In the second round of the international call for Polish-Chinese research proposals, funding was awarded to 18 projects. Applicants had vied for grants in the Life Sciences and selected disciplines of Physical Sciences and Engineering, as well as Social Sciences. The total budget slated for the Polish part of the research projects amounted to nearly 28 million PLN.

RANKING LIST

Cardiovascular disease is the main cause of death around the world. A large proportion of people who suffer heart attacks also develop heart failure due to other causes, such as atherosclerosis, hypertension, or various infections. At just 50%, the five-year survival rate of patients with heart failure is lower than for many cancers. These problems will be addressed by Professor Józef Dulak from the Jagiellonian University in a project entitled “Wzmocnienie naprawy serca po zawale za pomocą genetycznie ulepszonych kardiomiocytów i komórek śródbłonka uzyskanych z indukowanych pluripotencjalnych komórek macierzystych” [“Genetically-enhanced HiPSC-derived cardiomyocytes and endothelial cells for post-myocardial infarction cardiac repair”]. The findings of the project will pave the way for new, safe and effective heart failure treatments. The project was awarded nearly 2 million PLN in funding.

Food wastage and the accumulation of food waste have now become a global problem. At present, the world’s population (more than 7 billion people) produces c. 1.3 billion tons of food waste per year.  The annual household waste generated within the EU is estimated to be as high as 76 kg per person; the corresponding figure for China is much lower and stands at 16 kg. The main goal of Professor Jacek Mąkinia from the Gdańsk University of Technology is to study the fermentation of food waste aimed at high-added value products (carboxylic acids). The REVAMP project will allow the valorisation of different kinds of waste to be compared and contribute to a greater understanding of the food waste fermentation process targeted at the recovery of valuable products. Entitled “Odzysk wartościowych produktów z fermentacji odpadów spożywczych poprzez sonokawitację i intensyfikację hydrotermalną: porównanie efektywności, mechanizm regulacyjny i modelowanie (REVAMP)” [“Recovering valuable food waste fermentation products by sonic cavitation and hydrothermal intensification: a comparison of efficacy, regulation mechanism and modelling (REVAMP)”], the project received nearly 1 million PLN in funding.

Substance abuse and behavioural addictions, such as gaming addictions, are a growing problem today, not least in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr hab. Mateusz Gola from the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences will work in Poland and China to study the discrepancy between behavioural expectations and outcomes (PE – prediction error) in subjects with different forms of addiction. Dr hab. Gola received a grant of 2.2 million PLN for a project entitled “W stronę zintegrowanego modelu błędów predykcji nagrody w uzależnieniach od substancji i zachowań. Badanie EEG metodą potencjałów wywołanych”  [“Toward an integrated model of reward prediction errors in substance and behavioural addictions. An ERP/EEG study]. The team designed a sequence of 6 studies with more than 800 subjects in Poland and China, including individuals with a diagnosed alcohol, methamphetamine or gambling addiction. By carrying out measurements in two different countries, they will be able to analyse several theories on how people with addictions learn and predict future events or behaviours and, finally, assess the extent to which any potential discoveries may be generalised.

The international bilateral call for Polish-Chinese research projects, SHENG 2, organized by the National Science Centre in tandem with the National Natural Science Foundation of China relied on a parallel review procedure. This means that both agencies carried out parallel formal eligibility checks and merit-based assessments and funding was granted only to projects recommended both by the NCN and the NSFC. Because of the very high quality of submitted proposals, the ranking list only includes the projects selected as the best by both agencies.

The successful projects will be carried out in Poland and China and each will have two principal investigators, one in either country. The grant may go toward funding research team salaries, scholarships for students or PhD students, purchasing or manufacturing research equipment, and other necessary costs necessary to complete the Polish part of the research project.

To find out more about the call, go HERE.

We will shortly send out the decisions for all successful and unsuccessful projects under SHENG 2. Please remember that the decisions of the NCN Director are delivered to the applicant in electronic form to the electronic address indicated in the proposal.

If the applicant is an entity described in Article 27 (1)-(7) and (9) or the Act on the National Science Centre, the decision will only be delivered to the Electronic Inbox (ESP ePUAP) provided in the proposal.

