The HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) Network is pleased to announce a new HERA Joint Research Programme (HERA JRP) on “Uses of the Past”. With up to €20 million available, the research programme will fund new and exciting humanities-centred projects involving researchers from four or more countries.Funding is available for research projects addressing the theme of “Uses of the Past” that involve at least four researchers from four different eligible countries. The application process will be in two stages.

The draft timetable for applications is:

• Outline Proposals to be submitted 9 April 2015, 19:00 Central European Time/18:00 Greenwich Mean Time
• Shortlisted applicants to submit Full Proposals in October 2015.

The following countries have committed to the HERA JRP on Uses of the Past:

Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom.

Funding is provided from HERA partners and The European Union is providing top-up funding via a COFUND grant to the HERA JRP UP initiative.

Before applying please read carefully the following documents:

• HERA UP Call for Proposals 2015 (PDF), including the detailed thematic text and the guidelines for applicants
• HERA UP General and National Eligibility Requirements 2015 (PDF) these must be adhered to in addition to the HERA requirements outlined in the call for proposals (UPDATED 19/01/2015)
• HERA UP Frequently Asked Questions 2015 (PDF)
• HERA UP Glossary 2015 (PDF)
• HERA UP Outline Proposal Template template 2015 (WORD)
• HERA UP Budget template 2015 (Excel)

For more information please see: http://heranet.info/hera-jrp-documents-1.

Polish applicants should also submit a short application via OSF system (UNISONO application).

Budget of the Polish part of the research project in the OSF system should be given in PLN. The Euro exchange rate should be calculated according to the NCN Council’s Resolutions no 7/2013 and 21/2014 (1 EUR= 4,2277 PLN). 

Contact

Dr hab. Wojciech Sowa, tel: +48 12 341 9171

Malwina Jabczuga-Gębalska, tel: +48 12 341 9017

The National Science Centre and Infect-ERA consortium invites researchers to a new edition of the call for international research projects.

The following themes are covered (equal in relevance):

• The host-pathogen interaction in regards to clinically relevant strains and the assessment of factors influencing this interplay.
• Diagnostics based on components of host-pathogen interaction, including development of markers for a clinical and personalized setting and detection of high risk clones in various diseases.

Proposals with topics HIV/AIDS, hepatitis B/C, malaria and tuberculosis are not in the scope of the call.

Research team: composed of research teams from at least 3, but no more than 6, countries participating in the call

Countries participating in the call:

• Belgium
• France
• Germany
• Hungary
• India
• Italy
• Israel
• Poland
• Portugal
• Romania
• Spain

Project duration: up to 3 years

NCN budget for the call: € 500 000

Timeframe:

Pre-proposal application deadline: 18th of March 2015 (17:00, CET)

Full proposals application deadline: 17th of July 2015 (17:00, CET)

Final results:  December 2015       

Proposals should be submitted via Infect-ERA submission system: https://www.submission-infect-era.eu/.

Polish applicants should also submit a short application via OSF system: www.osf.opi.org (UNISONO application). Deadline: 25^th March 2015.

Budget of the Polish part of the research project in the OSF system should be given in PLN. The Euro exchange rate should be calculated according to the NCN Council’s Resolutions no 7/2013 and 73/2014 (1 EUR= 4,1935 PLN). 

Call documents:

1. Infect-ERA Call 2015 Call Text 3rd Call
2. Infect-ERA Call 2015 Guidelines for Applicants
3. Infect-ERA Call 2015 PreProposal Example and Hints

For more information please click here: https://www.submission-infect-era.eu/3rd-call. 

Applicants are also invited to use a partnering tool (http://www.infect-era.eu/collaborations) in order to search partners for Infect-ERA projects. 

Contact:

Dr Magdalena Kowalczyk, +48 123419161

Sylwia Kostka, +48 123419018

Recently concluded OPUS 7, PRELUDIUM 7 & SONATA 7 calls contribute over € 67 million to basic research in Poland.

In response to the three calls, the NCN received over 5,000 proposals, of which 715 have qualified for funding.

OPUS continues to remain the most popular of the National Science Centre’s funding schemes. Its calls are open to all researchers, regardless of their research experience. The funding from the NCN may help finance different types of research activity: the purchase of equipment, employment of co-investigators, research expeditions etc. In the seventh edition of the OPUS calls, as many as 362 research projects across all three research domains (Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences & Engineering) received aggregate funding of over € 50 million.

Dedicated to early-stage researchers is the PRELUDIUM funding scheme. A person submitting a proposal under the PRELUDIUM call has to be a researcher before completion of their doctorate, therefore it is doctoral candidates who make up the majority of applicants. In the recent edition, funding worth ca. € 6 million was granted to 240 proposals.

In the third of the concluded calls, SONATA 7, proposals were sent in by researchers who had been holders of a doctoral degree for no longer than 5 years. Under this funding scheme grantees may purchase equipment that could be instrumental in developing a unique approach or method. This time funding was granted to 113 projects, with the total sum exceeding € 10 million.

