ewa Szczurek, Szymon Toruńczyk, Paweł Caputa, and Magdalena Wojcieszak from the University of Warsaw have just grabbed four ERC Consolidator Grants. They have also worked on NCN-funded projects.

Prof. Ewa Szczurek will work on a project entitled Deep Optimised Generation of Antimicrobial Peptides (DOG-AMP) to generate new antimicrobial peptides that would be more active and less toxic than the peptides we have today. They could be used more effectively in therapies and help counteract antimicrobial resistance.

Prof. Szczurek is a winner of three NCN grants: POLONEZ, SONATA BIS and OPUS, and works at the Faculty of Mathematics, Mechanics and Computer Science of the University of Warsaw. Her faculty colleague, Prof. Szymon Toruńczyk, who also won a CoG, will focus on the “Limits of Structural Tractability”. His project aims to develop a mathematical theory composed of definitions, theorems and proofs to describe the theoretical limits of effective graph-computation algorithms.

Professor Toruńczyk has previously completed a SONATA project on database theory.

Prof. Paweł Caputa will work on a project entitled “Quantum Complexity from Quantum Field Theories to Quantum Gravity”. His goal is to develop precise measures of state complexity and operators in quantum theories and employ them in quantum gravity models to improve our understanding of the interior of black holes and cosmological singularities.

Prof. Caputa works at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw, where he is also working on a SONATA BIS projects in quantum gravity, quantum information and quantum computing. 

Last but not least, the fourth CoG will go to Prof. Magdalena Wojcieszak from the Centre of Migration Research at the University of Warsaw, who will work on a project focused on “Incentivizing Citizen Exposure to Quality News Online: Framework and Tools”.

ERC Consolidator Grants, worth up to 2 million euro, are available to researchers who earned their PhD 7 to 12 years ago. In this iteration of the CoG call, funding was awarded to a total of 308 researchers of 43 different nationalities. The greatest number of projects will be conducted in Germany (66), the Netherlands (36), and France (23).

More information about the call and its winners can be found on the website of the ERC.

A list of the previous winners of all ERC grants (Starting Grant, Consolidator Grant, Advanced Grant, Proof of Concept and Synergy Grant) working at Polish institutions is available here:  https://www.kpk.gov.pl/horyzont-europa/excelence-science/erc-frontier-research

Nearly all Polish ERC winners have previously served as a PI or worked in an NCN-funded project.

A little over 338 million zlotys in funding will go to 407 projects selected under OPUS 25 and PRELUDIUM 22. This is the lowest number of winning projects in these calls since the NCN was founded. Because our budget has been frozen, success rates in this iteration of OPUS and PRELUDIUM fell to just 8.06% and 10.73%, respectively.

OPUS and PRELUDIUM are two very well-known calls from the NCN portfolio, which allow Polish researchers to carry out basic research at Polish host institutions. OPUS grants go toward funding complex projects that may last several years, require large research teams, major international research equipment or collaboration with international partners – all this is available to any researcher, no matter how far they have advanced in their career. PRELUDIUM is a unique call that allows early-stage researchers (without a PhD degree) to gain their first experience coordinating a project, which may take up to three years.

“Since the first days of the National Science Centre, we have aimed at building a complete research career path that would prize researcher independence and growth. Many outstanding scientists working in Poland today belong to what we call ‘the NCN generation’, i.e., researchers who first struck out on their own with a PRELUDIUM project and then went on to use our grants to build their own research teams, which conduct top world-level research today”, says Krzysztof Jóźwiak, NCN Director.

Ranking lists

OPUS 25 ranking list (.pdf)

PRELUDIUM 22 ranking list (.pdf)

OPUS 25 and PRELUDIUM 22 in figures

These have been record iterations of these calls in every sense, including the negative. Over the past two years, due to a very low research-funding budget available to the NCN, the number of awarded grants has been steadily declining.

Under OPUS 25, funding was awarded to 176 out of 2184 proposals, which means that the success rate dropped to just 8.06%, much lower than for previous iterations. OPUS 25 winners will receive a total of c. 301.6 million zlotys. This is also less than the figure for previous calls: two years ago, OPUS 21 awarded 559 million zlotys to 417 researchers, OPUS 22 – 500 million zlotys to 350 researchers, and OPUS 23 – 401.5 million to 266 researchers. In May 2023, the corresponding figures dropped to just 224 researchers and 364.4 million zlotys. Success rates also steadily declined over time, falling from almost 19% to a meagre 11.7%.

