Katharina Boguslawski, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska and Łukasz Opaliński are the three winners of the NCN Award, the highest distinction for early-stage researchers working in Poland. In 2023, the award will travel to Toruń, Warsaw, and Wrocław. The ceremony took place on 11 October at the Gallery of 19th-Century Polish Art in the Sukiennice.

Prof. Katharina Boguslawski is a quantum chemist working at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, and was selected as the winner in Physical Sciences and Engineering. Dr Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska, the winner in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, specialises in cultural studies, Czech studies and ethnology at the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Last but not least, the award for Life Sciences went to Prof. Łukasz Opaliński, a molecular biologist from the University of Wrocław.

The main criterion that guided the jury in the evaluation of the candidates and their achievements was their scientific excellence and international recognition. The award can be given to past and present NCN grant holders, but also to researchers who have never coordinated any NCN projects. This year, the jury chose from among 44 candidates nominated by the research community.

Checks for research

“Polish science is not yet lost so long as the NCN still lives”, said Prof. Zbigniew Błocki at the awards ceremony, “The NCN is an institution that gives early-stage researchers an opportunity to fast-track their careers and achieve research independence much earlier than would otherwise be possible in a reality that is not always auspicious and an environment that is highly hierarchical”, he added.

The acting director thanked all the researchers who have recently spoken out in defence of the NCN. “The existence of grant agencies that are completely independent of current politics and give the final say to researchers, rather than state officials, is a standard across the entire civilised world. Freedom is an absolute prerequisite for science.” Professor Błocki also commented on the situation of science in our country more generally: “We have observed dramatic cuts in research funding in proportion to what our country needs to continue to grow. And yet, year after year, the number of cheques publicly awarded for research funding and their figures continue to increase. This makes me think of a saying attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, which is not really his: that "democracy will endure until the day the politicians discover that they can bribe the public with the public's money”, the director added.

A small breakthrough

This year, the NCN Award was given out for the 11th time. Among the 30 researchers who won it between 2013 and 2022, 25 were men and only 5 were women. “The award has been very male dominated thus far. This year, we have achieved a breakthrough, but, for now, it’s still only a breakthrough with a lowercase ‘b’”, says Prof. Robert Hasterok. This is the first year we have seen two women and only one man collect the award.

During the ceremony, the President of the NCN Council explained that as of next year, the terms and conditions of the award will change so as to implement a more stringent equality policy in the academic community. The most important change will have to do with the maximum age of the nominees. Until now, it was the chronological age that mattered (up to 40); from now on, the jury will take into account the nominee’s academic age (up to 12 years post-PhD) and make allowances for possible career breaks. The group of individuals eligible to nominate candidates will also be expanded. These changes were already passed by the NCN Council in mid-November 2022, but the ministry took more than 9 months until it finally approved them at the end of August 2023, which is why they will only come into force next year.

Achievements that are seen and appreciated

“This award gives me a sense that my research and achievements are really seen and appreciated within the Polish research community”, says Prof. Katharina Boguslawski.

Katharina Boguslawski, fot. Andrzej Romański Prof. Boguslawski is a quantum chemist, whose research combines chemistry, physics, mathematics and applied computer science. She focuses on developing innovative computing methods to model the properties of large chemical molecules without the need for experiments.

She won the NCN Award for two achievements: building a simple and reliable quantum mechanical model of actinide compounds and using quantum information theory to develop innovative methods to study electron structures and track actinide chemical reactions.

When asked about the scientific challenges she has faced in recent months, she replies that she has finally reached a stage where all her efforts have borne fruit: “Together with my research group and collaborators, we built a new software platform from the ground up starting in 2015, incorporating all our theoretical models and tools. In recent months, we have reached the point where we can finally tackle larger problems with more efficient models and implementations. We are still in the early stages, but our initial results are auspicious”, she explains.

