Thanks to a partnership between the NCN and the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR), six Polish research teams will soon be able to start on their research projects. They will receive nearly 7 million zlotys for their cooperation with Czech partners. Four projects address problems in physical sciences and engineering; two more belong to life sciences.
One of the winners in the former panel is Prof. Dr hab. Zbigniew Żytkiewicz from the Institute of Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who will work on a project entitled “Heterostructures of ZnO/(AI,Ga)N Nanowires for Optoelectronics” in cooperation with a Czech partner, Dr hab. inż. Jan Grym from the Institute of Photonics and Electronics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The teams were awarded almost 1.2 million zlotys.
Prof. Dr hab. Tadeusz Domański from the Marie Curie Skłodowska University in Lublin, in partnership with Dr hab. Tomáš Novotný from the Charles University in Prague, will study superconducting nanohybrids out of equilibrium. The project will be carried out by a group of Polish centres, including the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Faculty of Physics). The budget on the Polish side is close to 1.4 million zlotys.
Novel anti-Stokes lanthanide nanoparticles and multicolour FRET mechanisms for single-molecule DNA sequencing will be investigated by Prof. Dr hab. Artur Bednarkiewicz from the Włodzimierz Trzebiatowski Institute of Low Temperatures and Structural Research, PAS, in cooperation with Prof. Dr hab. Hans Gorris from the Masaryk University in Brno. The budget of the project approaches 1.6 million zlotys.
Nearly 400,000 zlotys will go to Prof. Dr hab. inż. Paweł Pohl from the Wrocław University of Technology for a project entitled “Versatile plasma sources and advanced approaches to signal evaluation as novel concepts in ultratrace element analysis by atomic spectrometry”, carried out in partnership with Dr Jan Kratzer from the Institute of Analytical Chemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
In the life sciences, a grant of more than 1.3 million zlotys will go to Dr Małgorzata Stanek from the Władysław Szafer Institute of Botany of the Polish Academy of Sciences for a project focused on the impact of alien and native woody plants on vegetation and soil. On the Czech side, the project will be led by Dr Jan Pergl from the Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences, in partnership with the Silesian University in Katowice on the Polish side. The other Polish-Czech project funded under this panel will address the role of tropomyosin isoform Tpm2.3 in the regulation of actin dynamics and osteosarcoma metastasis. The research will be conducted by Prof. Dr hab. Joanna Moraczewska from the Kazimierz Wielki University and Dr Petr Beneš from the Masaryk University in Brno. Their budget is c. 1.1 million zlotys.
Funding decisions for other proposals submitted to the Weave-UNISONO call in 2022 and evaluated by GAČR will be sent out at a later date.
Weave-UNISONO
The Weave-UNISONO call is the result of multilateral cooperation between research-funding agencies in the Science Europe association. It aims to simplify submission and selection procedures for research proposals that bring together researchers from two or three different European countries in any discipline of science.
The selection process is based on the Lead Agency Procedure (LAP), under which only one partner institution is responsible for merit-based review and the others simply accept the result.
Under Weave, partner research teams apply in parallel to the lead agency and their relevant domestic institutions. Their joint proposal must include coherent research plans and clearly spell out the added value of international cooperation.
The Weave-UNISONO call accepts proposals on a rolling basis. Polish teams wishing to partner up with colleagues from Austria, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Switzerland, Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium-Flanders are encouraged to carefully read the call announcement and submit their funding proposals.