Proposals are assessed by our Experts, in the course of a 2-stage peer review, with additional evaluation carried out by External Reviewers from abroad. We are happy to see the number of foreign reviews steadily increase. In the case of OPUS 7, PRELUDIUM 7 & SONATA 7, the second stage of evaluation had a considerable share of reviews made by Experts from abroad: nearly 50 per cent in Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, 94 per cent in Life Sciences, and 62 per cent in Physical Sciences and Engineering, said professor Andrzej Jajszczyk, director of the NCN.

Regarding distribution of the funding between research domains, Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences received ca. € 11 million, Life Sciences – over € 28 million, Physical Sciences - Engineering – over € 27 million.

Among the projects in Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, the largest portion of funding was awarded to Settlement History of Iraqi Kurdistan 2, led by dr hab. Rafał Koliński from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, a continuation to the research of the history and cultural heritage of the Aqrah-Bardarash plain, which started in 2012. The project, worth € 355,000, will be carried out under the OPUS scheme.

The largest grant in the domain of Life Sciences, amounting to ca. € 473,000, was awarded to the project on metabolic profiling of individuals with classic and genetic risk factors of coronary artery disease, led by doctor Tadeusz Osadnik. It will be carried out at the Silesian Centre for Heart Disease in Zabrze.

The top funding in Physical Sciences and Engineering was given to the project Intelligent Radiation Detector with Inter-pixel Communication and Time of Arrival Measurements for Implementation in Technologies of Extreme Scale of Integration. The Principal Investigator of the project, worth over € 350,000, is professor Grzegorz Deptuch from the AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow.

The full list of awardees can be found here (available only in Polish).

We are extremely happy to join in congratulating a team of doctors from Wroclaw Medical University. Thanks to the pioneering course of treatment they administered to a 40-year-old patient whose spinal cord had been severed, the man could resume walking with the help of orthopaedic equipment.

The therapy involved a method of implanting the patient’s ensheathing olfactory cells into the damaged area. The cells, normally responsible for the replenishment of frequently damaged and renewed olfactory neurons, stimulate the regeneration of the severed spinal cord; their particular properties were discovered and described by professor Geoffrey Raisman from University College London’s Institute of Neurology.

The research on the use of ensheathing olfactory cells in treating spinal cord injuries has been carried out by a team led by professor Włodzimierz Jarmundowicz in collaboration with professor Raisman. The research is co-financed by the NCN under its HARMONIA 3 funding scheme.

Paralysed man walks again after cell transplant - BBC News

The HERA (“Humanities in the European Research Area”) Network invites researchers to apply for the participation in the “Uses of the Past – Matchmaking Event” taking place in Tallinn on 29 January 2015.The aim of the Matchmaking Event is to present the Call for transnational humanities-led research proposals under the theme “Uses of the Past” to be formally announced in January 2015 and to facilitate the building of international research partnerships.

The deadline to register your interest in attending the Matchmaking Event is 5 November 2014, 14:00 CET (Central European Time).

For more information please click here: http://www.b2match.eu/hera-up-mme.

Contact

dr hab. Wojciech Sowa, tel: +48 12 341 9171

Malwina Jabczuga-Gębalska, tel: +48 12 341 9017

The National Science Centre and the CHIST-ERA consortium invite researchers to a new edition of the call for international research projects. Topics of the 2014 opportunity are: Resilient Trustworthy Cyber-Physical Systems (RTCPS) and Human Language Understanding: Grounding Language Learning (HLU).

The deadline for submitting applications is 13 January, 2015, 5 p.m. (CET).

It is also required that Polish applicants send in an initial application, along with attachments, by  20 January, 2015, using the OSF electronic submission system (www.osf.opi.org – please use the UNISONO form).

Funding:

Within this call the NCN Council has allocated 500 000 EUR for Polish research projects.

Call documentation:

1. CHIST-ERA Call 2014 Anouncement
2. CHIST-ERA Call 2014 Eligibility Requirements
3. CHIST-ERA Call 2014 Proposal Form
4. CHIST-ERA Call 2014 Financial Template
5. CHIST-ERA Call 2014 Leaflet

For detailed information please see: http://www.chistera.eu/call-2014-announcement

Applicants are also invited to use Partner Search Tool (http://www.chistera.eu/node/add/call-2014-eoi), in order to express interest either in joining a research project proposal or to search partner(s) for joining an existing proposal idea.

Contact:

dr Jakub Gadek, jakub.gadek@ncn.gov.pl, tel. +48 12 341 9152

Sylwia Kostka, sylwia.kostka@ncn.gov.pl, tel. +48 12 341 9018

Professors Janusz Bujnicki, Michał Horodecki and Marcin Miłkowski received the National Science Centre (NCN) 2014 Award. Each will receive PLN 50,000 in recognition of their excellent research achievements.

The NCN Award was founded as a form of special acknowledgement of scientific research by Polish researchers under 40. It is awarded to those who carry out basic research in Polish research centres which have resulted in publications. The Award is conferred by a jury that includes representatives of the National Science Centre and the sponsors’ representatives.

In the area of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, the Award was given to professor Marcin Miłkowski from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, for his original version of the computational theory of the mind, which he discusses in Explaining the computational mind, a book published by MIT Press.