The figures for PRELUDIUM are just as telling. In the 22nd iteration of the call, grants will go to 1 out of every 10 young researchers who applied; the ranking list features 231 projects with a total budget of c. 36.5 million zlotys (for a success rate of 10.73%). Here, as elsewhere, the past two years have witnessed a significant decline: under PRELUDIUM 20, we funded 495 projects with 77 million zlotys (22% success rate), and in PRELUDIUM 21 – 258 projects worth a total of 41.2 million (12% success rate).

We have been warning about this radical drop in success rates for a long time.

“It is the first time in our history that we are only able to fund such a small number of projects. We all know what the consequences will be: in light of the instability in the funding system, talented Polish researchers will begin to look for greener pastures abroad. This is why the state budget for the next few years should absolutely prioritise an increase in the NCN’s basic research budget”, emphasises Prof. Krzysztof Jóźwiak, NCN Director.

NCN budget, call budget and success rates

The NCN should ensure an optimal success rate of 25-30% in order to be able to fund the best projects and boost our chances of success in the international scientific arena. The total research-funding budget of the NCN, as we have said time after time, has remained nearly the same in the last six years. Over the same period, the amount of funding requested by researchers has increased by several dozen percent. Today, the NCN grant fails by a large margin to meet the needs of the Polish research community.

At the NCN, we have long been lobbying for an increase in the grant-in-aid for research funding.

“In recent years, the qualifications of researchers have considerably increased; they now plan for very ambitious, high-quality projects, often in cooperation with many international partners, which obviously requires more funding. This is a good sign and the natural development of research in our country. At the NCN, we are campaigning for more funding not for our institution as such, but for the researchers who benefit from our grants and who, thanks to our grants, want to continue their work in Poland. We are grateful for all the support we have received from the research community thus far, but we need to ask for even more. This time, we can try and influence the public authorities to increase research funding”, emphasised the NCN Director.

Waiting lists of highly rated projects

In connection to its campaign to acquire more funding for the NCN from 2024 onward, the NCN Council, in communication with the Director, passed a resolution that allows Expert Teams, for the first time in the history of OPUS and PRELUDIUM calls, to draw up waiting lists. The waiting lists include projects that earned a high score in merit-based evaluation and only failed to win a grant due to our limited resources. Similar waiting lists will be drawn up in upcoming calls, such as SONATA BIS 13 and MAESTRO 15, which will conclude soon.

We decided to take this step in anticipation of a potential budget increase in 2024 and in subsequent years. In domestic NCN programmes, call procedures take around 5 months from the submission deadline to grant decision. Winning projects can usually go ahead 8-9 months after the end of the submission period.

The NCN budget has an annual billing cycle. This means that any resources we do not use in a given year must be paid back to the Ministry of Education and Science by the last working day of December; they may not be carried over to the next year. “Waiting lists allow us to spend a potential budget increase on highly-rated projects in 2024”, Prof. Jóźwiak explains.

Once the National Science Centre has received additional resources, the NCN Council will decide to which calls they will be added. The Council may pass a resolution to modify the budget of such call, depending on when and how much more resources will be awarded to the National Science Centre by the Ministry of Education and Science.

I was put on a waiting list. What does that mean?

Researchers who were put on a waiting list receive a negative funding decision, with a caveat that they are on the waiting list. They are not in any way restricted in the exercise of their rights in the call procedure; they can still appeal against the decision and submit proposals in other calls.

If the budget of the NCN is increased and the NCN Council passes a resolution to commit additional resources to specific calls, waiting list projects will be funded in the order in which they have been ranked by Expert Teams. How many waiting list projects are funded will depend on the sum added to the project by the Council. The PIs of successful projects will then receive a new funding decision and a relevant announcement will be published on the NCN website.

Thirteen (13) projects with a total budget of PLN 15 million will be funded in the third iteration of the international SHENG call for Polish-Chinese research projects in selected disciplines of Physical Sciences and Engineering, as well as Social Sciences.         

