The CHIST-ERA Network has defined topics for the Call for proposals that will be announced later this month:

• Analog Computing for Artificial Intelligence (ACAI)
• Smart Distribution of Computing in Dynamic Networks (SDCDN)

Researchers are encouraged to start discussing possible projects with prospective partners. The call will require that projects are submitted by international consortia with partners in at least three countries (the list of countries which have shown preliminary interest in participating in the Call is provided in the pre-announcement). The national/regional eligibility criteria will be defined by each participating funding agency.

The anticipated deadline for proposals is 15^th of January 2019. The projects will be selected in the second half of 2019.

For details please see the attached document and website, where a Partner Search Tool is available.

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

Contact:

• Dr Jakub Gadek, tel. 12 341 9152
• Marlena Wosiak, tel. 12 341 9093

In the context of the launch of its 2018 joint call for research proposals on "Biodiversity and its impact on animal, human and plant health”, BiodivERsA organises information webinar to answer the questions of potential applicants.

Webinar session will be organized on 2 October 2018, from 14:00 to 15:30 CEST  – Please register here before 2 October, 10:00 CEST

If you are looking for a Research Partner for your Project or for a Project to join, you can use the BiodivERsA Partner Search Tool.

For more information about the webinars, click here.

The National Science Centre in cooperation with the BiodivERsA network welcomes submissions under a call for international research projects on biodiversity. The call covers two separate actions (Action A and Action B), which are jointly titled: Biodiversity and its influence on animal, human and plant health.

The deadline for submitting pre-proposals is 16 November 2018, 4:00 p.m. CET.

Eligible for funding under Action A are research groups comprised of at least 3 research teams from at least 3 different countries involved in the call.

Eligible for funding under Action B are research groups comprised of at least 5 research teams from at least 5 different countries involved in the call.

Applicants are welcome to use the Partner Search Tool, a tool that will enable them to find partners for their research projects.

Countries involved in the call:

Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria,* Estonia,* France, Ireland, Lithuania, Germany, Poland, Romania,* Slovakia and Switzerland.

* Decisions on a country’s involvement in the call may be followed at: Countries involved

Call documentation:

• Call announcement
• Pre-registration form – action A
• Proposal application form – action A
• Pre-registration form – action B
• Proposal application form – action B
• FAQ
• NCN eligibility requirements

Detailed call information: BiodivERsA 2018

Additional information for researchers applying for funding from the NCN:

The call is carried out in two stages: in the first stage, the coordinator of an international project submits a pre-proposal on behalf of the entire consortium; in the second stage, the coordinator submits a full proposal. The deadline for submitting pre-proposals is 16 November 2018, 4:00 p.m. (CET). The deadline for submitting proposals will be scheduled for the period between early February and mid-March 2019, depending on the overall number of proposals received.

At the full proposal stage, Polish applicants are required to register projects in the OSF system (type: UNISONO).

1. Please read the information on the eligible costs in the call for Polish applicants, included in annex to the NCN Council Resolution regarding international calls (Terms and regulations on awarding funding for research tasks under the BiodivERsA Call 2018).
2. Should an international project include two entities from Poland, they should establish a consortium. Each entity in the consortium has a separate budget, however, the upper limit on the funding for remuneration applies to the consortium as a whole. Pursuant to the Terms and regulations on awarding funding for research tasks under the BiodivERsA Call 2018, Polish consortia have been granted a higher upper limit on the funding for additional remuneration.
3. The exchange rate of 7 June 2018 (EUR 1 = PLN 4.2634) applies to the call.
4. A project by a Polish research team may be carried out over 36 months.

Contact details:

Dr Anna Wiktor, tel. 12 341 9166

Joanna Komperda, tel. 12 341 9138

This is the sixteenth time that the National Science Centre (NCN) has opened a new call for proposals within the OPUS and PRELUDIUM funding schemes, and the fourteenth time within the SONATA scheme. A total of PLN 480 million is available in all national calls. In addition, BEETHOVEN CLASSIC 3 and a new program, BEETHOVEN LIFE 1, are launched in cooperation with the German Research Foundation. International schemes offer grants up to a total amount of PLN 50 million. Altogether, applicants in the recently announced calls will vie for a record total of PLN 530 million.