Prof. Boguslawski is a winner of the Dirac Medal and currently focuses on working on two grants:  ERC StG2022 and SONATA BIS NCN. “The NCN is an agency that has really invested in my research career and enabled my professional growth. Without the NCN, I wouldn’t be where I am now”, she says.

She returned to Poland in 2015 after 26 years abroad. She had graduated from a PhD programme at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich and went on to complete postdoctoral fellowships at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich and McMaster University in Canada. She currently works at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and is a member of the Polish Young Academy, PAS.

She has also been actively involved in initiatives aimed at levelling the playing field for men and women in science, such as, e.g., “Become a Researcher”, a campaign organised by the Polish Young Academy to encourage female school and university students to pursue research careers. 

A community award

Dr Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska specialises in memory studies, including the objects and cultures of the “Recovered Territories”. She looks at how areas previously inhabited by German and German-speaking communities were resettled in post-war Poland and Czechoslovakia. Her home institution is the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska, fot. Leszek Zych, Polityka She won the NCN Award for defining a new category of resettlement cultures in the research on post-displacement areas.

“I analyse whether, and if so, how, selected areas saw the emergence of new communities, which I refer to as ‘resettlement cultures’. I want to know what the new inhabitants did with things left behind by their predecessors”, she says. She has been looking for answers in archives, through participant observations and via interviews. “I treat the material relics of German cultures in Central Europe as ghosts that force one to interact with the continuing spectral presence of those who lived there before. This helps me understand the motivations of the new settlers and their actions”, she explains.

Ćwiek-Rogalska also won the ERC StG in 2021. She is currently working on an OPUS project funded by the NCN.

She says her research is about the “entanglement of time”, or the way in which the past continues to influence the present and the future. In her ERC project, she proposed a methodology based on hauntology, derived from the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. “Derrida shows that we are practically doomed to inherit; whether we want to or not, we always come after someone, we just exist after someone else, and our inheritance determines the shape of our future”, she adds.

Her study of resettlement cultures is part of a global debate now underway in memory and displacement studies. Ćwiek-Rogalska has completed fellowships at institutions such as Cambridge University, UCLA and Charles University in Prague.

She is also the winner of scholarships and fellowships of the Foundation for Polish Science, the former Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the Fulbright Foundation and the National Agency for Academic Exchange. Last year, she also won the Polityka Science Award.

She emphasises how much the NCN Award means to her. “First of all, it is an award that comes from the community; you cannot nominate yourself. For me to be here, someone had to name me as a candidate”, she says.

Therapeutic potential

Prof. Łukasz Opaliński from the University of Wrocław is a biotechnologist and molecular biologist. Together with an interdisciplinary research team, he looks into how healthy and cancerous cells transmit signals and transport macromolecules, and uses that data to design proteins with for potential use in therapies.

Łukasz Opaliński, fot. Dominika Hull-Bruska He won his NCN Award for his investigation of the multivalent interactions between fibroblast growth factor receptors and natural and designed ligands for applications in research and medicine.

“In our research, we are trying to understand how our cells use fibroblast growth factor receptors (FGFR), which are among the most important cell surface receptors, to communicate in health and illness. We study how FGFR are activated and how their spatial arrangement on the cell surface influences their function and endocytosis. Once we get all this data, we use it to design and produce proteins with strictly defined properties that recognise FGFR and could serve as high-performance drug carriers in targeted cancer therapies”, Opaliński explains.

He argues that molecular biology opens up great growth opportunities for early-stage researchers. “Early-stage researchers can now use the knowledge they acquire through basic research to create concrete applications and products that may change human lives and improve our environment”, he says. A great case in point here are the gene therapies that treat previously incurable diseases, highly effective targeted cancer therapies with minimal side effects, plastic-degrading microorganisms and the highly effective and quickly delivered Covid-19 vaccines.

