We have just announced the second edition of the SHENG call for Polish-Chinese research projects and the fifth SONATINA call for research projects carried out by researchers at the outset of their research career. The total budget of the two calls equals 45 million PLN. 

SHENG is the first call in the NCN portfolio to be organized thanks to international cooperation that goes beyond Europe. First launched in 2018, it has attracted great interest among researchers. In response to the great demand for funding for Polish-Chinese projects, the National Science Centre has joined hands with the National Natural Science Foundation of China to resume the call this year. SHENG 2 is targeted at basic research projects carried out by Polish-Chinese research teams in one of the four basic disciplines: materials science and engineering, chemical sciences, health sciences, or life sciences. The principal investigator on the Polish side must hold a PhD degree and the projects should take 36 months to complete. The total budget of the Polish part of the project must be at least 250 thousand PLN. A total of 25 million PLN is up for grabs for Polish proposals submitted under the SHENG 2 call.

SONATINA 5 is targeted at applicants who were awarded a PhD up to three years before the year in which the proposal is submitted or expect to earn it by the end of June 2021. The purpose of the call is to support young researchers in their career, enabling them to find full-time employment, conduct research at Polish research centres and gain experience through fellowships at renowned foreign research institutions. Projects should take either 24 or 36 months to complete, while foreign fellowships should last anywhere from 3 to 6 months. As part of the grant, the principal investigator should be hired full-time, based on an employment contract, by an entity other than that which awarded the PhD degree. The budget of this year’s edition of SONATINA is 20 million PLN.

The proposals will undergo a formal eligibility check and a merit-based review by Expert Teams composed of outstanding Polish and foreign researchers. The final verdict will be based, e.g. on research quality and the innovative nature of the project.

The deadline for submission in both calls is 4 pm on 15 March 20221. Proposals should be submitted electronically via the ZSUN/OSF system, available at https://osf.opi.org.pl, in accordance with the proposal submission procedure. The results of both calls will be announced in the autumn of 2021.

As of today, the composition of the NCN Council has changed. Twelve professors have been newly appointed as members and will sit on the Council from 15 December 2020 until 14 December 2024. They include eight new professors and four previous NCN Council members.

Council members 2020-2022:

1. Prof. dr hab. Krystyna Bartol
2. Prof. dr hab. Wojciech Dajczak
3. Prof. dr hab. Stefan Dziembowski
4. Dr hab. inż. Krzysztof Fic
5. Prof. dr hab. n. med. Jakub Fichna
6. Dr hab. Joanna Golińska-Pilarek
7. Prof. dr hab. Robert Hasterok
8. Prof. dr hab. inż. Monika Kaczmarek
9. Prof. dr hab. Grzegorz Karch
10. Prof. dr hab. inż. Barbara Klajnert-Maculewicz
11. Prof. dr hab. Jacek Kuźnicki
12. Prof. dr hab. Jerzy Łuczka
13. Prof. zw. hab. Dariusz Markowski
14. Prof. dr hab. Piotr Migoń
15. Dr hab. Justyna Olko
16. Prof. dr hab. Bronisław Rudak
17. Prof. dr hab. inż. Marek Samoć
18. Prof. dr hab. Andrzej Sobczak
19. Prof. dr hab. Tomasz Szapiro
20. Prof. dr hab. n. med. Anetta Undas
21. Prof. dr hab. inż. Aneta Wojdyło
22. Dr. hab. Joanna Wolszczak-Derlacz
23. Prof. dr hab. Tomasz Zaleśkiewicz
24. Prof. dr hab. inż. Teresa Zielińska

The Council of the National Science Centre consists of twenty-four eminent researchers representing various disciplines, appointed by the minister responsible for science from among the candidates nominated by the Identification Team. The duties of the Council include, e.g. laying out the priority basic research areas, specifying the conditions of NCN calls, as well as establishing the amount of funding slated for research within individual disciplines or groups of disciplines. The Council sits for a term of four years, but half of its members are changed every two years.

The first session of the new NCN Council, with the attendance of Przemysław Czarnek, Minister of Education and Science, is scheduled for 21 December 2020.

We are pleased to inform you that the CHANSE (Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe) consortium will soon announce a call for international research projects: Transformations: social and cultural dynamics in the digital age. The programme has been co-created by the HERA and NORFACE networks and will be implemented by 27 research funding organisations from 24 countries, coordinated by the National Science Centre, Poland (NCN). The total call budget amounts to EUR 36 M and includes over EUR 26 M of national allocations complemented by up to 10 million in co-funding from the European Commission.