Following the success of the previous two editions of the BEETHOVEN call, a new edition is launched this year under a new name, but with the same conditions. BEETHOVEN CLASSIC 3 is targeted at Polish-German research projects in arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as the selected disciplines in physical sciences and engineering. The call’s budget, organised in cooperation with the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), amounts to PLN 30 million.

A new addition to the call portfolio, BEETHOVEN LIFE is designed as a supplement to BEETHOVEN CLASSIC, and is aimed at scholars involved in life sciences. For the Centre, it will be the first call conducted on the basis of the Lead Agency Procedure, and the DFG will play the role of the lead agency in the first edition. The German agency will have the sole responsibility for scientific assessment, while the National Science Centre will accept national proposals for the funding of the Polish part of research projects in question. A total of PLN 20 million is available within the BEETHOVEN LIFE call.

“We are happy that our cooperation with the German Research Foundation has now been expanded to include a call in the life sciences. This rounds out our offer for researchers cooperating with the German side”, says Professor Zbigniew Błocki, Director of the National Science Centre, “Our office will have a chance to test the Lead Agency Procedure in practice and see whether it facilitates and expedites the assessment of submissions in calls organised in cooperation with foreign partners. In the future, we would like to implement the same system in all such calls.”

Apart from international funding opportunities, the National Science Centre also announced its flagship national calls: OPUS, PRELUDIUM and SONATA. The budgets of all three calls have been substantially increased in this edition with PLN 350 million to be distributed in OPUS 16, 40 million in PRELUDIUM 16, and PLN 90 million in SONATA 14.

“OPUS, PRELUDIUM and SONATA are the most popular calls in the National Science Centre offer. The quality of submitted proposals gets better and better every year and it is not unusual for good projects to be rejected because of insufficient funds, which is why it has been so important for us to increase the budget and thus give many more valuable projects an opportunity to get off the ground”, says Professor Janusz Janeczek, Chairman of the Council of the National Science Centre.

The OPUS 16 funding scheme is open to all researchers, irrespective of their academic level. Within the framework of the project, they may receive funds to hire a research team to work on a given subject matter, as well as purchase or construct the research equipment necessary for the project. Young researchers are also eligible for special fellowships.

PRELUDIUM 16 is dedicated to researchers at the outset of their academic career, who do not yet have the title of doctor. Doctoral students may conduct an independent research project for one, two or three years, not necessarily connected to the subject of their doctoral thesis. The maximum funding for a single project equals, respectively, PLN 70,000, 140,000, or 210,000.

Last, but not least, SONATA 14 is addressed to scholars who earned their doctoral degree between 2011 and 2016 and aims to support them in conducting innovative research with the use of state-of-the-art equipment and original methodology. This edition has done away with the obligatory interviews with principal investigators at the second stage of the assessment process.

Effective as of the new calls announced in September, the Council of the National Science Centre has introduced important changes into the job funding requirements within NCN’s calls. An additional condition has been formulated for post-doc applicants. They must not have had an employment contract with the entity where the research project is to be conducted within 2 years prior to their post-doc.

“The change is designed to create the conditions for increased researcher mobility, both on the national and international scale. The opportunity to cooperate with scholars representing other experiences and work cultures benefits the entire research team and improves the quality of the research project”, says Professor Janeczek.

Proposals should be submitted by means of the ZSUN/OSF system (https://osf.opi.org.pl) until 17 December 2018.

• OPUS 16 call for proposals for research projects, including purchase or construction of research equipment necessary for their completion
• PRELUDIUM 16 call for proposals for research projects conducted by researchers at the beginning of their career in research, who do not hold a doctorate degree.
• SONATA 14 call for proposals for research projects carried out by researchers who have been awarded a doctorate within 2 to 7 years before submitting the proposal
• BEETHOVEN CLASSIC 3 for Polish-German research projects within humanities, social sciences, chemistry, physics, mathematics and material sciences. 
• BEETHOVEN LIFE 1 for Polish-German research projects within life sciences.

QuantERA Consortium is pleased to announce that the 2^nd Call for Proposals in the field of Quantum Technologies will be launched at the end of November 2018.

