The National Science Centre (NCN), in collaboration with the European Biodiversity Partnership (Biodiversa+), has launched a new call for international research projects on biodiversity and transformative change (BiodivTransform and Transformative Change).

Projects must focus on comprehending the compromises and links between the worldwide crises of biodiversity loss, climate change, and pollution. The call embedded in the “Supporting societal transformation for the sustainable use and management of biodiversity” programme aims to comprehend transformation process that may halt and reverse biodiversity decline. 

Funding may be requested by international consortia comprising at least 3 research teams from at least 3 countries participating in the call. The principal investigator of the Polish team must be at least a PhD holder.

Countries participating in the call: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Brazil, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tunisia, Turkey and Faroe Islands.

Submission deadline for pre-proposals is 8 November 2024, 3 p.m. and for full-proposals, 11 April 2025, 3 p.m. The principal investigator of the Polish research team is required to draft an NCN proposal for the Polish part of the project in the OSF submission system.

The call results will be published at the end of September 2025.

Please, read the call text and call documents on the website of the Biodiversa+ Partnership and on the NCN website.

“The draft (state) budget is clearly inconsistent with public statements that the NCN funding must be increased,” the NCN Council noted in its Resolution of 5 September. The Council members emphasize that consistent increase in NCN funding is indispensable to ensure stable development of research in Poland.

According to the draft Budget Act 2025 adopted by the Council of Ministers on 28 August 2024, the NCN will be awarded PLN 1.648 billion for its operations next year which is almost the same as its current funding. This year, with the additional PLN 200 million awarded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in spring, the NCN was awarded PLN 1.643 billing.

“The draft budget is clearly inconsistent with public statements that the NCN funding must be increased,” the NCN Council members provided in their Resolution of 5 September. 

Therefore, they have called for “modification of the state budget and increase in NCN funding for research by another PLN 300 million and by PLN 2 million for NCN staff salaries from 2025 onwards,” and provided that “this should stabilize our financial situation and enable support for the best quality research in Poland.”

It was also provided that if the NCN funding was not adequately increased, the “NCN Council, following consultation with the NCN Director, might consider suspension of MINIATURA and SONATINA calls and discontinuance of the next POLONEZ call co-funded by the European Commission. Furthermore, the NCN Council might consider reduction of the number of OPUS calls to one a year and MAESTRO calls to one every two years.”

In its Resolution, the Council also pointed out that salary of the NCN staff members is not commensurate with their competences and market situation. It was emphasised that “the NCN employs highly qualified staff, and many jobs require a PhD. It is difficult to recruit new employees and retain existing ones with the current average salary at the NCN being lower than the Krakow average by 25%.”

Please note that our webinars on Open Access Policy and Data Management Plans will be held on different dates:

• Webinar of 17 September 2024 will be held on 3 October 2024 and
• Webinar of 18 September 2024 will be held on 4 October 2024. 

The webinars will be held in English and their times will remain the same.

In addition, on 2 October 2024, between 10 a.m. and noon, a webinar on Open Access Policy will be held in Polish.

We are sorry for any inconveniences this change could bring about. The new dates will allow us to better tailor the webinars to the current state of the art and circumstances, hence ensuring better OA and Data Management support.

Should you have any questions or queries, please contact our Open Access Team

Show number

Webinar links will be provided two weeks in advance on our website (https://ncn.gov.pl/) and in the training calendar.

Dr Piotr Alexandrowicz, a legal historian at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and Dr Łukasz Bola from the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences have joined the ranks of ERC Starting Grant winners. They are also involved in NCN-funded projects.

ERC Starting Grants are available for projects of up to 5 years by post-docs who earned their PhD 2-7 years before the call. They are awarded to research projects that are risky but potentially groundbreaking.

Brain plasticity in the blind Dr Łukasz Bola

Dr Łukasz Bola from the Institute of Psychology, PAS, won this year’s ERC grant for a project entitled BLINDBRAIN, focused on brain plasticity in people who are blind from birth. “A large part of the human brain is genetically hardwired to perform tasks related to vision. In my research, I aim to determine what the same areas do in people who are blind from birth and thus do not use their visual cortex in the same way as those with intact vision. This helps me understand how the human brain adapts to new challenges”, the researcher explains.