The call attracted 125 proposals, out of which only 5 addressed topics in Social Sciences. Winners include 1 project in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and as many as 12 in Physical Sciences and Engineering.

Ranking list

New imaging methods: Physical Sciences at the service of Life Sciences

Cells are the basic structural and functional elements of all living organisms. Various applications in research, diagnostics and pharmacology often require us to perform quick and non-destructive functional testing on live cell cultures. Unfortunately, single cell-level research is time consuming if done on a whole population, fluorescent microscopy imaging is difficult because the samples need to be marked and the process is frequently toxic. A team from the Warsaw University of Technology, headed by Prof. Małgorzata Kujawińska, in cooperation with scientists based at the Nanjing University of Science and Technology, will work on new non-fluorescent imaging tools for single-cell analysis that will allow scientists to study large populations with sub-cellular precision, with easy sample preparation and no risk of contamination.

The main goal of a project submitted by Dr hab. inż. Dominika Wawrzyńczyk from the Wrocław University of Technology is to develop a new advanced optical bioimaging and bio-detection technique, using quick luminescence life-cycle mapping and specially designed luminescent nanoprobes that can perform the real-time detection and imaging of changes in their immediate environment. The new imaging method will find biomedical applications. The project relies on interdisciplinary experience in nanoengineering (brought in by the Polish team) and advanced optical bioimaging and biosensors (the Chinese team at Shenzhen University).

Science as a weapon against climate change

A team led by Dr hab. Piotr Matczak from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, will collaborate with researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences to address a very topical issue related to climate change: rising temperatures in urban areas. Using the example of Warsaw and Beijing, the scientists will look into how urban development is linked to an increase in temperatures and whether (and if so, how) urban heat islands can be neutralised or minimised by the appropriate planning of urban green areas and water basins. The project will also develop public policy recommendations to mitigate the phenomenon of heat islands in the two cities under study.

Rapid technological progress in recent years has not only led to new advances in space technologies, ICT and artificial intelligence, but also exacerbated the frequency and severity of natural disasters and man-made catastrophes. Climate change and extreme weather phenomena are among the most pressing challenges of our world. In order to try and address this challenge, scientists from the Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences, led by Prof. Witold Rohm, teamed up with researchers from the China University of Mining under a joint initiative called “Destination Earth”. Their research project aims to create a virtual replica (digital twin) of Earth’s objects and systems, including its atmosphere, oceans and land masses, which would then be used to simulate and predict their response to a variety of conditions. Real-time data will come from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), supported by artificial intelligence. The project might have an important impact on the future of our societies, especially in terms of protection against climate change and economic system collapse.

SHENG call

The international bilateral SHENG 3 call is organised by the National Science Centre in cooperation with the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). It is based on a parallel review procedure, which means that the two agencies conduct parallel eligibility checks and merit-based evaluation, and funding is only awarded to those proposals that are approved by both the NCN and the NSFC. SHENG 3 was open to basic research proposals in disciplines included in the following panels: ST1-ST3, ST6-ST7, ST9-ST10, and HS4.

The winning projects will be conducted in Poland and China; each will have two PIs: one in China and one in Poland. The grants can go toward funding research, salaries for research team members, scholarships for students and PhD candidates, purchase or manufacturing of research equipment and other necessary project expenses for the Polish part of the project. Read more about the call here.

Decisions

All the positive and negative decisions for proposals submitted under SHENG 3 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.

If the applicant is an entity mentioned in Article 27 (1)-(7) and (9) of the NCN Act, the decision will only be delivered to the Electronic Delivery Box (ESP ePUAP) provided in the proposal. If the applicant is a natural person and has listed an ePUAP address in the proposal, the decision will be sent to that address. Otherwise, a message will be sent to the applicant’s indicated e-mail account, containing a link from which the decision of the NCN Director can be downloaded.

The funding decisions of the Director of the National Science Centre are also communicated to the principal investigator and, if the applicant is a natural person, to the host institution indicated in the proposal. If you do not receive a decision, please make sure that the address (ESP, ePUAP, e-mail) listed in your proposal is correct. If not, contact the person in charge of the proposal, as indicated in the OSF submission system.

