Together with the Research Council of Lithuania (RCL) we have announced the results of DAINA 1 call for joint Polish-Lithuanian research projects.
Funding in DAINA 1 was available to Polish-Lithuanian research teams conducting projects within basic research in all fields of science and the humanities. More about the DAINA 1 call.
Ca. € 46.3 million: this is the sum of funding available under the new NCN calls for proposals to researchers who plan to establish new teams, carry out projects in international cooperation or launch innovative and groundbreaking efforts. Researchers planning joint Polish-Chinese projects will compete for more than € 9 million in total.
The SHENG call for Polish-Chinese research projects is a novelty in the Centre’s offer of funding programmes. An agreement establishing cooperation between the National Science Centre and the Chinese research-funding agency, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), was signed at the end of March in Beijing.
We hope that the Polish-Chinese programme will be as popular as previous bilateral NCN funding opportunities. The choice of partner is no coincidence. Entering into and developing a relationship with a country as active in economics and science as China, will certainly be fruitful for the Polish academic community, said Professor Zbigniew Błocki, director of the NCN.
Funding under the SHENG scheme will be available to projects in basic research, carried out under all panels of Physical Sciences and Engineering, as well as Life Sciences and selected panels of Art, Humanities and Social Sciences. Funding will be awarded to research carried out jointly by Polish and Chinese teams, and in which international cooperation is an essential component of the effort. The research should be conducted over 36 months, and both the Polish and the Chinese principal investigator may act as such only in one proposal submitted under the SHENG call. The principal investigator of the Polish team should hold a doctorate, and the budget of the Polish contribution should be no less than € 57,982.
Traditionally, June sees the launch of another SONATA BIS call, seeking to establish new research teams. Principal investigators under the scheme may be doctorate holders who have obtained their degree within 5 to 12 years of submitting their application to the call. Also, the researcher submitting the proposal is required to name between 3 and 10 published papers, the 3 most significant of which should be attached to the proposal. It will be noted that investigators in the project may not include researchers with habilitation or professorship other than the principal investigator. The budget of the 8th edition of the call has been set at more than € 27.83 million.
MAESTRO is a call addressed to advanced researchers, who seek to conduct research surpassing the current state of the art. Principal investigators may recruit from scholars who, over the past 10 years, have published at least 5 papers in renowned Polish or foreign journals, have acted as principal investigators to at least two research projects carried out under nationwide or international calls and have been active in other fields of academic life. The MAESTRO call is being announced for the 10th time, and its budget is nearly € 9.28 million.
It is also the 10th round of the HARMONIA programme: the call for research projects carried out as international collaborations, non-co-funded from foreign resources. Eligible under the call is research carried out in direct cooperation with partners from research institutions overseas, under international programmes or initiatives launched as bi- or multilateral cooperation, and the research in which Polish teams use large-scale international infrastructure. The total funding in the call comes close to € 9.28 million.
The calls will be open until 17 September 2018, and the results will be announced by 15 March 2019.
The National Science Centre invites Polish research institutions to declare commitment as potential Host Institutions to Dioscuri Centres of Scientific Excellence. Applications for establishing Dioscuri Centres may come from basic organisational units and research centres of higher education institutions, research units of the Polish Academy of Sciences, research institutes, international research institutes established on the territory of Poland, Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, other research institutions established on the territory of Poland.
The deadline for submissions expires on 5th November 2018.
Full text of the announcement:
Submissions meeting the formal requirements will be published alongside the Dioscuri call announcement, thus helping researchers find the right research institution in Poland.
Researchers will be able to choose an institution from beyond the published list, provided that the institution meets the formal requirements and will commit to satisfy the basic conditions specified in the announcement.
Dioscuri is an initiative by the Max Planck Society (MPG), intended to establish Centres of Scientific Excellence in Central and Eastern Europe. The Centres will enable outstanding researchers to carry out top level research at research institutions in this part of Europe.
For details of the Dioscuri programme and all formal requirements, see the Dioscuri web-page.
Contact:
Marcin Liana, tel. 12 341 9161
Małgorzata Jacobs, tel. 12 341 9173
The results of the first Dioscuri call will be announced in September 2018.
3rd Polish-German BEETHOVEN call coming up in September 2018.
Following up on its two successful rounds the National Science Centre (NCN) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) are extending the funding initiative to cover new disciplines.