In recent years, neuroimaging studies on blind subjects have shown that the visual areas of their brain are activated in response to linguistic stimuli, such as words and sentences. The new ERC grant winner seeks to discover the mechanisms behind this activation. “When a blind person hears the word ‘apple’, for example, does their visual cortex produce a relatively simple, spatial representation of a small and round object? If so, this would suggest that these brain areas do retain some of their typical functions, such as the ability to assess object shape and size, even in the blind. But another possible scenario is that the activation we are seeing in these brain areas has to do with representations of more abstract knowledge, such as the fact that apples do not grow in Antarctica or that the word is a noun. This would be an indication that in the blind, visual areas may be responsible for completely different tasks than in people with intact vision. This would revolutionise our understanding of the plasticity of the human brain”, the scientist says.

Dr Bola has authored several dozen publications in leading international journals and completed research fellowships at the University of Glasgow and Harvard University.

Studying paratexts

Dr Piotr Alexandrowicz Dr Piotr Alexandrowicz won ERC funding for a project entitled PetrIUS: “Petryfikacja ius commune poprzez drukowane parateksty” [The petrification of ius commune through printed paratexts]. The goal of the project is to examine the history and function of printed marginalia in the most important old legal prints. Collections of Roman and canonical law were published in print in a format that imitated the format of manuscripts: the normative text was placed in the centre of the page, while the margins featured glosses, explanations, legal cases or summaries. These “paratexts” in the margins of printed legal books have not yet been thoroughly analysed. Their analysis can bring important insights into the relationship between legal scholars and printers, as well as about the application of the law, legal interpretation and legal education in the early modern period. These paratexts can also be analysed as tools of legal communication. “We are planning to rely on natural language processing tools, for instance, to quickly and effectively compare thousands of paratexts, track their evolution and look for references to them in contemporaneous legal literature”, the researcher explains.

Piotr Alexandrowicz works at the Faculty of Law and Administration of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. He has published papers on the reception of Roman law in medieval canonical law, early modern comparative law and the legal summaries in the Decretals of Gregory IX.

Previous NCN experience

Both researchers have previously won multiple awards and distinctions. Dr Piotr Alexandrowicz has worked as a PI under three NCN projects. “These projects helped me take the bold step into the international community of legal historians, establish useful contacts and effectively disseminate the results of my research. It is thanks to the NCN that I could and still can continue my post-doctoral research. Since 2020, I have been employed in projects full-time; I have no idea what or where I would be doing if it wasn’t for the NCN”, says Alexandrowicz.

Thanks to the support he got from the National Science Centre and the National Agency for Academic Exchange, Dr Łukasz Bola was able to return to Poland after a stint at Harvard University. He has completed three NCN projects. In his own words, prior experience in domestic calls proved “incredibly helpful” when applying for the ERC grant. “An original research idea is the most important, but so is the credibility of the applicant”, he says, and adds that institutional support is also something that matters. He lists examples such as mentoring initiatives offered by the NCPs of EU Research Programs, as well as mock panels and consultations with experts organised by the Scientific Excellence Office at the PAS.

The National Science Centre will support the Medical Research Agency (MRA) in their calls for basic research projects in medical and health sciences. An agreement to this effect was signed in Krakow, on 4 September 2024 by the directors of the two agencies. prof. Krzysztof Jóźwiak, prof. Wojciech Fendler

The Medical Research Agency (MRA) is a state agency responsible for the development of scientific research in the field of medical and health sciences. The MRA funds research and development in medical and health sciences as well as interdisciplinary projects selected in the calls for proposals, in particular clinical, observation and epidemiological studies and research experiments. The agency has been in business for 5 years.  

Since its formation, the National Science Centre has awarded nearly 30 thousand grants for a total of nearly PLN 16 billion. The NCN funds research in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Life Sciences and Physical Sciences and Engineering. 

In its next calls for basic research projects, the Medical Research Agency will use the expertise of the National Science Centre. Pursuant to the agreement of 4 September, NCN officers will support the MRA by advising on the calls and running training courses on proposal evaluation procedure, and will recommend candidates for external reviewers to evaluate proposals.