On 28 November, join us for an online lecture by Prof. Łukasz Opaliński, winner of 2023 NCN Award, who will talk about how cellular processes can be harnessed to develop innovative cancer therapies. The session is organised within the framework of the “Science at the Centre” series.

Prof. Łukasz Opaliński is a molecular biologist working at the University of Wrocław, who won the 2023 NCN Award for Life Sciences in October. On Tuesday (28 November), he will deliver a lecture entitled “Multivalency in biology and biomedicine: how to harness natural cellular processes to develop innovative cancer therapies”. The lecture will be streamed on the YouTube  channel of the Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Research.

Cells are separated from the external environment by a cell membrane, which ensures their integrity and allows them to retain multidimensional control over their internal processes. However, they are not isolated structures; they are in continuous communication with the surrounding environment. Thanks to receptor proteins embedded in the cell membrane, cells recognise external signals (arriving in the form of, e.g., proteins or other macromolecules), decipher the information they encode and convert it into a precise cellular response. Among the most important receptors found on the surface of human cells are the fibroblast growth factor receptors (FGFR), which respond to the fibroblast growth factor (FGF) and regulate processes such as cell division, motility and death. The FGF/FGFR system is crucial for the growth and homeostasis of the human body and abnormalities in it lead to a number of diseases, including cancer.

“Most biochemical processes inside living cells involve intermolecular interactions. The same is true for the FGF/FGFR system; the FGF present in the serum is recognised by FGFR and their interaction leads to the formation of an active FGF/FGFR complex. In a typical FGFR activation mechanism, what we see is a monovalent interaction: one FGF molecule interacts with a single FGFR molecule. In my lecture, however, I will focus on multivalent interactions that involve many copies of the same macromolecules all at once, as well as their importance for cellular signalling and transport. The latest research by our team has shown that such multivalent interactions do occur naturally between the FGFR, the FGF and proteins from the galectin family, forming an additional signalling pathway inside the cell, with an important impact on FGFR transport”, the scientist has told us.

Opaliński will also tell us how we can mimic natural processes that involve multivalent interactions to design targeted cancer therapies.

The live stream starts at 6 pm. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A session, during which you will be able to ask your questions via chat.

Professor Opaliński’s lecture will be the second talk this year, and the eleventh overall, delivered within the framework of the “Science at the Centre” series organised together by the NCN and the Copernicus Center. In mid-November, we met with Dr Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska, another NCN Award winner (for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences), who took us on a guided tour of the “Recovered Territories”.

All lectures.

Additional materials:

NCN Awards 2023 gala

Lecture by Dr Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska: announcement and video

“My main task for the nearest future is to make sure that the NCN budget is increased significantly, by approx. PLN 300 million”, says Prof. Krzysztof Jóźwiak speaking to “Forum Akademickie”. An interview with the NCN Director was published on 20 November.

We have been talking about NCN’s extremely low budget for many months. Funding awarded to the NCN in no way meets the needs of the Polish scientific community. Less and less applicants receive funding for their research. The calls concluded in the nearest future will have a single digit success rate.

Prof. Krzysztof Jóźwiak has been the NCN Director since 30 October. He had to wait eight months for his official appointment. In hist first interview in the new capacity, he talks about, inter alia, the significance of grants for research, indirect costs and NCN’s low budget consequences for research and the entire country.

“If [our] budget for 2024 is not increased, we might need to end some schemes or continue to decrease funding for the OPUS call which would be to the great detriment of Polish science. I will also argue that NCN’s grant-in-aid must be increased on a regular basis to allow the NCN to plan its statutory operations in the long run and to ensure sufficient funds for research to the scientific community.

Prof. Jóźwiak underlines that researchers working in Poland are involved in more and more ambitious projects, their competencies are higher and higher and Polish science is in a completely different place than it was over ten years ago, when the National Science Centre was established.

“In the past, it was widely believed that research ideas must be adjusted to financial capabilities. For over 10 years of NCN’s operation researchers have learnt to pursue more extensive and ambitious research, develop bigger projects based on external funds awarded in the calls for proposals. They are not afraid to compete for such funds, presenting bold projects and using more and more interesting techniques, in wide international collaboration which is so important for research. At the NCN, we respond to the needs and ambitions of Polish science (…). We believe it to be our great success although it is not supported by an increased funding.

