PM Donald Tusk announced earlier today that the National Science Centre will receive an additional 500 million zlotys in bonds. The announcement was made during an awards ceremony for the winners of the Prime Minister’s Awards for research achievements.

“The future of our world and PM Donald Tusk meeting the winners of the Prime Minister s 2023 Award for Scientific Achievements, 29, November 2024. Photo: Prime Minister s Office the values on which it is founded, the future of the West in a broad sense as a political entity and civilization, will depend on whether we will be able to keep Europe, including Poland, at the peak of creativity, innovation, knowledge and science”, said Polish PM Donald Tusk during the event, which took place in Warsaw.

“We need to close the very large gap between us and other centres of science and civilization such as the United States and China. Europe, which at least some of us still remember as unrivalled in this respect, now needs to catch up with the rest of the world and your role here is absolutely crucial, no matter your field”, he added.

He also talked briefly about the 2025 state budget underway. “The resources of the Cabinet of Ministers include bonds, money...at the sole disposal of the Prime Minister, so we also decided to add an extra 500 million zlotys in bonds to the budget money slated for the National Science Centre, especially for the purpose of scholarships,”, he continued.

“This is a lot of money, but I know that when you divide it by the number of days, months, and interested parties, the sum will always be a little short. But I would like you to treat it as a token that at least I personally don’t need any convincing that in this big race, which is also a race for the security of Poland and the security of Europe, your efforts, your work, your thinking will be of absolutely crucial importance.”

Winners of 2024 Prime Minister's Awards

After the ceremony, the Minister of Finance Andrzej Domański wrote on X:

“Each zloty invested in research and innovation generates between 4 and 7 zlotys of return in the economy at large. Today, PM Donald Tusk has awarded an extra 0.5 billion zlotys to the National Science Centre, which supports key basic research activity. We need to build an innovative economy and create new drivers of economic growth in Poland.”

Scientists analysed hundreds of pieces of fossilised digestive material to reconstruct the diet of the dinosaurs. Their findings, based on research funded in part by the #NCN, were published by “Nature” on 27 November.

An international research team Bromaliths of herbivorous dinosaurs (photo: Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki) analysed hundreds of pieces of fossilised digestive material, called bromalites, to reconstruct what dinosaurs ate and how their diet changed. Using various research tools, they looked at nearly 500 fossilised pieces of poo and vomit, sampled from the southern edge of the Polish Basin, the Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship, and Silesia. On 27 November, their findings were published in “Nature”.

The fossils reveal that the rise of the dinosaurs, over millions of years in the Triassic period, was influenced by factors such as climate change and other species’ extinction.

Entitled Digestive contents and food webs record the advent of dinosaur supremacy, the article was authored by Martin Qvarnström (corresponding author), Joel Vikberg Wernström, Zuzanna Wawrzyniak, Maria Barbacka, Grzegorz Pacyna, Artur Górecki, Jadwiga Ziaja, Agata Jarzynka, Krzysztof Owocki, Tomasz Sulej, Leszek Marynowski, Grzegorz Pieńkowski, Per E. Ahlberg and Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki.

The research projects that led to the publication, headed by PIs Maria Barbacka. Grzegorz Pieńkowski, and Zuzanna Wawrzyniak, were funded partly by the NCN,

Abstract for the general public:

Fossilised poo and vomit show how dinosaurs rose to rule Earth

SONATA BIS 14 and MAESTRO 16 interview dates 

Dates have been released for interviews in the calls launched on 17 June 2024. The results of the first stage of merit-based evaluation under MAESTRO 16 and SONATA BIS 14 will be published in the second half of December.

Principal investigators in projects recommended for the second stage of evaluation will be interviewed according to the following schedule:

MAESTRO 16

• Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (HS): 7 February 2025  
• Life Sciences (NZ): 4-6 February 2025
• Physical Sciences and Engineering (ST): 5 and 6 February 2025  

SONATA BIS 14

• Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (HS): 5-7 February 2025
• Life Sciences (NZ): 4-6 February 2025
• Physical Sciences and Engineering (ST): 4 and 6 February 2025 

Principal investigators will be interviewed in English. Researchers recommended for the second stage of evaluation will be notified of the interviews 14 days in advance at the latest. Interviews will be held at the premises of the National Science Centre in Krakow and although principal investigators are required to participate in person, in exceptional and well-justified cases interviews may be held via available telecommunication tools. Failure to attend the interview will be regarded as a resignation from applying for funding. The cost of travel to and accommodation in Krakow will not be reimbursed.