Thematic scope of the Call will include the topics of:

• Quantum communication
• Quantum simulation
• Quantum computation
• Quantum information sciences
• Quantum metrology sensing and imaging

The 2^nd QuantERA Call will be open for consortia composed of researchers from at least three QuantERA Partner countries, participating in the Call (the list of the countries to be confirmed): Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey.

Please note that this announcement is for information purposes only. It does not create any obligation for the QuantERA consortium nor for any of the participating funding organisations. The official Call Announcement, to be published later, shall prevail.

The BiodivERsA consortium has a new international funding opportunity for researchers in Life Sciences. The launch of the call “Biodiversity and its influence on animal, human and plant health” is scheduled for October 2018, with the deadline for submission of pre-proposals in November 2018. Funding of the projects selected in the call will start in late 2019.

For more information, please refer to : http://www.biodiversa.org/1481

Contact:

• dr Anna Wiktor, e-mail: anna.wiktor@ncn.gov.pl, tel: 12 341 9166
• Joanna Komperda, e-mail: joanna.komperda@ncn.gov.pl, tel: 12 341 9138

Advanced researchers, researchers collaborating internationally and researchers who have been awarded a doctorate within five to twelve years before submitting the proposal may apply for the three funding opportunities open at the NCN. The deadline is 17 September 2018. See the detailed submission instructions of MAESTRO 10, HARMONIA 10 and SONATA BIS 8.

We are pleased to inform you that one of the most prestigious scientific magazines in the world – “Cell” – has published an article written by a team of Polish scientists from the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (IBB PAN). This is the second publication in its history to have a Polish mailing address in the magazine, the first having been published in 1990.

The first author of the publication and originator of the research project was Dr Zbigniew Warkocki. The other members of the team were Dr Paweł Krawczyk, Dorota Adamska, Krystian Bijata and Jose L. Garcia-Perez and the project was supervised by Prof. Andrzej Dziembowski.

The article published in “Cell”, entitled Uridylation by TUT4/7 Restricts Retrotransposition of Human LINE-1s, concerns the mechanisms of defence against the so-called jumping genes (retrotransposons) which were described for the first time by the Polish researchers. The retrotransposons are DNA fragments that constitute characteristic parasites in cells, they are completely useless, and even harmful. Earlier descriptions involved the manner of inhibition by a cell of DNA fragment activity, which leads to the multiplication of harmful retrotransposons, whereas, at present, the Polish scientists have explained how a cell may defend itself against these genetic parasites during a further stage, when a retrotransposon has already activated.

The research conducted by the team lead by Prof. Dziembowski was, to a great extent, financed by the National Science Centre within the FUGA 1 grant, during which Dr Warkocki came from Germany for an placement in IBB PAN. The research was also financed from the two grants received by Prof. Andrzej Dziembowski: the ERC Starting Grant and the TEAM grant by the Foundation for Polish Science TEAM. Prof. Dziembowski is also a grantee of the National Science Centre and a 2013 NCN prize-winner.

Article in "Cell"

The names have been published of the early awardees in the second edition of the MINIATURA call, a funding opportunity supporting activities instrumental in basic research.

In the MINIATURA 2 call, unlike in other calls operated by the National Science Centre, submissions are accepted on a continuous basis and the review process has been trimmed down to 4 months. In the first round, 30 research proposals have been awarded funding. Subsequent ranking lists will be published systematically by the end of April 2019.

The MINIATURA scheme is addressed to researchers with a doctorate received within 12 years of submitting the proposal, who have not acted as principal investigators to NCN-funded research projects, nor have been laureates of the NCN doctoral scholarship and post-doctoral fellowship programmes. Prospective entrants to the call must also secure a research position with a contract of employment in the research institution acting as applicant.

Grants under the MINIATURA 2 call may be worth c. €1,160 to €11,600, and the time of their implementation may not exceed 12 months. The list of research efforts eligible for funding in the call is limited to such activities as preliminary studies, pilot studies, library and archive searches, fellowships, conferences, research travels and consultations.

The first edition of MINIATURA, announced and concluded in 2017, saw a record-high response from researchers. Thanks to MINIATURA 1 as many as 828 applicants received funding worth nearly € 7 million in total.