For 14 years now, I have been compelled by science’s attempts to explain the operations of the human mind. In my book I seek to understand how  scientists who pursue the computational theory of the mind actually work. My point of departure was to describe the practice, said professor Miłkowski.

The Award in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences was sponsored by Meble Vox Sp. z o.o.

In the area of Life Sciences, the Award was conferred on professor Janusz Bujnicki from the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw. He was awarded for designing innovative bioinformatic methods for the research of RNA-protein complexes, and for determining the structure and mechanics of the human enzymes responsible for synthesis of RNA.

RNA molecules are extremely important both for medicine and biotechnology. Understanding their structure may contribute to the development of new drugs and new biotechnological tools. It is my dream as a scientist to make a major discovery or invent something that will benefit all humans, said professor Bujnicki.

The Award in Life Sciences was sponsored by Adamed Sp. z o.o.

In Physical Sciences and Engineering, the Award was given to professor Michał Horodecki from the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, University of Gdańsk, for his discovery of the quantum state of bound entanglement and for his investigations into the non-additiveness of quantum channels’ capacity.

What gives me most joy in my job is that it is about the basics of quantum mechanics, in fact the very basics of physics. Thanks to quantum cryptography, we can go about what scientists like best: trying to understand nature, said professor Horodecki.

The Award in Physical Sciences and Engineering was sponsored by EDF Polska S.A.

Present at the NCN Award gala in Kraków's Cloth Hall was Director of the NCN professor Andrzej Jajszczyk, Chair of the NCN Council professor Michał Karoński, and Mr Jacek Guliński, Under-secretary of State in the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

In a recent issue of Nature, the BOREXINO experiment team, including  prof. Marcin Wójcik, dr Marcin Misiaszek & dr Grzegorz Zuzel from Jagiellonian University’s Faculty of Physics, published an article reporting direct observations of neutrinos from the first step of the proton-proton fusion process in the Sun. Direct detection of pp neutrinos is confirmation of physicists’ main theoretical models describing the Sun and its energy origins. According to these models, almost 99 per cent of the power of the Sun is generated in its core by the proton-proton fusion process. The  fusion of two protons into deuteron is a prelude to a chain of reactions that transform hydrogen into helium. BOREXINO is one of the world’s most sensitive neutrino detectors with the unique capability of low energy neutrino registration in real time. It has been working since 2007 in the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy and has so far delivered information on almost the entire solar neutrino spectrum, as well as on geo-neutrinos (neutrinos produced in radioactive decays in the Earth). Presently the BOREXINO team is working on detection of neutrinos from the  carbo-nitrogen-oxygen (CNO) energy production cycle, which is of great interest for bigger stars (its contribution to the total energy production may be much more significant than in the Sun) The measurement of the CNO neutrino flux, even more challenging than the measurement of pp neutrinos, will also help to solve the Sun’s metallicity problem (an abundance of elements heavier than He).

Prof. Marcin Wójcik is a grant holder of the HARMONIA funding opportunity (supporting participation of the Polish team in BOREXINO),  dr Marcin Misiaszek has been granted funding within the SONATA BIS scheme, dr Grzegorz Zuzel is both a HARMONIA and SONATA BIS awardee.

Learn more about the project: http://borex.lngs.infn.it/

Nature

Scientific American

Astronomy

Spektrum

New Scientist

Physics World

This text was based on information found on the Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Applied Computer Science's website, Jagiellonian University.

The Call 2014 of CHIST-ERA, to be published in October 2014, targets research in the following topics:

1. Resilient Trustworthy Cyber-Physical Systems (RTCPS);
2. Human Language Understanding: Grounding Language Learning (HLU).

The details of the research targeted in the call have been defined by the research community during the CHIST-ERA Conference 2014 (http://conference2014.chistera.eu/) event, an event that was open to all interested researchers. The Call 2014 pre-announcement document below (see attached file) gives an overview of the research themes that have emerged during the conference (see pages 2 to 4).

Researchers are encouraged to start discussing possible projects with prospective partners. The call will require that projects are submitted by international consortia with partners in at least three of the following countries (additional partners from other countries may be part of a consortium if they can secure their own funding):

• Austria (topics to be confirmed)
• Belgium (FNRS & FWO)
• Canada (Québec)
• France
• Ireland
• Latvia
• Poland
• Romania
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Turkey
• United Kingdom (RTCPS topic only)

Please note that this pre-announcement is for information purposes only and does not create any obligation for the CHIST-ERA consortium nor for any of the participating funding agencies. No further information will be given until the call is published.

The National Science Centre has launched the 8^th edition of three of its most popular funding schemes. From 15 September until 15 December 2014, researchers may apply for grants under the following funding programmes:

1. OPUS 8, intended for a wide range of applicants, irrespective of their research experience (proposals submitted under this scheme may include the purchase or construction of research equipment);
2. PRELUDIUM 8, aimed at pre-doctoral researchers beginning their career in research;
3. SONATA 8, addressed to emerging researchers with a doctorate that has been held for a maximum of 5 years.

Please note that calls for proposals with results published after 31 December 2014 no longer admit applications from entities legally categorised as entrepreneurs.