Happy Holidays and best wishes for a wonderful New Year 2022!

For this new ERA-Net Cofund Urban Accessibility and Connectivity (EN-UAC) call, JPI Urban Europe network and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) will address the urban mobility, accessibility, and connectivity challenge in the Sino-European cooperation, with a focus on knowledge and impact. The sub-themes of the Call are Sustainable Urban Logistics and Individual Mobility.

This will be a two-step call, expected to be launched in January 2022, with a likely pre-proposal submission deadline in March 2022. Further details will be provided at the launch of the call.

For further detail please visit the JPI Urban Europe website.

Please note that this pre-announcement is for information purposes only. It does not create  any obligation for the JPI Urban Europe network, nor for any of the participating funding organizations. The official call announcement, to be published later, shall prevail.

PRELUDIUM is a call for proposals addressed at early-career researchers who are not PhD holders. In the last edition of the call closed in November 2021, almost 500 researchers from all over Poland received project funding of over 77 million PLN. The grant money will allow them to conduct a thorough investigation of various issues in many domains. 

List of winners

Activities recommended for funding included projects on women’s professional and social activity and women’s health.

Leaders with disabilities

Kamila Albin from the Institute of Applied Social Sciences of the University of Warsaw will analyse individual experiences of women with disabilities in her project “Activists, leaders (self)advocates. Activism experience in autobiographical stories of women with disabilities in Poland”. Kamila Albin will investigate the motives of their social engagement and views on obstacles to the activism of disabled people.

Disabled women are still subject to stereotypes, marginalisation and discrimination as helpless and dependent on others. They are excluded from many areas of life, such as civic and social activities, even motherhood. “For me, it is very important to include the viewpoint of disabled researchers in the academic discourse. In a way, every such action changes our thinking of disabilities and beats stereotypes” she says.

The aim of research is to help shape positive social attitudes towards women with disabilities and join in collaboration, while writing and disseminating stories of female activists with disabilities can inspire disabled women to actively shape the civic society. “Community engagement is often caused by the fact that disability is recognised as a part of one's identity. In my research, I would also like to find women whose social engagement is not related to their disability and is not its consequence” she says.

Women in the European Parliament  

Aleksandra Polak is yet another researcher to investigate women’s activism. She is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Social Sciences of the University of Warsaw specialising in political science and administration, and expert with the Team Europe network at the European Commission Representation in Poland in the project “Explaining Cross-National Differences in Women's Descriptive Representation in the European Parliament: a Comparative Study”.

The European Parliament is often regarded a gender balance promoter in Europe due to its support for women’s rights and rather equal number of female and male MPs. There is currently a record number of female MPs: 39.3%, while an average percentage of female MP’s in the EU Member States is 32.7%. “There are, however, significant differences between Member States, ranging from completely gender-balanced national representations from Denmark, Latvia, Luxembourg and Slovenia to only 15.2% of Romania MPs and none from Cyprus” says the Aleksandra Polak. 

The aim of the project is to explain the cause of such significant disproportions between Member States in terms of the percentage of women elected to the European Parliament, determine the role of national political parties in the election of women to the European Parliament and verify whether the views and position of the political party in a given country may impact gender balance in the Parliament. “Identifying the reasons for significant disproportions between Member States in terms of the percentage of women elected to the European Parliament seems crucial to effectively create the policy of gender equality in Europe” she says.

More effective breast cancer detection 

Jakub Chłędowski from the Faculty of Mathematics and Information Technologies of the Jagiellonian University will work on the classification and detection of 3D DBT volumes to aid radiologists in breast cancer screening under the PRELUDIUM call. 

Breast cancer is the main cause of cancer deaths in women, with a global mortality rate of 15.5% of all cancers in 2020. Mammography is the most common method of breast cancer detection, however it is not accurate and can increase the number of both false negative and false positive diagnoses. Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (DBT) is a three-dimensional equivalent of mammography that allows for more accurate imaging of lesions. “Conventional mammography is limited due to overlapping structures that may obscure suspicious lesions or make normal structures look suspicious. DBT uses multiple low-dose X-ray projections creating a three-dimensional image of the breast and prevents the structures from overlapping which may help overcome such limitations” says Jakub Chłędowski

This is the first type of research allowing multiple DBT surfaces to be combined and all types of tumour lesions to be seen across the tested area. “In my research, I will use the signal from DBT segmentation to improve the quality of classification. First, I will train a neural network that can locate tumours and then use the information from the hidden layers of the network to create a neural network to classify DBT” he says.

Research will be conducted in collaboration with researchers from the New York University. “This collaboration will allow me to be in touch with world-class radiologists and machine learning researchers”.

151 scientists from 41 countries applied in the POLONEZ BIS 1 call to conduct their research projects in host institutions across Poland.

The call attracted 40 (26%) proposals in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, 83 (55%) in Physical Sciences and Engineering, and 28 (19%) in Life Sciences. 48 million PLN (around €11 million) from the NCN and European Commission are available under this call to fund researchers’ mobility in all areas of science. 