To see lists of the research activities approved for funding under the MINIATURA 2 call, click here (in Polish only).

Today we learned the results of the second edition of the UWERTURA call proposals, in which entrants competed for fellowships in international research teams carrying out ERC grants. The National Science Centre has received proposals from 21 researchers, of whom 8 will be awarded the total sum of €156,000.

UWERTURA’s aim is to help Polish researchers successfully apply for European resources, and to increase their share among the recipients of ERC (European Research Council) grants. Those eligible were scholars with a doctorate or higher level of academic qualification, who have carried out an NCN-funded research project as principal investigator. The laureates, awarded the status of fellows, will join research teams abroad in their work on ERC-funded projects and within 18 months of returning to Poland, the visiting researchers will prepare and submit a research proposal to ERC themselves.

The essence of UWERTURA is the opportunity it offers to work alongside excellent researchers, winners of ERC grants. The applicants themselves choose the teams they want to join should their fellowship application prove successful. We are positive that working with international research teams will be for them a springboard to success later on, when they seek to secure grants from the European Research Council, said Professor Zbigniew Błocki, director of the NCN. As a matter of fact, we have already had our first success in this regard, as the laureate of the UWERTURA 1 call, Dr Tomasz Żuradzki of Jagiellonian University was among those awarded with ERC Starting Grants. Dr Żuradzki works on a new interpretation of the ethical disputes over contemporary advances in medicine.

In UWERTURA’s second edition, 21 researchers applied for fellowships, while 8 of them will go abroad to carry out research. For 3 to 6 months they will collaborate with eminent European scholars from the best centres. Dr Michał Tomza of the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw will be a fellow at the University of Innsbruck, working with Professor Francesca Ferlaino. He will investigate new dimensions in ultracold complex quantum molecular systems. Dr Błażej Nikiel-Wroczyński, of the Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Applied Computer Science, Jagiellonian University (UJ) will conduct low frequency studies of atypical, poor galaxy systems. To that end, he will use the International LOFAR Telescope and the LoTSS Survey. The fellowship will be hosted by the University of Leiden, under the supervision of Professor Hubertus Röttgerin. Dr Piotr Micek of the Faculty of Mathematics and Information Technologies, UJ, focuses his research interests on the structure theory for posets. To study the subject he will go on a fellowship to Berlin’s Technical University, to work in the research team led by Professor Stephan Kreutzer. Dr inż. Błażej Scheibe of the NanoBioMedical Centre, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (UAM) will also go to Berlin. At the Humboldt University he will investigate Van der Waals heterostructures and nanocomposites based on MXenes and hexagonal layered 2D nanomaterials. The principal investigator of the fellow’s host team is Dr. rer. nat. Michael J. Bojdys. Another laureate in the same field of physical sciences and engineering is Dr Łukasz Pawlik of the Faculty of Earth Sciences, the University of Silesia in Katowice. In his project WINDIMPACT, Dr Pawlik will carry out research into extreme windstorms affecting European forests under climate change and their long-term impacts on bio-geomorphic and paedogenic systems. His fellowship will take him to the University of Reading in the UK. He will join a research team led by Professor Sandy P. Harrison.

The only laureate of the UWERTURA 2 representing life sciences is Dr Michał Bogdziewicz of the Faculty of Biology, UAM. His hosts will be the team of Professor Josep Peñuelas at the Global Ecology Unit CREAF-CSIC-UAB in Spain. His project entitled EXPMAST envisages experimental tests of mechanisms driving variability in the reproduction of trees. In the field of arts, humanities and social sciences, fellowships have been awarded to Dr Michał Marciak and Professor Dariusz Jemielniak. The former works at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Technology, University of Rzeszów, and he carries out interdisciplinary research on the cultural, economic, military and political aspects of the presence of the Imperium Romanum in Mesopotamia. He will continue his work with Professor Caroline Warzeggers at the University of Leiden. Professor Jemielniak of Kozminski University will be a fellow at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where in the team of Professor Samer Hassan he will examine online communities and knowledge-legitimation systems such as alterscience, citizen science and open collaboration.

To see the list of the projects approved for funding, click here.