Prof. Łukasz Opaliński earned his PhD at the University of Groningen and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Fribourg. He has coordinated three NCN projects and one First TEAM FNP grant. He is also a winner of programmes launched by the European Molecular Biology Organization, as well as a Prime Minister’s Award for significant research achievement and the scholarship of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education for outstanding young researchers.

2023 NCN Award winners: Katharina Boguslawski, Łukasz Opaliński, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska

The Navoica platform has launched open online courses (MOOCs) in research data management, commissioned by the National Science Centre and targeted at researchers who work with research data, as well as data stewards who support them. Visit the platform and check out the syllabuses!

The courses were designed within the framework of Poland’s participation in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). EOSC is an initiative that aims to develop a virtual environment where users can store, publish and reuse research data. It connects existing and developed infrastructures, services, tools and research resources from different disciplines into a broad network of data and platforms based on FAIR principles.

Two courses are targeted at researchers who work with research data on a daily basis. They are meant to impart a comprehensive understanding of data management and develop the skills necessary to put this knowledge into practice for effective data management in actual research projects. The courses are available at beginner and intermediate levels.

Data stewards who support researchers in data management will find two more dedicated courses on the platform. These will cover the most important tasks of data stewards and develop the necessary skills, as well as explore different ways to improve data management in projects and research institutions. Data stewardship courses are also available at beginner and intermediate levels.

The courses are free and offer a certificate of completion.

The courses were designed within the framework of a task commissioned to the National Science Centre by the Minister of Education and Science, focused on the domestic coordination of the European Open Science Cloud partnership in 2022-2023. The content was developed by experts from the Open Science Platform at the Interdisciplinary Center for Mathematical and Computational Modeling at the University of Warsaw.

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are online courses open to an unlimited number of participants, available via websites or online platforms. MOOCs rely on a variety of educational materials, including interactive tools.

A research team from Poland in tandem with Slovenian partners will perform international research on luminescent materials under the Weave Programme. The budget of the Polish part of the project is over PLN 1.5 mln.

A team headed by Dr Karolina Elżbieciak-Piecki from the Włodzimierz Trzebiatowski Institute of Low Temperature and Structure Research, Polish Academy of Sciences has been granted funding for its project “Novel materials based on lignin from biomass with enhanced luminescent activity”. Their research will focus on luminophores, i.e., a synthetic fluorescent substance. Luminophores are present in our daily live, for example in the lighting industry, image intensifiers, luminous paint, and X-ray machines. Their application is cost-efficient and environment friendly, therefore researchers have worked on new methods of their application and production for many years. The goal of the team headed by Dr Karolina Elżbieciak-Piecki is to develop a method for producing high-intensity carbon luminescent dots from lignin that will enable the development of efficient and low-cost luminophores with controlled emission properties. Research will be conducted in tandem with the Slovenian research team headed by Dr Jelena Papan Djaniš from the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana.

The project was recommended for funding following a merit-based evaluation by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARIS) in its capacity of the Lead Agency under the Weave Programme. The National Science Centre, a partner under the Weave Programme, has accepted the results of the evaluation and decided to award funding to the Polish research teams.

Ranking lists

Weave-UNISONO

The Weave-UNISONO call is the result of multilateral cooperation between research-funding agencies that make up 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 academic discipline.

The selection process is based on the Lead Agency Procedure (LAP), under which only one partner institution is responsible for merit-based evaluation 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 text and submit their funding proposals.

Two research components of Dr Olga Lenczewska and Dr Mariusz Kornatowski will be funded thanks to collaboration between the National Science Centre and the National Agency of Academic Exchange under the NAWA Polish Returns Programme.

Dr Olga Lenczewska will research the Enlightenment-era pedagogical reforms and arguments against the gendered conception of human progress in Poland and Germany. Lenczewska’s research component has received funding of nearly PLN 49,000 and will be developed at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw. PLN 200,000 will go to Dr Przemysław Kornatowski for his project on safe and low noise drones for urban applications.

