We announce the  ALPHORN call for Polish-Swiss research projects to be carried out in cooperation with the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). PLN 7,000,000 has been allocated to finance research.

ALPHORN is a bilateral international call addressed at Polish research teams that apply jointly with Swiss research teams for funding of research projects. The principal investigator at the Polish research team must be at least a PhD holder; the funds acquired under the call may be designated for remuneration for the research team and scholarships for students and PhD students. The call may also provide funding for purchase or manufacturing of research equipment and for other costs relevant to the research projects. Research projects may last for a period of either 24 or 36 months. Proposals may be submitted to the call covering basic research in any of 25 NCN panels within the three core areas: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences; Physical Sciences and Engineering; and Life Sciences.

“Each year we expand our range of international calls, including those organised in bilateral cooperation. This year, besides calls for Polish-German, Polish-Lithuanian or Polish-Chinese projects, we now offer the opportunity to carry out research jointly with Swiss partners, says Prof. Zbigniew Błocki, NCN Director. “We want Polish researchers to be able to share their scientific ideas with researchers from other countries and thus to expand their scientific horizons”.

The ALPHORN call is held in compliance with the Lead Agency Procedure (LAP). The LAP is aimed at improving and accelerating the review of proposals in calls organised jointly with foreign partners. It provides that in each edition of the call, proposals are subject to merit-based evaluation carried out by one partner agency according to the rules thereof. In the ALPHORN call, the SNSF acts as the Lead Agency.

Proposals are submitted to two electronic submission systems: mySNSF for joint proposals submitted to the SNSF by Swiss research teams and ZSUN/OSF for NCN proposals (to which joint proposals are attached) submitted to the NCN by Polish research teams. Joint proposals must be submitted by 1 October 2019 while NCN proposals must be submitted by 8 October 2019. The results will be announced at the end of June 2020.

In September 2019 the BiodivERsA Network will announce a BiodivClim Call for proposals entitled „Biodiversity and climate change”, covering the following topics:

• Consequences of climate change on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people
• Climate-biodiversity feedback processes
• Potential of nature-based solutions for mitigating and adapting to climate change
• Synergies and trade-offs between policies on biodiversity, climate and other relevant sectors, and the role of agents of change

Researchers are encouraged to start discussing possible projects with prospective partners. The call will require that projects are submitted by international consortia with partners in at least 3 countries (the list of countries which have shown preliminary interest in participating in the Call is provided in the pre-announcement). The national/regional eligibility criteria will be defined by each participating funding agency.

The anticipated deadline for pre-proposals is 5^th of November 2019 and 10^th of April 2020 for full proposals. The projects will be selected in the late 2020.

For details please see the website, where a Partner Search Tool is available.

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

Contact:

• Dr Anna Wiktor, tel. 12 341 9166
• Joanna Komperda, tel. 698 780 352

We have the pleasure of inviting you to an information meeting devoted to the GRIEG and IdeaLab calls announced by the National Science Centre on 17 June 2019. The meeting will be held at 11am on Monday, 8 July, at the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences at ul. Sławkowska 17 in Kraków. It will take around 4 hours, including two 1.5h sessions devoted to both calls, a coffee break in-between and a lunch at the end of the meeting.

Moderated by the staff of the EEA and Norway Grants Team, the meeting will impart general information on the premises and objectives of the Research Programme, as well as more detailed guidelines for potential applicants and partners in the Polish-Norwegian GRIEG call. A part devoted to the IdeaLab call will present an innovative formula for the workshop, designed to help drawing up joint research projects that address the topic of “Managing Threats”, and to provide information on the stages of the call procedure (selection of workshop participants, 5-day workshop and submission of the full proposal via OSF).

Due to organisational reasons, the number of places is limited. We reserve the right to select participants in a way that ensures the representation of institutions from various academic centres. Participation in the information meeting is free of charge. The National Science Centre shall not reimburse the costs of accommodation and travel to and from the meeting.

The deadline for application is 3 July 2019. To sign up, please fill in the application form. Please keep in mind that submitting an application does not mean that your participation is confirmed. Selected applicants will be notified of their acceptance and receive all practical information by e-mail. Should you have any queries, please contact us at norway.grants@ncn.gov.pl.

The NCN is the operator of the Basic Research Programme for which 40% of the funds is allocated out of more than EUR 129 million slated for the support of Polish science. The Research Programme’s budget is funded in 85% from donors (EUR 100 million from the Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2014-2021 and EUR 10 million from the EEA Financial Mechanism 2014-2021), while the remaining 15% is funded from the Polish state budget. The GRIEG and IdeaLab calls have a total budget of EUR 41,774,118.