The BEETHOVEN CLASSIC 3 call will be a continuation of the BEETHOVEN 2 call with a joint peer review and selection process. It is open to research in the humanities, social sciences, chemistry, physics, mathematics and material sciences. This corresponds to the subject areas covered by
A new joint call titled BEETHOVEN LIFE 1 will be announced for research in the life science disciplines. This corresponds to the subject areas covered by
In this call, DFG will act as the lead agency, i.e. assessment of all applications will be made by the DFG according to its rules for the individual research grants programme.
The aims of the BEETHOVEN CLASSIC 3 and BEETHOVEN LIFE 1 calls are:
Proposals for research projects in the above-listed disciplines must be written in English and submitted by joint Polish-German research teams. The duration of the projects must be either 24 or 36 months.
The National Science Centre (NCN) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) will launch BEETHOVEN CLASSIC 3 and BEETHOVEN LIFE 1 on 14 September 2018.
The submission deadline for proposals under the two calls will be 17 December 2018. Further information will be made available on 14 September 2018 on the websites of both agencies.
Contact persons at NCN:
BEETHOVEN CLASSIC 3
Humanities and Social Sciences:
Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, Material Science:
BEETHOVEN LIFE 1
General inquiries:
Contact persons at DFG:
BEETHOVEN CLASSIC 3
Humanities and Social Sciences:
Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, Material Science:
BEETHOVEN LIFE 1
General inquiries on cooperation with Poland:
Dr. Annina Lottermann, International Affairs, phone: +49 228 885-2802, annina.lottermann@dfg.de
Starting on 25 May 2018 the General Personal Data Protection Regulation will directly apply in Poland. GDPR is a comprehensive regulation that unifies data protection laws across the EU member states. To comply with the GDPR requirements, we have prepared information about how we process personal data at the NCN.
See: Personal data processing at the National Science Centre
We have announced the results of the 14th edition of our most popular calls, OPUS and PRELUDIUM. The researchers will receive a total of € 93 million to carry out their research projects.
OPUS and PRELUDIUM are the two flagship calls of the National Science Centre, and they continue to attract the greatest interest among all available funding opportunities. The expert panels of the 14th edition have awarded a total of € 92,208,782 to the submitted research projects. In all, 3122 applications were received for both calls, 669 of which were recommended for funding, setting the success rate at 21%
The OPUS call does not put any threshold requirements of research seniority or academic degree. As a result, the 14th edition welcomed as many as 1968 submissions, 394 of which qualified for funding. Their authors will jointly receive a total of more than € 81 million.
OPUS is our most important grant call and represents more than half of our total budget. It is targeted at young and experienced researchers alike. Statistics show that what really matters is not the academic title or degree, but research achievements and an interesting idea. We are glad that more and more resources today go toward funding doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships", said professor Zbigniew Błocki, Director of the National Science Centre, "PRELUDIUM, on the other hand, reaches out to pre-doctoral applicants, which on a global scale is exceptional. Thanks to their projects, young researchers have the chance to gain hands-on experience of the grant system at an earlier stage than anywhere else in the world.
PRELUDIUM 14 was specifically targeted at pre-doctoral applicants. This time, early stage researchers submitted 1154 applications, 275 of which will receive funding to the total amount of € 9.5 million.
PRELUDIUM 14 allowed applicants to declare higher indirect costs than in previous editions. Their maximum value was increased to 40% of direct costs, not including equipment. The maximum funding limit grew from € 14,000 to 16,000 for one-year projects, from € 28,000 to 32,000 for two-year projects, and from € 42,000 to 49,000 for three-year projects. Another novelty is that the funding will be transferred to the beneficiaries as a one-off payment, immediately upon signing of the grant agreement.
The ranking lists of all projects approved for funding under OPUS 14 and PRELUDIUM 14 are available on the official website of the National Science Centre.
More than 100 participants attended the QuantERA Projects’ Launch Event, which was organized in Bucharest on April 24th, 2018. The aim of the event was to gather the representatives of the 26 QuantERA-funded projects, European Commission, research funders and quantum community. The meeting was hosted by UEFISCDI (a research funding organisation from Romania) and the National Science Centre, Poland – the Coordinator of the QuantERA Programme.
During the event the participants could hear about the quantum technology research landscape in Europe and recent developments within the Quantum Flagship. Two panel discussions provided the audience with valuable insights into the topics of Fostering Industry Connections and Promoting Inclusiveness in the field of quantum technology research. The results of the discussions will lay the foundations for further activities of the QuantERA Programme.