Ranking lists

The purpose of the “NAWA Polish Returns 2022” program is to enable outstanding Polish researchers working abroad to return to Poland and conduct their research at Polish host institutions.

Proposals submitted to the NAWA can include a basic research component, which is funded by the National Science Centre. In this particular call, the NAWA peer review team selected 9 projects which meet this criterion. Before they can start working on their projects, the scientists first need to submit a funding application to the NCN. The application will only undergo a formal eligibility check.

The NCN accepts applications on a rolling basis from the moment NAWA decides to grant funding under the “Polish Returns NAWA 2022” scheme until the last proposal with the research component is submitted.

The NCN Council has set aside a total budget of 3 million zlotys for “Polish Returns NAWA 2022”. Ranking List No 5 is the final list of research components recommended for funding under the call.

“Science Europe wishes to express its protest against any politicisation of research funding and reiterate its unwavering support for the NCN”, reads a statement issued by the association of 41 institutions from 30 countries.

Science Europe published its statement in response to the upcoming changes in the status of the NCN, which had been announced by the Ministry of Education and Science and are supposed to apply in the autumn.

“In the run-up to the parliamentary elections in Poland on 15 October, Science Europe wishes to express its protest against any politicisation of research funding and reiterate its unwavering support for the National Science Centre. As a respected member of Science Europe, the NCN is of key importance to the Polish and European research and innovation ecosystem. It plays a crucial role in funding high-quality basic research among researchers at all career levels and promotes scientific excellence in the country”, the statement continues.

Science Europe is an association that sets the course of development for the entire European ecosystem of research and innovation. It brings together mostly state-funded institutions that enjoy full political independence and act as leaders in their respective domestic research systems. The member institutions together spend a total of 22.4 billion euro on research funding every year.

“In addition, Science Europe strongly opposes any action that may politicise research funding or encroach on research freedom and autonomy, which are the core values of our association, as well as of the entire European landscape of research and innovation”, the statement emphasises.

The statement was issued on 6 October and its full text can be found on the official website of Science Europe.

International cooperation is very important for Polish science and has been a cornerstone of the NCN’s mission since its founding. The NCN is a trusted partner of many foreign research-supporting institutions and an active member of Science Europe since 2012. Within this organisation, it has joined hands with many other European grant agencies to launch Weave, a programme based on the Lead Agency Procedure (LAP). NCN employees sit on working groups devoted to issues such as open science, international cooperation, the European Research Area (ERA), Horizon Europe, research culture, green and digital transformation and communication.

The winners of 2023 NCN Award will be announced on Wednesday, 11 October. This most prestigious distinction for early-stage researchers working in Poland will be awarded for the eleventh time. The ceremony will be streamed online.

The NCN Award is given to researchers under the age of 40 with a substantial record in the field of basic research, documented by publications affiliated with Polish research centres. The award is given in three groups of disciplines: Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (HS), Physical Sciences and Engineering (ST), and Life Sciences (NZ), and the main criterion in the selection process is scientific excellence and international recognition.

The award has been presented to 30 researchers since 2013, when it was conferred for the first time.

This year, the jury will select winners among 44 candidates. The winners will be announced at the award ceremony on 11 October held in the Gallery of 19th-Century Polish Art in Sukiennice (Branch of the Krakow National Museum).

The event will start at 6:30 p.m. and will be streamed online, on our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/ncngovpl) and on X/Twitter. 

The programme will feature speeches by the Acting Director and by the President of the NCN Council, a presentation of the profiles of the award winners and speeches by the award winners.

The event is supported by Nauka w Polsce and Forum Akademickie.

In November and December, the award winners will deliver lectures as part of the “Nauka w Centrum” [Science in the Centre] series organised jointly by the National Science Centre and the Copernicus Centre Foundation.

