43 projects worth a total of nearly 26 million zlotys will be funded under the fifth PRELUDIUM BIS call.
PRELUDIUM BIS 5 is targeted at doctoral schools; its objective is to support the education of PhD students and fund research projects they carry out as part of their doctoral dissertations. The call also promotes international mobility, as each grant holder is required to complete a foreign fellowship of 3 to 6 months, which is funded by the National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA).
Under a PRELUDIUM BIS project, the research supervisor is the PI and the PhD students are chosen in an open call procedure. In this edition, the NCN waived the requirement for the PhD student working on the grant to earn their PhD as a condition for final project completion.
PRELUDIUM BIS projects may be planned over 36 or 48 months. PhD students are paid monthly scholarships of PLN 5,000 until the midterm assessment, after which the sum is increased to PLN 6,000 per month. The budget of the project may go toward funding the PI’s salary, materials and small equipment, outsourcing, business trips, visits, consultations, and compensation for collective investigators.
The fifth PRELUDIUM BIS call attracted 229 proposals with a total budget of more than 134 million zlotys, out of which the NCN selected 43, worth a total of nearly 26 million, for a final success rate of 18.78%.
Quality of life in the modern world in PRELUDIUM BIS grants
Some of the projects recommended for funding in this round address the factors and phenomena that affect our world today and our quality of life.
In Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Dr hab. Katarzyna Andrejuk from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences will carry out a project in migration studies. Her project will centre on work offered via online platforms that publish e.g. offers of meal delivery or transport services, which has become increasingly important economically in recent years. As work of this kind is easily available and does not require any professional experience, it is often the first choice for refugees and economic migrants, or those who arrive in the country to pursue a degree or to reunite with their families and seek employment. Together with her PhD student, Andrejuk will look at the phenomenon from different angles; for instance, she will study how it affects the integration of immigrants into the host society.
In Physical Sciences and Engineering, funding will go to a project by Dr hab. Mikołaj Piniewski from the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, devoted to elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations and their impact on future hydrological projections. Across the globe, researchers simulate hydrological processes with the aid of models of varying complexity and rely on different factors to create future scenarios, but the issue of elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations and their impact on plant growth has not yet been adequately studied. Dr hab. Mikołaj Piniewski plans to carry out his modelling research in small river basins located in different climate zones.
In Life Sciences, Prof. Dr hab. inż. Ewa Kaczorek from the Poznań University of Technology will study the impact of microplastics on the biosphere. In recent years, we have been learning more and more about the dangers related to the presence of microplastics in our environment and their impact on animals and people. As emphasized by Kaczorek, microplastic particles do not occur in the environment on their own, but together with other contaminants. Particularly alarming are their interactions with antibiotics, which may potentially contribute to the development and spread of antibiotic resistance genes (ARG). In her PRELUDIUM BIS project, Prof. Kaczorek will aim to describe the role of microplastics as carriers of antibiotic contaminants in the environment and determine the interaction between microplastic-related contaminants and environmental microorganisms.
PRELUDIUM BIS was first launched in 2019. In all its iterations, the NCN has funded 360 projects thus far.