The proposals will now undergo an eligibility check, after which they will be evaluated by independent international experts and reviewers. The results of the call will be known at the beginning of June 2022.   

We may be contacting the applicants during the eligibility check and at the end of each evaluation stage, so please check your mailboxes for messages from the NCN. 

If you have missed the first call, we encourage you to apply for POLONEZ BIS 2, scheduled to open on 15 March 2022. 

The POLONEZ BIS Coordination Team is at your disposal for any questions: do not hesitate to contact us at polonez@ncn.gov.pl

The National Science Centre and the Copernicus Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of the Jagiellonian University have organised a number of online lectures under the title „Science at the Centre” during which winners of 2020 and 2021 NCN Awards discussed their research work.

Prof. Yonatan Gutman, winner of the 2021 NCN Award in Physical Science and Engineering will discuss his work on 22 December 2021, at 6 p.m. His lecture is entitled “The reconstruction of a dynamical system based on observations: mathematical approach”.

Prof. Yonatan Gutman works at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Science. His area of expertise is the theory of dynamical systems, in particular topological and ergodic dynamics. He studied at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and Stanford University and earned his PhD at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, followed by a postdoctoral degree (habilitation) at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He has also completed numerous postdoctoral fellowships, including at Cambridge and Oxford.

The lecture will be in English with Polish subtitles.

The lecture will be streamed online on the YouTube channel of the Copernicus Centre where other lectures are also available, i.e. 

In English with Polish subtitles:

• Dr Sebastian Glatt (How our body translates mRNA into proteins?)  

In Polish:

• Dr hab. Michał Tomza, Jak wystresować kota Schrödingera? [Training Schrödinger’s cat]
• Prof. Wojciech Fendler, MikroRNA w radioterapii – nadzieje, rozczarowania, zastosowania [MicroRNA in radiotherapy: hopes, disappointments and application]
• Prof. Jakub Growiec, 300 tysięcy lat wzrostu gospodarczego [300 thousand years of economic growth]
• Dr Paweł Polkowski, Wyspa petroglifów: 10 lat badań w egipskiej oazie [Petroglyph Island: 10 years of research in the Egyptian oasis]

The results of the Weave-UNISONO call for research projects conducted by Polish and Austrian researchers are now published.

The National Science Centre supports international research collaboration which is why it is involved in the Weave-UNISONO call aimed to fund bilateral and trilateral research projects with Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Switzerland, Germany and soon with Luxembourg and Belgium-Flanders. As a result of NCN’s collaboration with the Austrian research-funding agency Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF) that has acted as the lead agency, 2 research teams from Poland will soon be able to start their research do to funding of their research with the Austrian partners totalling over 1.34 million PLN.

Under Weave-UNISONO, Dr hab. Piotr Tadeusz Borodulin-Nadzieja from the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Wrocław will collaborate with the Austrian research team for a period of 3 years. Over 388 thousand PLN was awarded to the project Analytic P-ideals, Banach spaces and measure algebras. Barnabas Artur Farkas from the Vienna University of Technology will be the principal investigator in the project.

Dr Piotr Jan Szewczak from the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw will conduct research in set-theoretic aspects of topological selections. Dr Lyubomyr Zdomskyy from the Institute of Mathematics at the Vienna University will be the principal investigator of the foreign partner. Over 955 thousand PLN was awarded to the project.

The first results of the Weave-UNISONO call were published together with the Swiss National Science Foundation on 27 September 2021 and the next results were published on 14 December together with Grantová agentura České republiky (GAČR) from the Czech Republic.

NCN proposals must be submitted electronically via the ZSUN/OSF submission system as soon as possible following the submission of the joint proposal to the ARRS, within 7 calendar days at the latest.

Please read the important information on the dates and application procedure in the Weave-UNISONO call and the updated call documentation.

The table below presents a preliminary timeline for calls operated by the National Science Centre in the year 2022.

The call timeline does not include multilateral calls launched by the international networks of research funding agencies, including the NCN, which are announced and pre-announced on the NCN website all year round according to the decisions of the participating agencies.

2022 call timeline

* calls schedule might be changed in the course of the year

Download the 2022 NCN Call Timeline

The JPI Urban Europe network has awarded funding to 16 new research projects within the EN-UTC Urban Transformation Capacities Call 2021 covering the call topics on:

• Urban circular economies;
• Community-based developments and urban innovation ecosystems;
• Robust and resilient urban infrastructure and built environment.

The total budget of awarded projects amounts to 16,8 M EUR, including 4,2 M EUR of European Union co-funding.

The following projects with Polish researchers were awarded within the EN-UTC Call 2021:

U-GARDEN: Promoting capacity building and knowledge for the extension of urban gardens in European cities. Polish Applicant: Group of entities - Warsaw University of Technology (Leader of the group of entities) in cooperation with the Warsaw University of Life Sciences (Member of the group of entities). Polish Principal Investigator: dr hab. inż. Maciej Kazimierz Lasocki. The project will involve research teams from Spain, Romania, and Sweden.