“As a representative of a group of researchers combining basic and clinical research, I believe that the agreement is very important for the development of biomedical sciences. I hope our cooperation will support researchers combining practical and theoretical approaches,” says Prof. Anetta Undas, President of the NCN Council.

The prof. Wojciech Fendler, prof. Anetta Undas, prof. Krzysztof Jóźwiak first results of cooperation will be revealed in the call for translational research in December 2024. “The NCN supports quality research. This experience will ensure unique support for the MRA. We can only hope that the December call will enable the best research teams to translate their discoveries from bench to bedside,” says Prof. Wojciech Fendler, President of the Medical Research Agency.

“There is only one science,” declares Prof. Krzysztof Jóźwiak, NCN Director, adding that “the agreement may be a prelude to closer cooperation between the two institutions.” “Both agencies support researchers. The NCN supports researchers in all research fields and the MRA, clinical doctors. We hope that the agreement will result in the calls on translational medicine which is of interest to both agencies,” says the NCN Director. 

Scientists from the Jagiellonian University have just won an IMPRESS-U research grant for a project looking into the properties of nuclear forces, which will be conducted in cooperation with researchers from the US and Ukraine. The budget for the Polish team is more than 800,000 zlotys.

International Multilateral Partnerships for Resilient Education and Science System in Ukraine (IMPRESS-U) is a programme that allows Polish scientists to fund their research cooperation with partners in Ukraine and the US, as well as, optionally, in the Baltic countries, i.e. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

The goal of the IMPRESS-U scheme is to support excellence in science and engineering, education and innovation through international collaboration, and to promote and catalyse integration of Ukrainian researchers in the global research community. The program was initiated by the National Science Foundation (NSF), a US government agency that funds research and educational programmes.

IMPRESS-U follows a lead agency formula, which means that a joint proposal, drawn up by all the project partners, must be submitted to the NSF, where it undergoes a merit-based evaluation alongside all other proposals filed under the agency’s EAGER funding mechanism. Partner agencies (including the NCN) then award funding to their national teams based on NSF recommendations.

The call is open to 24-month projects headed by principal investigators with at least a PhD degree.

Nuclear interactions in focus

The ninth IMPRESS-U grant funded by the NCN will go to a research team headed by Prof. Jacek Golak from the M. Smoluchowski Institute of Physics at the Jagiellonian University. Their project, entitled “Prądy dwuciałowe w rozpraszaniu elektronów i neutrin na tarczach kilkunukleonowych” /”Two-body currents in electron and neutrino scattering on few-nucleon targets”/, will receive more than 800 thousand zlotys in the next two years.

Prof. Jacek Golak, fot. archiwum prywatne Prof. Golak and his team at the Department of Theory of Nuclear Systems have studied the properties of the forces acting between the constituents of atomic nuclei, protons and neutrons, and other subatomic particles. These forces are responsible for the existence of atomic nuclei as we know them and determine the mechanisms of nuclear reactions and radioactive decay processes, including those crucial to nuclear power or cancer radiation therapy.

“What it means in practice is that we are building a whole sequence of computer software programs that take a given mathematical model of nuclear interactions and perform calculations that can be compared with the results of experiments carried out around the world. This comparison allows us to assess the quality of our theoretical model and further enhance it to ultimately improve our understanding of the phenomena inside atomic nuclei”, explains Prof. Jacek Golak.

In their IMPRESS-U project, the Polish team will collaborate with an US team, led by Prof. Wayne Polyzou from the University of Iowa, and a Ukrainian team, headed by Prof. Oleksandr Shebeko from the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology.

“We decided to submit a project under the IMPRESS-U scheme together with all our partners. We had known each other before, we had worked and published together, and we had met at international conferences; both professors had also visited us in Kraków. We really liked the formula of IMPRESS-U and the call provided an incentive for us to accelerate and cement our cooperation. An important aspect that also mattered to us was that we could use our project to support science and the academic community in Ukraine, which has been involved in a long, devastating war”, Prof. Golak adds.