Information about the call:

Full call topic description is available here. From mid-January 2021 onwards, all information will shift to the CHANSE website: www.chanse.org. 

Project team: Composed of at least four Principal Investigators, i.e. partners, eligible to receive funding from the CHANSE funders from four or more different countries participating in the call

Project duration: 24-36 months

Recommended cap on funding for one international project: 1 500 000 EUR

Indicative timeline:

• Official call announcement and launch of the submission system: March 2021
• Deadline for outline proposals: May 7^th, 2021, 14.00 CEST
• Deadline for full proposals (for invited applicants): December 7^th, 2021, 14.00 CET
• Call results: May/June 2022
• Earliest funded project start: September/October 2022

Countries participating in the call:

Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom

PARTNER SEARCH TOOL:

In order to facilitate the process of forming research consortia, we offer applicants a partner search tool available here: https://ncn.gov.pl/partners/chanse/. This tool can be used by projects looking for partners and partners looking for projects.      

In mid-January 2021 the full list of national contact points will be published on the CHANSE website and then they will be available for questions about national eligibility requirements.

For general questions please contact:

Dr Malwina Gębalska, CHANSE programme coordinator

Michał Kaczmarek, CHANSE Coordination Office

chanse@ncn.gov.pl

National Science Center, Poland

We are pleased to inform you that a new CHANSE (Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe) programme supporting research in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences will be launched at the beginning of 2021. It will be implemented by 27 research funding institutions from 24 European countries and coordinated by the NCN. The CHANSE consortium has acquired a co-funding of EUR 10 million from the Horizon 2020 EU Framework Programme. The main goal of the CHANSE programme is to announce a call for international research projects: Transformations: Social and cultural dynamics in the digital age. The total call budget amounts to 36 million euro and includes ca. EUR 26 M of national allocation complemented by the co-funding from the European Commission. The call will be pre-announced at the beginning of 2021 and the first information about the call topic will soon be published on the NCN website.

The CHANSE program has been co-created by the HERA and NORFACE networks  supporting research in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences, respectively. The CHANSE's goal is to finance high-quality international research projects and inspire collaboration between researchers and various stakeholder groups, such as: NGOs, cultural institutions, legislators, policy makers, schools, etc.

Contact:

Malwina Gębalska, malwina.gebalska@ncn.gov.pl

Michał Kaczmarek, michal.kaczmarek@ncn.gov.pl

We are pleased to announce that a member of the NCN Council, Dr hab. Justyna Olko from the Faculty of Artes Liberales of Warsaw University, has just won a prestigious Consolidator Grant awarded by the European Research Council (ERC). The researcher was selected in the field of humanities and social sciences to carry out a project entitled “Multilingual worlds – neglected histories. Uncovering their emergence, continuity and loss in past and present societies”.

This is the second time that Dr hab. Justyna Olko has won an ERC grant; back in 2012, she went away with the first ever Starting Grant to be awarded to a Polish humanities scholar. She is also the winner of two NCN calls, OPUS 1 and OPUS 15, and since 2018, she has sat on the Council of the National Science Centre. Dr hab. Olko combines research with social involvement in promoting multilingualism, language revival and helping ethnic minorities regain their subjectivity.

The grant’s winners also include two other Polish researchers. Dr Sebastian Glatt from the Małopolska Centre of Biotechnology at the Jagiellonian University (MCB UJ) won funding in the life sciences section for a project entitled “Deciphering the role of RNA modifications during ribosomal decoding and protein synthesis”, while Dr hab. inż. Piotr Faliszewski from the Krakow University of Technology will carry out a project devoted to the “Pragmatics of multiwinner voting: algorithms and preference data analysis” in physical sciences and engineering. Dr Glatt has previously won two NCN calls, conducting his projects within the framework of HARMONIA 3 and OPUS 11.

This year’s list of Consolidator Grant winners includes 327 researchers, who were awarded a total of 655 million euro in funding. Since 2008, the ERC has been awarding grants for pioneering research conducted in the European Union and associated countries. The call is targeted at researchers who earned their PhD between 7 and 12 years ago and can already boast an impressive research record, such as publications in major international journals, presentations at renowned, international conferences, as well as secured patents or other distinctions.