The funding decisions of the NCN Director are also communicated to the principal investigator. If you do not receive a decision, please make sure that the address (ESP, ePUAP, e-mail) listed in your proposal is correct. If it is not, contact the person in charge of the proposal, as indicated in the ZSUN/OSF system.

We are pleased to announce that a new call for research projects within the ERA-NET JPIAMR-ACTION will be announced at the beginning of January 2022.

The call will focus on Disrupting drug Resistance Using Innovative Design and will support research into therapeutic interventions based on the improvement of the efficacy, specificity, delivery, combination and/or repurposing of drugs and plant protection agents to treat bacterial or fungal infections in One Health settings.

Seventeen countries are participating in this joint call to date. Estimated call budget is 16.7 million Euro.

The call opens on 11 January 2022.

For more information about the call, see the call webpage: www.jpiamr.eu/therapeutics-call-2022

“Quest for the Past: Politics of History in the ‘United Europe’ and Around (Actors, actions, Outcomes, end of the 1980s – 2020s)” is the subject of the fifth research component recommended for funding by the National Science Centre within the framework of its collaboration with the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA).

The research project will be performed by Dr hab. Georgiy Kasianov from the Department of History and Politics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kiev. Since September 2021, Dr hab. Georgiy Kasianov has been employed at the Institute of Political Science and Public Administration at the Maria Skłodowska-Curie University in Lublin under the NAWA Chair Programme.

The list of research components recommended for funding

The objective of the NAWA Chair Programme is to support scientific and research as well as teaching activity of Polish universities and other research institutions involved in high-quality research and education. The Programme facilities long-term collaboration with the world-class foreign scientists whose research is subsidised by the National Science Centre.

In the first edition of the NAWA Chair Programme, the NAWA evaluating team has selected five projects containing a research component. Funds were available for research in the area of Humanities, Social Sciences and Theological Sciences.

Find out more on the Programme

We have just announced the results of the OPUS 20 call for OPUS LAP projects to be carried out in cooperation with research teams from Germany. The funding was awarded to 30 projects with a total budget of more than 41.2 billion PLN and with topics ranging from cancer research to nanophysics and security.

Ranking lists.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed in women. Even though the number of associated deaths has decreased considerably in the last two decades, it still ranks as the second most frequent cause of death in this group. Dr Aleksandra Markiewicz from Gdansk Medical University will address that important issue. She will analyse samples of primary tumours (PT), circulating tumour cells (CTC) and circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) to identify the most important  information for forecasting susceptibility to drugs and personalizing treatments for patients at a high risk of relapse. The results of the project may pave the way for the development of innovative diagnostic methods to allow more effective breast cancer treatments. Entitled “Genomic profiling of circulating markers and paired primary tumours in breast cancer patients”, the project was awarded more than 1.1. million PLN in funding.

Smoke visibility models serve as key tools for fire safety engineering. Dr hab. inż. Wojciech Węgrzyński, professor at the Building Research Institute, will use his grant to carry out the NextVIS project. Instead of a simple relationship between smoke concentration and visibility, he will rely on a physical model of interactions between light and smoke particles to determine exactly what a given structure (evacuation sign, exit, obstacle) will look like to an evacuee. By simulating visibility conditions in this way, the project will be able to draw up “visibility maps” for any given building, clearly marking out individual spots where visibility is either good or bad, so as to create customized solutions, e.g. larger evacuation signs or different emergency lighting strategies. The model will be converted into a computer program (Visibility Prediction Framework, VPF) and published on an open-access platform, developed in Germany. It can be expected to find applications in innovative fire-safety engineering processes, such as VR fire modelling or human behaviour assessments under limited visibility conditions. Entitled “Visibility Prediction Methodology – new-generation smoke visibility modelling for buildings”, the project was awarded more than 1 million PLN in funding.

