We are pleased to present the results of SONATINA 9 under which funding for employment in research institutions, research projects and foreign fellowships was awarded to 50 early-career researchers.
SONATINA is an opportunity for PhD holders who wish to develop their research career and gain experience as principal investigators. This edition of the call was open to researchers whose PhD degree was conferred between 1 January 2022 - 31 December 2024, and researchers without a PhD degree who have committed to obtaining it by 30 June.
wyniki SONATINA 9
The winning applicants will be awarded funding for full-time employment at Polish research institutions (different from the ones from which they have earned their PhD degree) for a period of either 24 or 36 months, and for research, i.e. remuneration for co-investigators (the so-called additional remuneration), purchase of materials and small equipment, outsourced services, business trips, visits and consultations, etc.. They will also be required to complete 3- to 6 month-long fellowships at foreign research institutions.
The nineth edition of SONATINA attracted 249 proposals which were evaluated by Expert Teams under three research domains: Humanities, Social Sciences and Art Sciences (HS), Physical Sciences and Engineering (ST), and Life Sciences (NZ). Proposals submitted to SONATINA are typically evaluated in two stages, like in most other NCN calls, except that the second stage includes an interview with the principal investigator held on the NCN premises.
50 researchers will have their basic or applied research funded, including 15 representatives of Humanities, Social Sciences and Art Sciences, 22 representatives of Physical Sciences and Engineering, and 13 representatives of Life Sciences. The total funding of over 44.7 million PLN was awarded and the success rate was 20.08%.
Awarded Research
Dr Łucja Doradzińska from the Jagiellonian University is a winning applicant representing Humanities, Social Sciences and Art Sciences. She will perform the project “Do we see what we expect or what we want to see? Mutual impact of expectations and endogenous attention on visual awareness,” under which she will study brain activity that makes us aware of the surrounding environment, formed through the external stimuli. Her main focus will be on identifying the mechanisms by which attention and expectations mutually influence subjective awareness.
Dr Honorata Sroka from the Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences will pursue the project on avant-garde archives in Central and Eastern Europe. She will investigate archival practices of the neo-avant-garde and define the term “avant-garde archive”, by tracing unconventional approaches to legacy recording during the 1960s and 1970s.
Dr Eng Matt Hepburn, a winning applicant representing Physical Sciences and Engineering, will carry out a SONATINA project at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Alongside his research team, he will investigate the cancerous tissue detection method that could be helpful in treatment of early-stage breast cancer, i.e. breast-conserving surgery, in which the tumour is removed while preserving as much healthy breast tissue as possible. There is currently no tool in breast cancer surgery allowing surgeons to identify and remove all cancerous tissue at surgery. Tumours are taken out with a margin of surrounding healthy tissue and, as a result, many patients require a second operation. In this context, optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a promising high-resolution imaging technique although it is too slow for real-time use during surgery. The research team headed by Dr Hepburn will aim to develop a new and improved dOCT system.
Dr Dominika Łuców from the Stanisław Leszczycki Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization, Polish Academy of Sciences will study testate amoebae that inhabit lakes and peatlands and are very sensitive to changes in the environment, which makes them excellent indicator species used in, inter alia, palaeoecological reconstructions. Dr Łuców will perform biodiversity assessment and potential use of freshwater testate amoebae for environmental reconstruction in the agricultural region of Central Europe, in particular to monitor eutrophication of lakes.
Dr Aleksandra Tempes from the University of Warsaw is among the winners representing Life Sciences. She will study the phenomenon of neonatal epilepsy, which is a severe neurological disorder caused by neonatal encephalopathy - brain damage caused by a reduction in oxygen partial pressure in the blood. Epilepsy may be genetically determined. As part of an international collaboration with scientists from Canada, Dr Tempes participated in the discovery of a new mutation in a child suffering from neonatal epilepsy. The SONATINA grant will let her analyse how the newly discovered mutation affects neuronal function and what mechanisms underlie its association with epilepsy.
Another SONATINA project will be carried out by Dr Michał Pierański from the Gdańsk University of Technology. His research studies focus on Antimicrobial PhotoDynamic Inactivation (aPDI), a promising therapy which provides an alternative solution for antibiotic resistance in bacteria. A research group headed by Dr Pierański has recently investigated the development of tolerance to aPDI in Streptococcus Agalactiae, a leading source of invasive infections in newborns, but recently also in pregnant women, the elderly and immune-compromised patients. During their recent studies, scientists have observed tolerance development to aPDI in Streptococcus Agalactiae. Under his SONATINA project, Dr Pierański will investigate which genes are necessary for the development of tolerance to ROS produced by a PDI.
During nine completed SONATINA calls, the total funding of nearly PLN 279 million was awarded to 375 early-career researchers. The list of SONATINA projects funded by the NCN and abstracts for the general public are available on the NCN website under Projects funded by the NCN.