On 27 November, join us for a meeting with Błażej Skrzypulec, a philosopher from the Jagiellonian University and winner of the 2024 NCN Award for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, who will give a talk in a series organised by the NCN and the Copernicus Center.

Dr hab. Błażej Skrzypulec, professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University, specialises in the philosophy of perception, and in particular, the structural aspects of sensory experience, non-visual perceptual modalities and multimodal perception. He won this year’s NCN Award for his work on the structural aspects of perceptual experience.

Next Wednesday, he will talk about his research in the “Science in the Center” series, organized by the Copernicus Center and the NCN. His lecture will start at 6 pm and will be livestreamed on the YouTube channel of the Copernicus Center. Viewers are encouraged to ask questions in the chat window!

This is how Błażej Skrzypulec describes the subject of his talk:

Intuitively, it seems like our senses present things as situated in space. For example, I can see that the mug is to my left, I can hear a voice coming from a close distance, I can feel something touch a spot near my left wrist. However, the matter becomes less straightforward when we think of our sense of smell. Does it really present smells as located in space, standing in spatial relations, or having spatial properties such as shapes and dimensions?

Some authors argue that, at most, it presents smells as being “here” or “outside”. Others, however, maintain that what we experience are “smellscapes”, or spatially ordered clouds of chemical substances. In my lecture, I will talk about the spatial nature of smell, addressing contemporary philosophical conceptions and available empirical data on the smell modality. In particular, I will present the principal models of the spatiality of smell, discussing the arguments in their favour, the assumptions they require and the consequences they entail for our understanding of the sense of smell.

339 researchers are joining the ranks of MINIATURA 8 grant holders. They will receive a total of more than 13.7 million zlotys in funding for their research tasks. Here are the results for the July batch of proposals and a final round-up of this year’s edition of the call.

MINIATURA is a call targeted at researchers who have earned their PhD degree in the previous 12 years and have never served as a PI under a call funded by the NCN or from any other resource. MINIATURA 8 offered grants ranging from 5K to 50K zlotys for research tasks planned for up to 12 months, including preliminary/ pilot studies, library and archive searches, fellowships, research visits and/or consultations. This year, for the first time in the history of MINIATURA, applicants could plan to carry out their research in more than one of these forms, as long as they could justify their decision. To be eligible for funding under the call, applicants were required to demonstrate a record of at least one paper published or at least one artistic achievement or achievement in research in art.

Research tasks funded under MINIATURA are meant to enable researchers who are just starting out on their research career to get their first experience in the grant system. Working on a MINIATURA task can serve as a springboard to a full-fledged research project, which they can then submit for funding under NCN calls or other domestic and international calls for proposals.

In the sixth and last round of MINIATURA 8, funding was awarded to 339 projects with a total budget of 13,707,056 zlotys.

Ranking lists for research tasks recommended for funding under MINIATURA 8

MINIATURA 8 Ranking list No 6 (.pdf)

MINIATURA 8 statistics

In total, MINIATURA 8 attracted 1752 proposals: 617 in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, 518 in Physical Sciences and Engineering, and 617 in Life Sciences.

The list of MINIATURA 8 winners includes 723 researchers, who will carry out research tasks worth nearly 28.78 million zlotys. We were able to fund so many research tasks this year thanks to the decision of the NCN Council, which, at its November session, passed a resolution that increased the MINIATURA 8 research-funding budget by nearly 8.78 million zlotys, on top of the original 20 million zlotys. The final success rate in the call reached 41.27%.

The bulk of research tasks recommended for funding this year will involve preliminary/pilot research. 83 researchers will go on research trips and 57 on consultations. Library and archive searchers account for 57 of funded tasks and fellowships for 46. Exactly 100 tasks will be carried out in more than one of these forms.

MINIATURA grants went to 150 research centres all over Poland. The greatest number were awarded to the Jagiellonian University (45), the Wrocław University of Science and Technology (35) and the University of Warsaw (32). The top ten also includes the University of Łódź (25), the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (23), the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków (21), the University of Silesia in Katowice (21), the Warsaw University of Life Sciences (20) and the University of Wrocław (17).