Prof. Krzysztof Jóźwiak talked to Piotr Kieraciński. The whole text is available on the website of “Forum Akademickie.”

Three research projects involving Polish researchers have been awarded funding in a call launched by the JPND network (EU Joint Programme – Neurodegenerative Disease Research). Polish research teams will receive over PLN 3 million for research on neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Three research projects have been recommended for funding in the call for international research projects with the aim of improving the understanding of the complex and multifactorial pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases. The call entitled Large scale analysis of OMICS data for drug-target finding in neurodegenerative diseases has been launched by the JPND network, which includes the NCN.

Funding proposals could be submitted by international consortia composed of at least 3 research teams from at least 3 countries participating in the call (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Canada, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey).

Polish research teams will be awarded a total of over PLN 3 million for their research projects.

The winning projects:

• CCAD – Deciphering the Chemoproteomics and Chemotranscriptomics of Anti-Alzheimer Drugs for Novel Druggable Target Identification and Biomarkers Development

Prof. Krzysztof Sobczak from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań is the principal investigator of the Polish research team.

Researchers participating in the project will try to decipher molecular targets and mode of action of low molecular weight compounds that are drug candidates for Alzheimer’s disease. The consortium members have already analysed five compounds as such. In the CCAD project, researchers will also try to identify diagnostic or theragnostic clinical biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease through the analyses of big data, including data collected in the course of the project. 

• PRIONOMICS: Prioritizing diagnostics and therapeutics of human prion diseases through integrative omics  

Prof. Beata Katarzyna Sikorska from the Medical University of Lodz is the principal investigator of the Polish research team. 

The purpose of the project is to identify the underlying mechanisms that lead to the development and progression of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD). For this purpose, new and existing data will be collected from patients with prion diseases. Researchers will put strong emphasis on identification of dysregulated pathways involved in age at onset and/or disease progression rate. They are also intending to develop new blood-based biomarkers for persons at risk and therapeutic drug targets for CJD.

• MyRIAD: (Micro)RNA and informatics approaches for diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and Dementia.

Dr Agnieszka Fiszer from the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences is the principal investigator of the Polish research team.

Researchers involved the project will look for possibilities of early detention of neurodegenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD). For this purpose, they will analyse microRNAs (small non-coding RNAs) as non-invasive biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases and will try to identify new therapeutical targets – genes associated with neurodegeneration. The project will enhance current understanding of neurodegenerative conditions.

Winners of JPND 2023 Call include 10 research projects evaluated and recommended for funding by the international panel of experts following a peer-review. Projects involving Polish research teams will be coordinated by the research teams from France, Germany and Ireland.   

The call results are available on the website of the network

JPND Call 2023 Text

It is our pleasure to announce that JPIAMR (Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance) will launch in 2024 an international call for projects within the framework of the ERA-NET JPIAMR-ACTION.

The call Interventions Moving forward to Promote ACTion to counteract the emergence and spread of bacterial and fungal resistance and to improve treatments (IMPACT) will involve funders from 19 countries.

The total estimated call budget is about 19 million euro. The Polish research teams may claim up to 0,5 M euro allocated to the call by the Council of the National Science Centre.

The primary aim of the call is to take action against the growing global threat of increased spread of antimicrobial (antibacterial and antifungal) resistance by funding international collaborative research projects aiming to improve, compare and evaluate the effectiveness, cost effectiveness, and uptake of existing interventions against bacterial or fungal infections and/or to design new interventions against fungal infections.

Timeline

The call Interventions Moving forward to Promote ACTion to counteract the emergence and spread of bacterial and fungal resistance and to improve treatments will follow a two-step evaluation procedure.

• 10 January 2024 – launch of the call and Partner Search Tool
• 24 January 2024 – webinar for applicants
• 14 March 2024 – deadline for pre-proposals
• 9 July 2024 – deadline for full proposals
• 16 July 2024 – deadline for submission of proposals to NCN (via OSF)

More information about the call is available at https://www.jpiamr.eu/calls/amr-interventions-call-2024

Please note that the information provided in the pre-announcement is not binding and that changes may occur without notice until the call opening on 10 January 2024.