The OPUS scheme will also fund research in quantum mechanics. Dr Daniel Wigger from Wrocław University of Technology is all set to carry out a project entitled “Quantum acoustics using semiconducting quantum dots”, with a budget of more than 1 million PLN. Nanomaterials are also of interest to Dr Silvio Osella from the Centre for New Technologies of the University of Warsaw, whose project aims to develop highly efficient and stable hybrid structures to harvest sunlight and convert it into another form of light or clean energy. Entitled LOW-LIGHT, the project was awarded 1.25 million PLN. Some of the successful projects also deal with climate. Dr hab. Anna Małgorzata Ronikier from the Władysław Szafer Institute of Botany of the Polish Academy of Sciences received more than 1 million PLN in funding for a project entitled “Mountain ecosystems under global warming: studying the impact of snow cover parameters on soil microorganisms using the example of nivicolous myxomycetes”.

Leading agency procedure – LAP

The OPUS 20 + LAP call at the NCN finished on 20 May 2021, having attracted 2122 proposals with a total budget of more than 2.3 billion PLN (including 227 OPUS LAP projects). It was open to projects conducted without foreign partners, but also bi- and trilateral projects carried out within the framework of a LAP cooperation or with other foreign partners, as well as those that required the use of large international research equipment. The call is open to researchers at all levels of seniority. The LAP procedure is a new standard for proposal review employed by European research-funding agencies, designed to make it easier for international research teams to access funding for joint projects and streamline the proposal review process at research-funding institutions.

Funding decisions

Today, we will dispatch all positive and negative decisions for calls submitted under OPUS 20 within the framework of bilateral cooperation with the German Research Foundation (DFG). Please remember that the decisions of the NCN Director are sent electronically to the address indicated in the proposal.

If the applicant is an entity mentioned in Article 27 (1)-(7) and (9) of the Act on the National Science Centre, the decision will only be delivered to the Electronic Delivery Box (ESP ePUAP) provided in the proposal. If the applicant is a natural person and has listed an ePUAP address in the proposal, the decision will be sent to that address. Otherwise, a message will be sent to the applicant’s e-mail address with a link from which the decision of the NCN Director can be downloaded.

The funding decisions of the Director of the National Science Centre are also communicated to the principal investigator and, if the applicant is a natural person, to the host institution indicated in the proposal.

If you do not receive a decision, please make sure that the address (ESP, ePUAP, e-mail) listed in your proposal is correct. If not, contact the person in charge of the proposal, as indicated in the ZSUN/OSF system.

The JPND network – Joint Programming Initiative in Neurodegenerative Diseases – has awarded funding to 14 new research projects covering the call topic on Linking pre-diagnosis disturbances of physiological systems to Neurodegenerative Diseases.

The total budget of awarded projects amounts to 15,5 M EUR.

Projects with Polish researchers awarded within the JPND Call 2021:

premodiALS: A premotor disease signature for ALS. Polish applicant: Maj Institute of Pharmacology Polish Academy of Sciences. Polish Principal Investigator: dr inż. Wojciech Kuban. The project will involve research teams from Germany, France, Israel, Sweden and Switzerland.

PreSSAD: Presymptomatic synaptic disorders in Alzheimer’s disease. Polish applicant: Mossakowski Medical Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences. Polish Principal Investigator: dr Michalina Maria Wężyk. The project will involve research teams from France, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

The implementation of research projects funded within the call will start early 2022.

More information and the full list of projects recommended for funding can be found at JPND website.

Who can apply for the POLONEZ BIS fellowship? Is there any conflict in applying for POLONEZ BIS and other funding programmes at the same time? Can the NCN provide help in finding a host institution?

We will answer these and many other questions during the Q&A webinar for researchers interested in applying in the first POLONEZ BIS call.

The event will take place on 26 October (Tuesday) at 1:00 pm (CEST). The webinar will be held in English via the Clickmeeting platform.

Prior to the webinar we are kindly asking you to get familiar with the POLONEZ BIS 1 call documentation.

In order to take part in the webinar, you have to register here.

The webinar will be available on YouTube after the event. To learn more about the POLONEZ BIS programme visit its official website.

The CHIST-ERA Call 2021, to be published by the end of October or beginning of November 2021, will target research in the following topics:

1. Nano-Opto-Electro-Mechanical Systems (NOEMS) for ICT,
2. Foundations for Misbehaviour Detection and Mitigation Strategies in Online Social Networks and Media.