Status of MINIATURA beneficiaries

• universities – 588
• research institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences – 89
• research institutes – 18
• institutes operating within the Łukasiewicz Research Network – 17
• legal entities with registered office in Poland– 7
• Łukasiewicz Centre  – 3
• international research institute – 1

Proposal intake and assessment

MINIATURA differs from other NCN calls in that it involves simplified proposal intake and assessment procedures. Proposals were accepted and evaluated at the NCN on a rolling basis from 1 February until 31 July.

Projects were assessed by members of the Expert Team established by the NCN Council specifically for the purposes of MINIATURA 8. The procedure consisted of a single stage and the final decision for each proposal was issued within 5 months of its submission. The first results were published in May and, from then on, the list of winners kept growing. The results announced today are the final ranking list for MINIATURA 8; it includes proposals that were submitted to the NCN in the last month of intake, i.e. in July 2024, and got positive reviews from our experts.

Service of decisions

On 25 November 2024, positive and negative decisions for proposals submitted to MINIATURA in July 2024 were served on the applicants. Grounds for the decisions are available in the OSF submission system where you should check the status of your proposal.

Decisions are served on the applicants in an electronic format to their Electronic Delivery Box (ESP (ePUAP)) address specified in the proposal. If you have not received the decision, make sure that your ESP (ePUAP) address is correct and if it is not, contact the NCN Program Officer named in the OSF submission system.

The JPND network, which supports research on neurodegenerative diseases, will be announcing a new international call for proposals in January 2025.

The JPND Call 2025 topic is: Health and social care research with a focus on the moderate and late stages of neurodegenerative diseases, with the aim of improving the understanding of factors that impact the quality of life of patients and their families and to develop more adequate concepts of easily accessible support for people with neurodegenerative diseases at moderate, advanced and end of life stages. Proposals to this call must be ambitious, innovative, multi-disciplinary and multi-national, i.e. include research teams from at least three different countries. They must be hypothesis driven and should have a strong focus on methodology.

JPND Call 2025 will accept proposals in two stages. The call will be officially announced in early January 2025. The deadline for the submission of joint pre-proposals is set for early March 2025. Funding is available to international consortia made up of at least 3 research teams from at least 3 different countries participating in the programme. The PI of the Polish team must have at least a PhD degree.

More information about the call, including a more detailed discussion of this year’s theme and a list of participating countries, can be found on the website of the JPND network.

This is not an official announcement. Detailed call conditions will be specified in the official announcement of the call.

Contact:

dr Jadwiga Spyrka

Alicja Dyląg, tel.:

Dr hab. Wiktor Lewandowski is a chemist working in photonics and materials chemistry and a professor at the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Warsaw. He is also the winner of this year’s NCN Award for Physical Sciences and Engineering for his groundbreaking technique for the production of chiral photonic nanomaterials.

Lewandowski will talk about his research in the “Science in the Centre” series, organised by the Copernicus Centre and the NCN. The meeting will take place at 6 pm on Wednesday, 20 November and will be livestreamed on the YouTube channel of the Copernicus Centre.

Nanotechnology, or the science of materials and structures at nanometre scale, is opening up new horizons for all of us. Materials with dimensions of less than one billionth of a metre show properties that may revolutionise many areas of our lives. Some nanotechnology products are already available in the market, ranging from QLED TV sets, which offer previously unheard-of image quality, to rapid test kits that have improved our diagnostic capabilities. A technique for the production of certain kinds of nanomaterials was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2023.

But do we understand the full potential of nanotechnology? Do we really know how to tap it, especially in view of their strong interactions with light? It is the ability to control the way nanomaterials interact with light that might hold the key to rapid new advances in optoelectronics and photonics.

In their research, Prof. Lewandowski and his team have demonstrated that it is possible to obtain the helical organisation of nanoparticles using liquid crystals. This self-organisation leads to the production of chiral materials that respond differently to light of opposite circular polarisations. The strategy proposed by the team is scalable and can be applied to various types of nanomaterials. Moreover, in a sense, it goes beyond what nature itself has achieved in the realm of nanotechnology. It proves that by understanding and harnessing the principles of self-organisation, we can create materials with completely novel properties.

JPIAMR has announced the results of the 17th call for transnational research projects in the field of antibiotic resistance. Among the thirteen awarded projects, three will be carried out by research teams based in Wroclaw and Warsaw. The total amount of funding provided by the NCN for these projects is over PLN 4.2 million.