The Polish, US and Ukrainian scientists will work together to explore the mechanisms of interaction at play between electrons and neutrinos and atomic nuclei. They will primarily focus on investigating and using relativistic interactions and associated nuclear currents (including two-nucleon currents) to scatter electrons and neutrinos off few-nucleon targets.

The US partner of the IMPRESS-U project is a recognised expert in relativistic quantum mechanics, while its Ukrainian partners are experienced in constructing nucleon-nucleon interaction models. The project will be supported by an external expert, Prof. Hiroyuki Kamada from the Japanese Research Center for Nuclear Physics (RCNP) in Osaka, who performs calculations related to relativistic nuclear interactions.

The role of the Polish team will be to bring all these elements together and perform calculations related to electron and neutrino scattering off the lightest atomic nuclei. They will be putting the greatest emphasis on so-called two-nucleon currents, closely associated with the properties of nucleon-nucleon interactions. The scientists from the Jagiellonian University are very experienced in building relativistic nucleon-nucleon potentials, using polarized particles to analyse neutron properties, and studying the physics of few-nucleon systems. The mentor of the group and its member, Prof. Henryk Witała, has worked with these research problems since the 1980s; his achievements have earned him this year’s Faddeev Medal, an award established in 2016 by the Topical Group on Few-Body Systems & Multiparticle Dynamics (GFB) of the American Physical Society and the European Research Committee on Few-Body Problems in Physics.

The main product of this IMPRESS-U project will be a new model of nuclear interactions.

“We are hoping that our calculations will lay the groundwork for future experiments and experimental data analysis. The project will also be an important formative experience for our younger colleagues”, Prof. Golak emphasised.

This year’s Award will have new rules and a new venue. As always, it will be presented to the best early-stage researchers, whose names will be announced on 9 October. 

The NCN Award is the most prestigious distinction for early-stage researchers working at Polish research institutions. It is given in three groups of disciplines: Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (HS), Physical Sciences and Engineering (ST), and Life Sciences (NZ). The Award has been presented to 33 researchers since 2013, when it was conferred for the first time.

As of this year, the Award will be conferred on the new rules. The nominees will still be required to have significant research achievements evidenced by publications affiliated with Polish research institutions. The most significant modification concerns the age of potential nominees. Metrical age applied so far (candidates could not have been over 40 years of age) will be replaced by academic age (up to 12 years from the date of PhD award). The applicable period can be extended by career breaks owing to childcare or illness.

Former winners included 26 men and only 7 women. The amended terms account for the change in the research model, career breaks for family or health reasons or economic situation of researchers often forcing them to delay their research career.

Presentation of nominees and selection of winning candidates 

Nominees are selected by the Chapter composed of the NCN Director and NCN Council members. They will be presented by former winners of the NCN Award, members of the Expert Team from Poland evaluating proposals submitted to OPUS, SONATA, SONATA BIS and MAESTRO, principal investigators of projects funded under MAESTRO and SONATA BIS, as well as former NCN Council members and other eminent researchers.

Award ceremony

The winners will be announced on 9 October. This year for the first time, the Award ceremony will be held at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology. So far, the ceremony has always been held at the Gallery of 19th-Century Polish Art in Sukiennice, except for the first time, when the awards were presented during the NCN Days in Silesia. The event will be streamed online.

The rules and profiles of former winners are available on our website under NCN Award.

In November and December, the NCN Award winners will deliver lectures on the Copernicus channel, in a programme launched by the NCN and the Copernicus Centre.

Media coverage:

95 researchers will have their research activities funded under MINIATURA 8. The fourth ranking list for proposals submitted in May is now available.

Under MINIATURA 8, researchers with a PhD degree who work for Polish research institutions could apply for funding of 5 to 50 thousand zlotys for their preliminary/ pilot studies, library and archive searchers, fellowships, research visits and/ or consultations.

25 winning applicants selected by the experts will perform their research activities in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Funding was awarded to projects involving, above all, sociology, socio-economic geography and town planning. Dr Joanna Popławska from the Warsaw School of Economics will perform pilot studies to analyse urban conversion of post-industrial areas for residential usage in Poland following Poland’s accession to the European Union in 2004. Dr Agata Trębacz-Ritter from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań will develop a research tool to assess phonological skills in pupils with speech sound disorder in the course of her research and fellowship.