We are proud to announce five new calls, including two (GRIEG and IdeaLab) funded from the EEA and Norway Grants. In addition, we have launched: MAESTRO 11, SONATA BIS 9 and UWERTURA 4. In total, 161 million PLN and nearly 42 million euro are up for grabs for researchers involved in basic research projects.

GRIEG and IdeaLab calls are funded under the third edition of EEA and Norway Grants 2014-2021 within the framework of the "Research" programme, in which the NCN serves as the coordinator in charge of basic research. With an allocated budget of more than 129 million euro, the programme is designed to support Polish science and intensify cooperation between research, business and society. 40% of available resources are slated for basic research projects within the framework of calls such as GRIEG and IdeaLab.

"Ever since its inception, the National Science Centre has striven to boost the quality and competitive edge of Polish research. As the operator of the programme in charge of basic research, we can do even more to internationalize it further and make research projects more effective", says Professor Zbigniew Błocki, NCN Director. "The new calls in our portfolio open up new opportunities for Polish researchers, e.g. to work within Polish-Norwegian research teams and take part in innovative workshops designed to support the elaboration of ground-breaking research ideas" Professor Błocki adds.

GRIEG call is open to joint Polish-Norwegian research projects in any discipline (as specified by NCN panels), with a special emphasis on polar research and social science. Projects must be conducted by Polish-Norwegian research teams including at least one Polish partner, who serves as the leader of the consortium, and one Norwegian partner. The role of principal investigator may be taken on by researchers employed by a Polish research institution, who hold at least a PhD degree. The Norwegian part of the research team must be headed by a research institution. The consortium may comprise research institutions, enterprises and NGOs and proposed projects may last 24 or 36 months.

The GRIEG call is financed under the Norway Grants, i.e. the resources of the Norwegian Funding Mechanism 2014-2021, and has an allocated budget of more than 37 million euro. The funding requested for the entire implementation period of the Polish-Norwegian project must fall within the 0.5-1.5 million euro bracket. The grant may go toward funding research team salaries and scholarships, purchasing equipment, materials and services, covering travel costs and conferences, as well as other project-related expenses.

"The original idea behind the GRIEG programme was to promote research-based knowledge, strengthen Polish-Norwegian research cooperation, boost the quality of publications, especially in the humanities, support the growth of young researchers, and shape a positive perception of research in society", says Professor Małgorzata Kossowska, Chairwoman of the NCN Council.

IdeaLab is a call for joint research projects carried out by research teams comprising at least one Polish partner, who serves as the leader of the consortium, and at least one partner from Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein. The role of principal investigator may be taken on by researchers who hold at least a PhD degree and are employed by a Polish research organization. The consortium may comprise research institutions, public institutions, entrepreneurs and NGOs. The call will be held in accordance with the "sandpit" process conceived by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and employed by the Research Council of Norway under the name of Idélab. The core component of the call is a workshop during which participants from various research institutes, NGOs and other public or private institutions are asked to tackle the challenges facing contemporary societies. The innovative workshop formula promotes the creation of ground-breaking, interdisciplinary and innovative research project ideas.

"The theme of the IdeaLab call has been laid out by the "Research" Programme Committee in cooperation with experts from the NCN Council. Entitled "Managing Threats", it is designed to address the current and future social challenges posed by complex social, economic and environmental processes, such as globalization, demographic change and migration, the lack of geopolitical stability, technological progress, climate change and the environment", explains Professor Kossowska.

The IdeaLab call is funded under the EEA scheme, i.e. from the resources of the EEA Mechanism 2014-2021, and has an allocated budget of nearly 4.5 million euro. The funding requested for the entire project implementation period must fall within the 0.5-1.5 million euro bracket. The grant may go toward funding research team salaries and scholarships, purchasing equipment, materials and services, covering travel costs and conferences, as well as other project-related expenses. The project may last 24 or 36 months.

As usual in June, we are also announcing the MAESTRO and SONATA BIS calls. The former is targeted at experienced researchers involved in pioneering, often interdisciplinary, research projects important for the development of science, which go well beyond the current state of knowledge. The role of principal investigator may be taken on by a person who holds at least a PhD degree, can demonstrate a minimum of 5 publications in renowned Polish or international academic press/ journals over the past 10 years, and has coordinated at least two research projects within the framework of national or international calls. The 11^th edition of the MAESTRO call boasts a budget of 40 million PLN. The SONATA BIS call, on the other hand, is targeted at researchers who have earned their PhD degrees 5 to 12 years before the proposal submission year and aims to create a new research team. The researcher who submits the proposal is required to demonstrate 1-10 research publications over the last 10 years; the 1-3 most important need to be attached to the proposal. Importantly, apart from the principal investigator, the research team may not include any members with an academic title, title of professor, habilitation degree or equivalent degree or title, or researchers who have already collaborated with one another on a research project funded under a previous call. The ninth edition of SONATA BIS has a budget of 120 million PLN.