CREST: Climate resilient coastal urban infrastructures through digital twinning. Polish Applicant: Group of entities - National Institute for Spatial Policy and Housing (Leader of the group of entities) in cooperation with the Kołobrzeg Commune (Member of the group of entities) and INnCREASE Sp. z o.o. (Ltd.) (Member of the group of entities). Polish Principal Investigator: dr hab. Bogna Gawrońska-Nowak. The project will involve research teams from France and Norway.

CONTRA: Conflict in Transformations. Polish Applicant: Group of entities - University of Warsaw (Leader of the group of entities) in cooperation with the Municipality of Gdynia (Member of the group of entities) and IDEA Institute Ltd. (Member of the group of entities). Polish Principal Investigator: dr Joanna Monika Krukowska. The project will involve research teams from Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway.

City&Co: Older Adults Co-Creating a Sustainable Age-friendly City. Polish Applicant: Group of entities - Jagiellonian University in Cracow (Leader of the group of entities) in cooperation with the Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences (Member of the group of entities). Polish Principal Investigator: dr hab. Jolanta Małgorzata Perek - Białas. The project will involve research teams from  the Netherlands and Romania.

EmbedterLabs: Better Embedded Labs for More Synergistic Sustainable Urban Transformation Planning. Polish Applicant: Gdańsk University of Technology. Polish Principal Investigator: dr inż. Joanna Beata Bach - Głowińska. The project will involve research teams from the Netherlands and Sweden.

The aim of the JPI Urban Europe is to finance international, interdisciplinary research projects that respond to the challenges of modern cities and urban areas. The National Science Centre has been cooperating with the JPI Urban Europe network since 2015.  

The implementation of research projects funded within the EN-UTC Call 2021 will start in 2022. More information and the full list of projects recommended for funding can be found at JPI Urban Europe website.

The experimental system, photo by Freiburg University Scientists from the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw, headed by Dr hab. Michał Tomza, and an experimental team led by Professor Tobias Schaetz at the University of Freiburg, were the first to observe Feshbach resonances between a single ion and ultracold atoms. An article that presents their research results has just been published in “Nature” and even made it to the cover of the magazine.

Dr hab. Michał Tomza is a physicist and chemist specializing in the description of matter at ultralow temperatures, as well as the theory of interactions and collisions between ultracold atoms, ions and molecules. In 2020, he won the NCN Award in physical sciences and engineering for his theoretical description of such phenomena.

Funded under the NCN’s OPUS programme and entitled “Ultracold quantum mixtures of ions with atoms, molecules, and Rydberg atoms: novel hybrid systems and applications”, the research project published by “Nature” was carried out in 2017-2021 by a research team at the University of Warsaw, which also included Dariusz Wiater, a Phd candidate, Agata Wojciechowska, an MSc student, and Dr Krzysztof Jachymski, a member of the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, in cooperation with researchers from the German research centre.

Laboratory at the Faculty of Physics, photo by M. Kaźmierczak/Warsaw University

The microscale quantum world

The world around us has a quantum nature that we cannot see in our daily life. It does come to light, however, at very low temperatures, which allow phenomena such as superfluidity or superconductivity to manifest. A good example of quantum matter can be found in the form of ultracold atom gases cooled down to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Under such conditions, interactions between atoms can be controlled by means of electromagnetic fields, using Feshbach resonances. Magnetic Feshbach resonances significantly increase the frequency of collisions when molecular energy states are adjusted to the energy of colliding atoms. The scientists from the University of Freiburg and the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw were able, for the first time, to observe and explain such resonances between a single ion and ultracold atoms.

In the experiment, resonances were observed as an increase in the probability of ion loss due to interaction with atom pairs for specific values of the magnetic field. The scientists were also able to demonstrate an increase in the frequency of two-body collisions in the proximity of the resonance, which allows the ion to be cooled down effectively. Through a theoretical analysis, they were also able to determine previously unknown interaction parameters and predict the position of the resonances that were not initially detected by the experiment.

Blazing the trail for next-generation experiments

Ultracold ion-atom systems have a variety of potential applications such as quantum computations and simulations, but they require temperatures much lower than those of neutral atomic gases. Several experimental groups have spent years working toward this success, with the computational support of, e.g. the Warsaw physicists. The results blaze the trail for next-generation experiments, as it will now be much easier to control the quantum state of the ion. A lower energy and a longer lifetime allow new phenomena to be investigated and generate new and interesting quantum matter states which, on the one hand, will help us better understand the quantum nature of our world and, on the other, serve as another element of newly emerging quantum technologies. Ion-atom Feshbach resonances can soon be expected to be observed for other element combinations as well. Research group of M. Tomza, photo by P. Kulik

Previously, in tandem with an experimental group headed by Professor Rene Gerritsma at the University of Amsterdam, Dr Tomza’s group successfully cooled down a single ion immersed in an ultracold atomic gas to the quantum regime of ion-atom collisions and observed shape resonances. The results of that cooperation were published by “Nature Physics” last year and formed part of the research record that earned Dr Tomza the NCN Award.

NCN grants and project descriptions.

Acceptance speech during the NCN Award ceremony on 6 October 2021.

The research team (University of Warsaw).