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Media support

Since one of the winners of POLONEZ BIS 1 and three winners of POLONEZ BIS 3 decided not to pursue their projects in the end, we will be able to fund projects currently on the waiting list. A positive funding decision has just been issued for two more projects in Art, Humanities and Social Sciences, and one each in Physical Sciences and Engineering, and Life Sciences. 

Dr Tom Whyman, qualified under POLONEZ BIS 1, will join the Jagiellonian University to explore the concept of human “natality” in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt in the context of climate action and the education of future generations in the spirit of climate change prevention. Among the three additional projects to be funded under POLONEZ BIS 3, Dr Cillian Ó Fathaigh (Jagiellonian University) will focus on the role of digital public space in the expression and recognition of injustice. Another researcher, Dr Leila Elyasi, will work at the M. Mossakowski Institute of Experimental and Clinical Medicine, PAS, studying the regenerative potential of baby teeth stem cells in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. Last but not least, Disha Disha will join the Institute of Physical Chemistry, PAS, to work on developing carbon dot heterostructures from biowaste and metal-organic skeletons to build a platform for printed biosensors.

Check out the supplementary POLONEZ BIS 1 and POLONEZ BIS 3 lists

POLONEZ BIS 1 and POLONEZ BIS 3 waiting lists were approved by expert teams and include projects that could not be funded due to the funding limits established by the NCN Council for projects under specific panels. The NCN issued negative funding decisions for such projects, with the caveat that they might be funded should another winner withdraw.

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“I was and I am still ready to step up as NCN Director”, says Prof. Krzysztof Jóźwiak from the Medical University of Lublin, who has been waiting for his appointment since February, in an interview published by “Forum Akademickie” on 2 October.

prof. Krzysztof Jóźwiak The NCN Council voted to submit the candidacy of Prof. Krzysztof Jóźwiak for the role of NCN Director to the Ministry of Education and Science more than seven months ago. The professor has been waiting for his appointment ever since.

“I don’t even know why my appointment has been delayed so much, nobody has told me”, the scientist says, “We were expecting it to happen according to the term schedule, in early March. The Ministry of Education and Sciences has never tried to contact me, neither then nor at any later time. I don’t understand the reason for this delay”, he adds.

The journalist, Mariusz Karwowski, also asked Jóźwiak about his opinion of our agency. “I believe the NCN is one of the greatest success stories in institutional science in Poland”, Professor Jóźwiak says, “Over the last ten odd years, we have been able to win renown and international recognition. For many people working abroad, the NCN is an argument that shows you can do quality science at Polish research centres, so it makes sense to come here to pursue your research career. I would even risk the statement that what the NCN has to offer can potentially reverse the direction of the brain drain. Of course, this is not yet a large-scale phenomenon, it’s not a great change, but most researchers have already observed these effects at their institutions. I definitely do see it at my own university. Thanks to the prospects offered by the NCN, we have a constant influx of “fresh blood” and the newcomers expect the system to continue to work in the current paradigm”, he says.

Full text of the interview in the online edition of “Forum Akademickie”:

CHIST-ERA has just announced the results of its Open & Re-usable Research Data & Software (ORD) call. Out of the nine winning projects, five include Polish researchers. Polish teams from Warsaw, Krakow and Wrocław will get a total of 3.5 million zlotys for projects related to open science.

Two projects from the list are headed by Polish researchers. Dr Robert Sot from the University of Warsaw will coordinate a project on FAIR standards (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) in long-term bird population studies, while Dr hab. inż. Tomasz Kajdanowicz from the Wrocław University of Technology will head a project on judicial data gathering and coding. The other three projects involving Polish partners will focus on open data in the context of physical sciences, social sciences and information sciences.