In Physical Sciences and Engineering, 31 researchers were awarded. They will conduct, inter alia, research activities on material engineering and earth science. Dr inż. Mateusz Ilba from the Krakow University of Economics will perform preliminary research on machine learning used to discover architectural sites. Dr inż. Maria Ratajczak from the Poznań University of Technology will analyse the use of FTIR mapping to assess the compatibility of SBS-modified asphalt.

In Life Sciences, funding was awarded to 39 researchers to study, inter alia, cell biology and neurobiology as well as diseases of civilization and E&S risks to animals and people. Dr Kamila Soboska from the University of Lodz will develop an in vitro research model to analyse the effects of ketosis on the formation of new blood vessels within a tumour, while Dr Monika Michalak from the Jan Kochanowski University of Kielce will examine whether or not plant extracts promote wound healing by activating the MAPK and Akt signalling pathways. 

Research activities recommended for funding on MINIATURA 8 ranking list No 4

Ranking list No 4 in pdf format.

Funding per panel: 

• Art, Humanities and Social Sciences: 669,534 zlotys
• Physical Sciences and Engineering: 1,265,926 zlotys
• Life Sciences: 1,834,286 zlotys

MINIATURA 8

MINIATURA aims to support research activities for the purposes of future research projects the funding for which may be requested under NCN calls or other national or international calls. Under MINIATURA 8, 5,000 – 50,000 zlotys is up for grabs for research activities performed over a period of up to 12 months. 

The total budget for this call edition is 20 million zlotys divided in proportion to the number of months of the call for proposal. Proposals can only be eligible for funding if they fit into the pool of available funds for the month. 

Funding of preliminary/ pilot studies, library and archive searchers, fellowships, research visits and/ or consultations may be requested by researchers who have been conferred their PhD degree after 1 January 2012 and have never been principal investigators in NCN-funded projects. Their scientific achievements must include at least one paper published or at least one artistic achievement or achievement in research in art. They must not be the winning applicants of an ETIUDA call for doctoral scholarships or a call for NCN-funded fellowships, or applicants, principal investigators or fellowship candidates under proposals submitted to or recommended for funding under any other NCN call.

Service of Decisions

On 22 August 2024, positive and negative decisions for proposals submitted to MINIATURA in May 2024 were served on the applicants. Grounds for the decisions are available in the OSF submission system where the status of proposals can also be checked.

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.

We are pleased to present the results of the OPUS 26+LAP/Weave call for researchers at any stage of their research career who may request funding for their bilateral and trilateral research projects carried out in international collaboration under the Weave programme. The project was approved by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), having been evaluated and recommended for funding by the NCN experts. Nearly PLN 1.4 million will be awarded to Polish scientists for their project performed in bilateral cooperation with researchers from Luxembourg.

The team headed by Dr Andrzej Mizera from the research and development centre IDEAS NCBR, in collaboration with the team from Luxembourg, will develop a computational framework for the identification of effective and efficacious strategies for cellular reprogramming, which is a process in which one mature, specialised cell type is changed into another. It has a therapeutic potential for the most complex diseases by providing means of creating new cells to replace those whose death or damage causes disease symptoms, or by guiding cells from ‘unhealthy’ to the desired ‘healthy’ states. The research will advance the state-of-the-art in the field of cellular reprogramming. The project has been awarded funding in Physical Sciences and Engineering.

OPUS and OPUS LAP results

The National Science Centre received 1,737 proposals for a total of nearly PLN 2.6 billion under OPUS 26+LAP/Weave. In the first round, funding was awarded to 267 researchers whose projects, with a total budget of PLN 441 million, excluded international collaboration under the Weave programme. In July, funding under the Weave programme was awarded to another 29 international research projects with a total value of over PLN 42.34 million, of which 28 were performed in bilateral cooperation with researchers from Austria, Belgium (Flanders), Czechia and Switzerland and 1 in trilateral cooperation with researchers from Poland, Belgium (Flanders) and Switzerland. Today, the project recommended for funding by the research agency from Luxemburg was announced. LAP proposals performed in collaboration with Slovenian and German partners and recommended for funding by the NCN experts under OPUS 26+LAP/Weave, are yet to be approved.