The project consortia must have a minimum of 3 eligible and independent partners requesting funding in at least 3 different countries participating it the call. The national eligibility criteria will be defined by each participating funding agency.

Further details of the coming call, including the list of countries and funding organisations which have shown preliminary interest in participating in the Call 2021, as well as topics description and call timeline can be found at CHIST-ERA website. 

Please note that this pre-announcement is for information purposes only. It does not create any obligation for the CHIST-ERA consortium, nor for any of the participating funding organisations. The official call announcement, to be published later, shall prevail.

Various norms define our social behaviour and determine the way in which we are expected to act in any given situation. The rules that govern the behaviour of men and women have differed widely since times immemorial, and even though nowadays such attitudes are changing, traditional (and often oppressive) divisions are still deeply entrenched, still going strong.

This issue has attracted the attention of Dr hab. Iga Magda. The scholar will analyse the relationship of said norms with decisions concerning the participation of men and women in childcare and the labour market. Together with her team, she will look at different households to see whose beliefs about male and female roles prevail in decisions concerning parental leave and women’s professional activities. She will also examine the situations in which men and women take actions consistent with the norms that they openly declare, and those in which their actions contradict them. Importantly, the project will be set in a comparative perspective, so as to test whether contradictions between declared beliefs and actions are greater in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe than in the Western part of the continent. Entitled Social norms and the situation of men and women in the labour market, the project was awarded more than 460,000 PLN in funding.

An important aspect of society has to do with the issues of tolerance. Dr Aleksandra Świderska will look into the basic characteristics of hate speech and its impact on listeners. Her team proposes to create an audio database of hate speech to study its acoustic, linguistic and paralinguistic properties. Dr Świderska expects that, when presented in the form of a recording, hate speech will elicit stronger emotional reactions; it will thus be more difficult to get used to than its textual equivalents. She plans to examine the psychophysiological and behavioural activity of research subjects (e.g. skin, heart and brain activity) in reaction to various modifications in content, presentation method and response options. Entitled Hate speech: from automatic classification to an understanding of the emotional dynamics, the project received a total grant of more than 437,000 PLN.

The subject of tolerance will also be addressed by Dr hab. Maciej Ptaszyński within the framework of a project entitled Explaining tolerance: conceptions, texts and intermediaries between Poland and Protestant Germany (1645-1795). The scholar will ponder the phenomenon of religious tolerance in a historical context. Tolerance is lauded today as one of the greatest achievements of the modern era. Research thus far has understood it either as an idea developed by intellectual elites or as a practice of co-existence followed by the acolytes of various religions and denominations living in a single territory. The project aims to propose a new understanding of the phenomenon; it will look at tolerance as an outcome of the politics and broadly conceived diplomatic relations between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Brandenburg-Prussia in the 17th and 18th centuries. Prof. Ptaszyński’s team proposes to study the evolution of the concept and the features of a “tolerant state”, the ways in which a state projects an image of tolerance and promotes it in the public sphere, as well as the social and political consequences of being known as a tolerant state. The project was awarded a budget of nearly 489,000 PLN.

The fourth edition of BEETHOVEN CLASSIC qualified 15 researchers to receive funding for projects in the field of the arts, humanities and social sciences.

BEETHOVEN CLASSIC 4 ranking list

BEETHOVEN CLASSIC 4 is a scheme open to projects in arts, humanities and social sciences carried out by Polish-German research teams. It continues the BEETHOVEN CLASSIC 3 call, relying on cooperation with the German agency Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). It is based on a joint procedure, whereby the two partner agencies have performed a joint merit-based review of research proposals to select the successful projects together.

The grant can go towards funding research team salaries and scholarships for students and PhD candidates, purchasing or generating research equipment, as well as other costs related to the Polish part of the project.

This was the last edition of the BEETHOVEN call. Starting in 2021, BEETHOVEN will be replaced with Weave, a scheme targeted at Polish-German research projects in all disciplines of science.

Today, we will dispatch all positive and negative decisions for calls submitted under BEETHOVEN CLASSIC 4. Please remember that the decisions of the NCN Director are sent electronically to the address indicated in the proposal.