UWERTURA 4 aims to support researchers in their successful application for prestigious grants awarded by the European Research Council (ERC). Working in an international research team is an excellent opportunity to acquire valuable experience. Under the UWERTURA call, researchers who apply for fellowships in foreign research teams carrying out ERC grants must hold at least a PhD degree and demonstrate experience in managing their own research projects within the framework of a call or winning prestigious scholarships. Fellowships may last from 1 to 6 months. Within 24 months from the signing of the funding agreement, the researcher must apply as the principal investigator for an ERC grant to be carried out at a Polish host institution. This year's edition of the UWERTURA call has a budget of 1 million PLN.

Proposals are accepted via the ZSUN/OSF electronic submission system. The deadline for submission under the MAESTRO, SONATA BIS and UWERTURA calls is 17 September 2019, under the GRIEG call - 28 October, the results will be announced by March 2020. Proposals for the IDEALAB call may be submitted until 19 August, and the results will be announced in January 2020.

Pilot studies, library and archive searches and conferences are but some of the research activities that can be carried out under the MINIATURA call. The third edition of the so-called "small grants", aimed at enabling researchers to take their first steps in the grant system, has just been launched.

The call is targeted at PhD holders who plan to seek funding for future research projects under other NCN calls, as well as other national and international calls. Experience gained while carrying out a minor task may make it easier to apply for other forms of funding later on. The call is open to researchers who have earned their PhD degrees within 12 years before the proposal submission year, and who have never coordinated and do not currently coordinate any NCN-funded research projects. Project duration must not exceed 12 months, and its budget must fall between 5,000 and 50,000 PLN. The total budget for the third edition of the MINIATURA call equals 20 million PLN.

The procedure of MINIATURA differs from that of other calls in the NCN portfolio. Proposals will be accepted on an ongoing basis via the electronic ZSUN/OSF system from 17 June to 30 September 2019. However, the call may be closed early if the total budget of the submitted proposals exceeds twice the total budget of the funding scheme. For this reason, it is worth submitting the proposal at an earlier date. The review process is simplified and includes only one stage, which means that the results will be known as early as four months from submission. Research implementation is also faster: the general conditions of the agreement are already included in the proposal, which means that the tasks can be undertaken immediately once the funding decision has come into force.

Detailed conditions can be found here (in Polish only).

On 7 June, in Warsaw at the Ministry of Investment and Economic Development, an agreement was signed covering the “Research” Programme under the third edition of the Norway and EEA Grants in which the NCN acts as the operator responsible for basic research, while the National Centre for Research and Development (NCBR) is responsible for the implementation of applied research.

The agreement was signed by Minister Jerzy Kwieciński and Olav Myklebust, Ambassador of the Kingdom of Norway to Poland. The signing ceremony was also attended by Professor Zbigniew Błocki, NCN Director, Wojciech Kamieniecki, acting Director of NCBR and Eivind Hovden, Director of the International Department of the Research Council of Norway representing the donors. The agreement was signed in the presence of Małgorzata Jarosińska-Jedynak, Deputy Minister and Juliusz Szymczak-Gałkowski, Director of the International Cooperation Department at the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

The aim of the “Research” Programme, which has an allocation of over EUR 129m, is to support Polish science, make it international and intensify cooperation between science, business, and the public. 40% of the funds is to support basic research within three calls: GRIEG for joint Polish-Norwegian research projects in all research domains; IDEALAB for innovative, ground-breaking research projects in the pre-defined subject “Managing Threats”; and the POLS mobility call to be distributed in the form of small grants aimed at researchers coming to Poland, who wish to carry out research in Polish research institutions and enterprises.

Director Zbigniew Błocki held that “The NCN as the operator of the Basic Research Programme aims at supporting outstanding research projects, making Polish science international and improving its transparency and openness. Acting in compliance with the best international practices, the National Science Centre contributes to improving the quality and effectiveness of basic research.”

The a result of the signed agreement covering the “Research” Programme, the GRIEG and IDEALAB calls will be announced in the near future. Please follow the NCN’s website where we will soon be publishing information on the calls funded from the EEA and Norway Grants.

Signing of the agreement (photos)

In response to changes introduced in the new model of PhD-level education by the Act on Higher Education and Science of 20 July 2018, we would like to clarify interpretation of specific provisions that govern the awarding and payment of NCN scholarships to researchers carrying out research projects funded by the NCN.

Read the NCN Director's letter

An international group of researchers centres at the Malopolska Centre of Biotechnology, Jagiellonian University in Poland have produce a super-stable artificial protein ball that apparently defies the rules of geometry and which may have applications in materials science and medicine.