Lead Agency Procedure

The Lead Agency Procedure (LAP) is a new proposal review standard adopted by European research-funding institutions, designed to make it easier for international research teams to seek funding for joint research projects, as well as to streamline the process of proposal review by research-funding institutions. LAP proposals submitted to the NCN undergo a comprehensive merit-based evaluation pursuant to the terms and criteria of the OPUS call. The academic and research career of principal investigators and completion of other research projects by the principal investigators are also reviewed, as well as balanced and complementary contribution in the research project by all research teams.

Foreign research teams apply for parallel funding of their projects to their relevant research-funding agencies under the Weave programme, however, according to the Lead Agency Procedure they no longer need to undergo a merit-based evaluation, but the result of review performed by the NCN experts must be approved by all partner agencies. 

The winning project will be funded by the National Science Centre as regards research performed by the Polish researchers and by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) in the part performed by the research team from Luxemburg.

In the new episode of the NCN podcast, professors Artur Obłuski and Piotr Sankowski, who have won grants from the European Research Council (ERC) and the National Science Centre, talk about their experiences in preparing research proposals and discuss the importance of perseverance in their quest for funding.

Artur Obłuski is an archaeologist at the helm of the Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw; he has led excavations, e.g. in Old Dongola in what is now Sudan. Piotr Sankowski is the mastermind and the first president of an AI research centre known as IDEAS NCBR. He received the NCN Award in recognition of his foundational research in the field of graph algorithms. He is also the only Polish researcher to have won four ERC grants.

“Behind any proposal, there needs to be an idea, a question that you want to answer. This is what science is all about: it’s about asking questions”, says Artur Obłuski. Piotr Sankowski explains that preparing a successful research proposal is a process. “Before we applied to the ERC, we had submitted many proposals to the NCN, to the EU; some made the cut, some did not, and this is how we learned to write them really well”, he says. “It is part of the job description for a researcher to know how to write grant proposals; we just have to learn it, it’s part of our job”, he adds.

A competitive procedure

Between 2011 and 2023, nearly 56 thousand researchers submitted grant proposals to the NCN. We funded nearly 30 thousand projects, with more than 21 thousand winners, i.e. more than 21 thousand people who were able to pursue their research plans as PIs thanks to NCN funding (and that’s not counting all the research team members in their grants!).

The selection procedure at the NCN is very competitive. Most of those who ultimately win a grant have previously walked away empty-handed. People who have worked on more than one project and never failed to win a grant represent just two percent of all applicants. After an initial failure, some researchers never try again.

A consistent research record

In the NCN podcast, Artur Obłuski and Piotr Sankowski share their personal experience in applying for funding and encourage others to never give up. “I started writing proposals and applying for jobs when I was at the University of Chicago and wanted to stay there or someplace else in the US a little longer. I sent out around 20 job applications, maybe more, and failed to get any of those jobs. But I think the idea is to never give up...If you’re confident you have a good research programme, just keep going”, says Artur Obłuski.

Both our guests admit that, today, they make short work of writing proposals but before they do, they take several months to get prepared. “Building a consistent research record, asking questions that fall within the wide spectrum of interest of other researchers or research programmes around the world: this is something I think a lot about before I begin writing a proposal”, stresses Piotr Sankowski. Artur Obłuski adds that consultations with colleagues in the field are equally important. “Today, archaeology is such a complex discipline that you cannot keep track of everything that goes on in every nook and cranny of this atomised field. We use the methods of physics (archaeometry) but also history. We need to be able to read ancient and medieval texts. And then there’s archaeobotany, which means we need to know about plants that once grew in this or that region. It is simply impossible for one person to hold it all in their head, so we have to ask our colleagues”, he says.

The same tone continues throughout our interview. Our guests point out that consulting proposals submitted to, e.g. the ERC with other experienced researchers is now the standard at many Western universities. “In Poland, a colleague will often hesitate to show their proposal for fear I might steal their research idea. I’ve never seen that happen in the West; on the contrary, researchers want to share their work, because a colleague who comes in with a slightly different perspective can really help them a lot with their proposal”, says Piotr Sankowski.

You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast or YouTube.