If the applicant is an entity mentioned in art. 27 (1)-(7) and (9) of the Act on the NCN, the decision will only be delivered to the Electronic Inbox (ESP ePUAP) provided in the proposal.

The funding decisions of the Director of the National Science Centre are also communicated to the principal investigator.

If you do not receive a decision, please make sure that the address (ESP, ePUAP, e-mail) listed in your proposal is correct. If not, contact the person in charge of the proposal, as indicated in the ZSUN/OSF system.

Before long, 130 more researchers from research centres throughout Poland will embark on their preliminary research, pilot studies, library research, research fellowships and study trips thanks to the funding awarded by the NCN under the MINIATURA 5 scheme. The total budget of all newly selected research activities stands at nearly 5 million PLN.

Some of the qualified projects will tackle women’s themes, e.g. the images of femininity in masculinised work environments on the example of female professionals in selected uniformed services (police, prison service and border guard). Others will look into medicine and study, e.g. the impact of vitamin D on the action of molecular-targeted drugs in the human melanoma model, or tackle the social repercussions of COVID-19, e.g. professional burnout and job commitment among nurses in the final phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. A complete list of subjects addressed by all the qualified research activities is included with the ranking list.

Funding awarded under individual panels:

• arts, humanities and social sciences: 39 activities with a total budget of 919,889 PLN
• physical sciences and engineering: 45 activities with a total budget of 1,731,116 PLN
• life sciences: 46 activities with a total budget of 2,185,628 PLN

Ranking list

About MINIATURA

The objective of the MINIATURA call is to finance individual research activities conducted for the purposes of preparing a future research project to be submitted under an NCN call or other domestic and international calls for proposals. The fifth edition offered grants from 5,000 to 50,000 PLN for research activities lasting up to 12 months. The call was open to researchers who earned their PhD no earlier than on 1 January 2009, have never conducted an NCN-funded research project, and whose scientific achievements include at least one published paper or at least one artistic achievement or achievement in research in art. The total budget of MINIATURA 5 was 22 million PLN; proposals were accepted until the end of September. They are assessed by experts within 4 months from submission and new ranking lists of qualified projects are published every month.

Decisions

Today, we will dispatch positive and negative decisions for calls submitted under MINIATURA 5 in July. Please remember that the decisions are sent electronically to the ESP ePUAP address indicated in the proposal. If you do not receive a decision, please make sure that the ESP address listed in your proposal is correct. If not, contact the person in charge of the proposal, as indicated in the ZSUN/OSF system.

In the last decade, new challenges have come up in medical diagnostics, environmental monitoring and materials processing, which require the use of high-class specialized equipment.

Scientists who do research in medicine or work with a variety of materials today employ the incredibly useful femtosecond (1 fs equals 10-15 s) laser sources. Lasers of this kind allow scientists to uncover new and surprising ways in which atoms and molecules interact and shed light even on those that have been difficult to study thus far because of their fast motion (the sensitivity of the human eye is around 0.4-0.7 µm, while the range used in diagnostics and materials excitation is found at 2-6 µm, i.e. in the mid-infrared range).

Developing a new, faster diagnostic technique using mid-infrared waves is the task set before research teams from Poland and Austria, headed by Prof. Dr hab. inż Ryszard Robert Buczyński from the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Warsaw, within the framework of a CEUS-UNISONO grant. The winner was recommended by the Austrian FWF agency.

The purpose of the project is to employ this new and relatively inexpensive form of light in materials science and engineering and, prospectively, in the life sciences and medical diagnostics (instead of X-ray or magnetic resonance systems).

The 2021 CEUS-UNISONO call is now closed. Altogether, it attracted 78 proposals, 15 out of which, with a total budget of nearly 16.5 million PLN, were recommended for funding. The success rate was 19%.

The CEUS programme is organized by the NCN based on the Lead Agency Procedure (LAP) in cooperation with research-funding agencies from several countries, such as Austria (FWF), Slovenia (ARRS) and the Czech Republic (GAČR). Its purpose is to fund basic research projects in all disciplines of science, carried out by research teams from two or three CEUS-participating countries. More details about the CEUS-UNISONO call can be found here.

CEUS-UNISONO ranking lists