Hearty congratulations to all winners!

The EU Joint Programme - Neurodegenerative Disease Research (JPND) will shortly launch a new multinational call for proposals for "Linking pre-diagnosis disturbances of physiological systems to Neurodegenerative Diseases“.

The call for proposals is currently planned to be launched in January 2021. The expected date for submitting pre-proposals is March 2021.

Please find more information at the JPND website.

Please note that this pre-announcement is for information purposes only. It does not create any obligation for the JPND network, nor for any of the participating funding organisations. The official call announcement, to be published later, shall prevail.

Contact:

Dr Małgorzata Zawiślak, malgorzata.zawislak@ncn.gov.pl

Alicja Dyląg, alicja.dylag@ncn.gov.pl, tel. +48 532 086 494

120 researchers from all over the world will relocate to Poland under a continuation of the POLONEZ programme. The National Science Centre will launch three consecutive calls in 2021 and 2022.

Successful candidates will move to Poland for 24 months to conduct basic research projects at Polish institutions. They will be free to choose the research topic and a future employer. In addition to a full-time salary, covered mostly by EU funds, POLONEZ BIS will offer scientists up to 100 000 euro to carry out their research projects and employ a project team. The programme will be complemented  by a cross-sectoral secondment phase and an attractive training package.

The first POLONEZ BIS call will open in September 2021. To learn more, visit our webpage , follow our LinkedIn profile and meet the Fellows recruited in the past calls.

We are pleased to announce that four projects involving Polish research teams have been awarded funding in the call launched by the CHIST-ERA network - European Coordinated Research on Long-term Challenges in Information and Communication Sciences & Technologies.

The CHIST-ERA Call 2019, launched in December 2019, covered the following topics:

• Explainable Machine Learning-based Artificial Intelligence;
• Novel Computational Approaches for Environmental Sustainability.

Within the call applicants have submitted 162  proposals, while 17 research projects have been selected for funding.

Projects with Polish researchers awarded within the CHIST-ERA Call 2019:

SAI: Social Explainable Artificial Intelligence. Polish Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr hab. Stanisław Józef Matwin - Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The project will involve research teams from: Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Italy and United Kingdom.

WATERLINE: New solutions for data assimilation and communication to improve hydrological modelling and forecasting. Polish Principal Investigator: Dr inż. Przemysław Jerzy Wachniew – AGH University of Science and Technology. The project will involve research teams from Austria, Finland, Greece and Switzerland.

INFORM: Interpretability of Deep Neural Networks for Radiomics. Polish Principal Investigator: Dr Neo Christopher Honghoon Chung - University of Warsaw. The project will involve research teams from France and Greece.

XPM: eXplainable Predictive Maintenance. Polish Principal Investigator: Prof. dr hab. inż. Grzegorz Jacek Nalepa - Jagiellonian University. The project will involve research teams from France, Portugal and Sweden.

The implementation of research projects funded within the call will start in early 2021.

More information and the full list of the projects recommended for funding are available on the CHIST-ERA web page.

Congratulations to all the laureates!

For almost ten years of NCN’s operation, the members of the NCN Council appointed to support high-quality research in Poland and create transparent standards for research funding have taken good care to make sure that funding decisions are taken primarily on the basis of scientific excellence that integrates various types of research in terms of subject, methodology and environment. The peer-review of proposals submitted to the call, applied by the National Science Centre based on the world standards that have proven successful, ensures equal treatment of representatives of all academic disciplines and respect for their research results while at the same time respecting human rights and ensuring independent research.

The members of the NCN Council are convinced that this is the only way to ensure the development of strong and independent research so needed in view of the challenges and crises facing Poland and the world today. The NCN Council hereby unanimously declare their intention to continue to act in such a way as to ensure apolitical research in Poland. 

The Forest Value Research Programme Innovating forest-based bioeconomy will shortly launch a new multinational call for proposals.

The 2nd Joint Call is expected to open in January 2021. The date for submitting proposals is April 2021.

Please find more information at the Forest Value website.

Please note that this pre-announcement is for information purposes only. It does not create any obligation for the Forest Value network, nor for any of the participating funding organisations. The official call announcement, to be published later, shall prevail.

Contact

Dr Małgorzata Zawiślak, malgorzata.zawislak@ncn.gov.pl

Alicja Dyląg, alicja.dylag@ncn.gov.pl,