The following projects include Polish research teams:

• FAIRBiRDS: FAIR Bird Research Data and Software (FAIRBiRDS): closing the research lifecycle in the long tail of science – the project will be coordinated by Dr Robert Sot (international consortium leader) from the University of Warsaw and conducted by an international consortium including partners from Belgium, Brazil, France and the Netherlands.
• JuDDGES: Judicial Decision Data Gathering, Encoding and Sharing – the project will be coordinated by Dr hab. inż. Tomasz Kajdanowicz (international consortium leader) from the Wrocław University of Technology and conducted by an international consortium including partners from France and Great Britain.
• OpenMAPP: Open meta-analysis in particle physics – the project will include Dr hab. Andrzej Siódmok from the Jagiellonian University in an international consortium with partners from France (international consortium leader), South Korea, Turkey and Great Britain.
• OPENMIN: Consolidating Open Science and Data Initiatives on Ethnic and Migrant Minorities in Europe – the project will include Dr hab. Justyna Salamońska from the Koźmiński University in an international consortium with partners from France (international consortium leader), Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and Romania.
• SoFAIR: Making Software FAIR: A machine-assisted workflow for the research software lifecycle – the project will include Dr Tomasz Umerle from the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in an international consortium with partners from Great Britain (international consortium leader), France and the Czech Republic.

Full list of projects recommended for funding under CHIST-ERA ORD

The CHIST-ERA ORD call was open to international consortia made up of at least three research teams from at least three different participating countries. The PI of the Polish team had to have at least a PhD degree.

The purpose of CHISTERA is to support research on information and communication technologies. To date, the NETWORK has launched 13 international calls for proposals, with the next one being scheduled to start in October.

Scientists from Warsaw and Kraków will work on two international research projects funded by the NCN in cooperation with the SNSF, with a total budget of more than PLN 4.2 million. We are pleased to present the second ranking list of projects selected in this year’s Weave-UNISONO call.

Both scientists specialise in Life Sciences. Dr Marcin Tabaka from the International Eye Research Centre of the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences will work on a project focused on the spatial determinants of immunotherapy resistance in cancer. Thanks to important advancements in cancer research, immune-checkpoint therapy (ICI) has emerged as an important treatment modality for cancers that resist other available therapies.  Recent research, however, shows that only 13% of patients respond to immunotherapy and, what’s more, its mechanisms are not entirely understood. This problem will be tackled by Dr Tabaka and his team in partnership with a team from the University of Basel, led by Professor Alfred Zippelius. They will attempt to determine precisely how ICI works and why, in a majority of patients, it fails. To this end, they will conduct an interdisciplinary study, including a series of experiments to analyse the cellular and transcriptional changes associated with tumours infiltrating immune cells; in addition, they will develop computational tools to better understand the organisation of the tumour microenvironment. The Polish team in the four-year project will receive nearly PLN 1.85 million in funding.

The other winner in this year’s Weave-UNISONO call is Dr Tomasz Kościółek from the Małopolska Biotechnology Centre of the Jagiellonian University, who will study the human gut microbiome.  Scientists all over the world have long been researching the diversity of these gut-inhabiting organisms across space and time, trying to understand how variations in their populations relate to human health and behaviour. This research has uncovered more than 600 million protein-coding genes from nearly 5,000 prokaryotic species, but the function of around half of these genes remains unknown. Dr Kościółek, in partnership with researchers from the University of Basel, headed by Prof. Torsten Schwede, will study these genes and attempt to identify their role and function in the human body, using deep learning and large-scale evolutionary modelling. The researchers will create an atlas of human gut protein structures and functions, and a protein universe map to help scientists navigate this vast space. The Polish team will receive nearly PLN 2.4 million for their four-year project.

The projects were selected following an evaluation by the Swiss National Science Foundation in its capacity as the lead agency under the Weave program. The National Science Centre accepted the results and awarded grants to the Polish teams.

Weave-UNISONO

The Weave-UNISONO call is the result of multilateral cooperation between research-funding agencies that make up 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 academic discipline.

The selection process is based on the Lead Agency Procedure (LAP), under which only one partner institution is responsible for merit-based evaluation 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 text and submit their funding proposals.