Every role playing gamer knows that there are restrictions governing the shape of dice; try to make a six-sided die by replacing the square faces with triangles and you will be left with something horribly distorted and certainly not fair. The reason for this is that there are geometrical rules describing what kind of shapes are allowed to be the faces of die-like shapes, so-called regular convex polyhedra. In nature too such shapes are common at the microscopic level. Usually made from many proteins and having a hollow interior, these nanoscale objects are known as protein cages and they carry out a variety of important tasks. The most famous example are viruses where the cage carries viral genetic material into host cells.

Researchers are interested in making artificial protein cages in the hope that they may be able to design them to have useful properties not found in nature. There are two challenges to achieving this goal. The first is the geometry problem: some proteins may have great potential utility but seem to be ruled out because they have the wrong shape to assemble into cages. The second problem is complexity: in nature the many proteins that form a protein cage are held together by a complex network of chemical bonds and these are very difficult to predict and simulate.

In the new work, headed by Professor Jonathan Heddle at the Bionanoscience and Biochemistry Laboratory Malopolska Centre of Biotechnology, Jagiellonian University and funded largely by Poland’s National Science Centre, researchers found a way to solve both of these problems. “We were able to replace the complex interactions between proteins with a simple ‘staple’ consisting of a single gold atom.” explains Professor Heddle the senior author of the research. "This simplifies the design problem and allows us to imbue the cages with new properties such as assembly and disassembly on demand.” The research has also found a way to get around the geometrical problem: “The building block of a protein cage is an 11-sided shape.” says Heddle “Theoretically this should not be able to form the faces of a regular convex polyhedron." However the research has found that while this is mathematically true, some so-called “impossible shapes” can assemble into cages which are so close to being regular that the errors are not noticeable. “What this means is that we can now use proteins which we previously would not have considered because they are theoretically unable to form cages." says Heddle. 

The potential implications of the work a far-reaching. "What we, together with our collaborators have found, is simply the first step." notes Heddle, who hopes that the work can be expanded further to produce cages with new structures and new capabilities and also investigated for potential applications particularly in drug delivery.

The research appears in the article “An ultra-stable gold-coordinated protein cage displaying reversible assembly” in the May16^th issue of Nature.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1185-4

The CHIST-ERA Network has defined initial topics for the Call for proposals that will be announced in October 2019:

• Explainable Machine Learning-based Artificial Intelligence
• Novel Computational Approaches for Environmental Sustainability

The general topics will be further developed  during the CHIST-ERA Conference 2019 in Tallinn, Estonia on June 11-13, which will bring together scientists and CHIST-ERA representatives in order to identify and formulate promising scientific and technological challenges at the frontier of research with a view to refine the scientific content of the Call. The conference is open to the research community.

For details please see the programme website.

Please note that this 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.

NCN contact:

• dr Anna Wieczorek, tel. 12 341 9164
• Marlena Wosiak, tel. +48 12 341 9093

Following a detailed analysis of the National Science Centre’s current call portfolio, the NCN Council decided to expand the formula of the OPUS call to include elements of the HARMONIA call. Applicants will still be able to receive funding for research projects conducted without any international partners, but also for those that do involve such cooperation.

Ever since our inception, we have striven to ensure that our basic research funding schemes are optimally suited to the needs and expectations of the research community. Organized since 2011, the HARMONIA call has funded research projects carried out within the framework of international cooperation, provided that they were not co-financed from foreign resources. The idea behind the call was to encourage Polish research teams to collaborate with foreign partners. Over the years, however, as the call portfolio steadily expanded and the NCN joined a number of international initiatives and programmes conducted within the framework of bilateral and multilateral cooperation, the rationale for the HARMONIA call has considerably weakened. Research teams may have their international research projects funded under other schemes, including bilateral and multilateral calls, as well as the OPUS call.

With this in mind, the NCN Council decided to expand the formula of the OPUS call and allow its funds to go toward research projects that have until now been funded under the HARMONIA call. Starting from the September edition, researchers, regardless of the stage of their research careers, will be able to apply with projects conducted within the framework of direct international cooperation with a partner or partners from a foreign research institution, within bilateral or multilateral international programmes or initiatives or projects conducted by Polish teams with the use of large international research equipment. In their proposal, applicants will be required to supply information on the proposed international collaboration and describe its expected benefits.

A special advantage of the OPUS call is that it allows projects that require the purchase of up to 500 thousand PLN in research equipment to be funded, which was not possible under the HARMONIA scheme. In addition, OPUS gives researchers greater leeway to construct their teams. Principal investigators may take their salaries from project resources and hire teams composed of persons with doctoral degrees, students and doctoral candidates, as well as partners from foreign research institutions. The scheme also provides funding for project-related foreign travel, covers the expenses related to foreign partners' stay in Poland, as well as other visits, consultations and conference travel costs.