The principal objective of this year's call Interventions moving forward to promote action to counteract the emergence and spread of bacterial and fungal resistance and to improve treatments, was to take action against the growing global threat of increased spread of antimicrobial (antibacterial and antifungal) resistance by funding international collaborative research projects aimed at improving, comparing and evaluating the efficacy, cost-effectiveness and uptake of existing interventions against bacterial or fungal infections and/or designing new interventions against fungal infections.

The IMPACT call was open to scientists working in Polish research organisations, who intend to carry out international research projects in collaboration with partners from 19 countries around the world. A total of 154 international consortia submitted proposals in answer to the call, and thirteen were recommended for funding. The three winning Polish research teams will receive funding of over PLN 4.2 million from NCN to further their research.

• PHASEK – Combination of bacteriophages and other antimicrobial agents as a strategy to combat multidrug-resistant E. coli and K. pneumoniae bacteria

The Principal Investigator is Prof. Krystyna Dabrowska, PhD, from the Ludwik Hirszfeld Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wrocław. The project has been awarded over than PLN 1.2 million.

• PHAGES-AntiPERS – Strategies for phage therapy against bacterial persister cells

The leader of the Polish team is Prof. Zuzanna Drulis-Kawa, PhD, from the University of Wroclaw. The project budgeted over PLN 1.2 million.

• FunHitDisco –Platform for high-throughput search for antifungal compounds.

The Principal Investigator is Dr. Maria Klimecka from the University of Warsaw. The project has been awarded over PLN 1.7 million.

The Minister of Science, Dariusz Wieczorek, met with Council members and representatives of the NCN office to discuss research funding, the work of the agency and a new team to deal with ongoing cooperation

“The NCN is essential for Polish science. We will be taking efforts to make sure that the state budget includes adequate resources to fund its tasks,” Dariusz Wieczorek said on 14 November in Kraków.

This year, the research-funding subsidy for the NCN was increased by 200 million zlotys. In September, the NCN Council issued an appeal, urging the government to raise the 2025 budget of the agency by a further 300 million for research funding and 2 million for its daily operation. However, if adopted, the current draft state budget, will only increase spending on the NCN by 50 million. During the meeting in Kraków, the Minister stressed that the legislative process is still underway, and the amount may still increase. “In this case, we are on the same side. As for the NCN, I am optimistic,” he said.  The Minister of Science, Dariusz Wieczorek joins NCN Council session, photo: MNiSW

The Minister also underscored that “our key concern right now is security” and the bulk of state resources go towards the military and weapons. Next year, the budget of the Minister of National Defence will climb up to 186 billion zlotys. “I am aware, as is any minister, that the geopolitical situation means we may need to give up on some of our aspirations,” he said.

Prof. Krzysztof Jóźwiak, the NCN Director, pointed out that, today, weaponry consists “not only of tanks and cannons,” but also of cybersecurity and social defence against manipulation and disinformation campaigns. “This is an area in which I can see an important role for basic research, and I think others would agree with me,” he said and went on to declare that the NCN would draft a strategy that would allow a certain amount of the military budget to be slated for NCN calls related to these issues. The participants in the meeting also suggested that the NCN might organise calls for proposals devoted to, e.g. health and energy security. Minister Wieczorek welcomed the offer of the new strategy with interest and promised to discuss it with the Ministry of National Defence.

Council Members and the NCN Director also emphasised the need to increase the subsidies for the NCN and allow greater flexibility in how they are spent, which would enable the agency, e.g. to raise salaries. “One of the quality indicators that measure how well funding agencies around the world do their job is a good ratio of office costs to grants. The NCN ranks very high in this respect, which shows that our agency’s staff do a great job and should be supported in their work,” emphasised Prof. Tomasz Dietl from the NCN Council.

Prof. Krzysztof Jóźwiak pointed out that the agency’s costs represent less than 3% of the total worth of awarded grants, which is “an exceptional achievement.” “The truth is that people are the most important element of the system,” he said.

Council members also indicated that the NCN should appoint a new team to deal with ongoing cooperation between the agency and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. They said it would be important to create a space for regular meetings between NCN Council and NCN office members with delegates from the Ministry, not necessarily the Minister himself, but his specially appointed representatives. “We are planning to set up a team to deal with these matters at the operational level and take the necessary decisions,” the Minister reassured them.