All 26 QuantERA-funded projects were presented during the scientific and poster sessions which formed the key part of the event and provided ground for engaging discussions which exceeded the timeframe of the meeting. The abstracts of the projects can be found in the QuantERA Projects Catalogue.
On the second day of the event the participants focused on the topics of Responsible Research and Innovation in QT and clarified further proceedings within the QuantERA-funded projects.
A short movie from the QuantERA Projects' Launch can be found under the following link.
Contact:
We would like to invite all researchers to participate in SHENG1 – a new funding opportunity for joint Polish-Chinese research teams to be launched by the National Science Centre (NCN) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). The programme aims to support research projects in all fields of the Natural, Engineering, Life and Management sciences.Polish applicants can submit proposals in all areas of Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering and selected areas of Social Sciences (all subpanels of HS4, HS6_1, HS6_2, HS6_3, HS6_4, HS6_5, HS6_6, HS6_7, HS6_13, HS6_14).
Within the SHENG scheme, the NCN and NSFC will fund only projects involving basic research.
A complete version of the call documents will be made available on the website in June 2018.
A complete proposal (consisting of the joint project description in English and the CVs of both PIs and Co-investigators in English) should be submitted by the Polish applicant via the ZSUN/OSF submission system which can be found at https://osf.opi.org.pl by September 17th, 2018, together with all necessary documents conforming to the formal requirements set out in the call documentation.
Chinese PIs should submit all documents (including the complete proposal consisting of the joint project description in English and the CVs of both PIs and Co-investigators in English) required by the NSFC via the NSFC electronic submission system by September 17th, 2018.
All proposals will be reviewed by both organisations separately. Proposals will be subject to an eligibility check and peer review.
Only proposals which have been declared eligible by the NCN and NSFC will be peer reviewed.
At the NCN, the eligibility check of proposals will be carried out by the NCN Coordinators. The peer review will be performed by NCN Expert Teams and by External Reviewers.
At the NCN, the peer review will be carried out in two stages:
The proposal evaluation will take into account in particular:
Support will be granted for those proposals where both the NCN and NSFC recommend funding.
Funds for Polish research teams will be allocated on the basis of the decisions issued by the Director of the NCN. Funds for Chinese research teams will be allocated according to NSFC regulations.
Poland, NCN:
China, NSFC:
1The sheng (also spelt as cheng in Encyclopedia Britannica) is a Chinese mouth-blown free reed instrument consisting of vertical pipes. It is a polyphonic instrument and enjoys increasing popularity as a solo instrument.
On the 5th April 2018 in Prague prof. Zbigniew Błocki, director of the National Science Centre (NCN) and prof. Klement Tockner, President of Austrian Science Fund (FWF), signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the NCN and the FWF. This bilateral agreement lays the cornerstone of work on a future joint funding opportunity for Polish-Austrian research teams.
A new call for Polish-Austrian research projects to be announced in late 2018 will target researchers in all fields of science and the humanities. The FWF will act as a lead agency responsible for carrying out merit-based evaluation.
Signing of the Memorandum of Understanding between the NCN and FWF is a step towards strengthening cooperation between funding agencies from Central European Countries (for more information please refer to: Towards a cooperation between funding agencies in Central Europe).
On 28th March in Beijing, the National Science Centre signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) to establish a new bilateral funding opportunity for Polish-Chinese theoretical research projects. Managed jointly with the NSFC, the new funding initiative will be yet another bilateral programme of the National Science Centre. Grants will be awarded to Polish-Chinese projects in the field of Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering, as well as selected disciplines in Social Sciences. Detailed terms and conditions of the call will be announced in June 2018.
We hope that the new Polish-Chinese programme will attract similar attention as our previous bilateral calls. The choice of partner was far from accidental. Cooperation with China, a country of vibrant economic and scientific activity, will no doubt benefit Polish academia, explains Professor Zbigniew Błocki, director of the National Science Centre.
The signing ceremony of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was held on 28th March at the NSFC office in Beijing. Poland was represented by Professor Zbigniew Błocki, Director of the National Science Centre, Professor Janusz Janeczek, Chairman of the NCN Council, and Justyna Woźniakowska and Magdalena Godowska, representatives of the International Cooperation Office. Professor Xie Xincheng, Vice-President for International Affairs, signed the MoU on behalf of the NSFC. The ceremony was also attended by Natalia Popczyk from the Polish Embassy in Beijing.
