Member of the NCN Council to receive Poland-U.S. Science Award

Thu, 11/03/2016 - 09:15

We are pleased to announce that professor Ryszard Kierzek from the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, member of the Council of the National Science Centre, and professor Douglas H. Turner from the University of Rochester have received the Poland-U.S. Science Award. The award is conferred jointly by the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for outstanding scientific achievements accomplished in American-Polish scientific cooperation.Professors Kierzek and Turner have been rewarded for their collaboration in research into thermodynamics, biology and structure of ribonucleic acid (RNA). Thanks to their research it has become possible to predict the structure of any RNA based on its sequence. The researchers have also determined thermodynamic rules of RNA folding, currently in use among most research teams active in this research area. Their research on RNA is also related to learning the development mechanisms of certain human diseases. For several years, they have worked on the use of modified oligonucleotides for the modulation of biological activity of pathogenic RNAs, including inhibition of replication of the influenza virus.

The Poland-U.S. Science Award was established in 2013. It is granted once every two years by way of a nomination-based competition. The winners are chosen by a jury of eminent scientists from Poland and the United States. This has been the second edition of the Award.

New CHIST-ERA call is now open

Fri, 10/28/2016 - 15:02

The National Science Centre and the CHIST-ERA consortium invite researchers to a new edition of the call for international research projects. Topics of the 2016 opportunity are:

  • Lifelong Learning for Intelligent Systems (LLIS)
  • Visual Analytics for Decision Making under Uncertainty (VADMU)

Proposals must be submitted by research groups composed of at least 3 partners from 3 different countries participating in the CHIST-ERA call.

Project duration: 24 or 36 months

Call deadline: 17th of January 2017, 17.00 CET

Call results: July 2017

Call documentation :

You are also invited to use Partner Search Tool, a development facilitating matches between potential partners with similar ideas.

For detailed information on the call, go to: http://www.chistera.eu/call-2016-announcement.

Information for polish applicants:

  1. Polish applicants must register their applications in the OSF submission system (UNISONO application, please see Annex to NCN Council’s Resolution no. 56/2016). This application includes the following budget table.
  2. Budget of the Polish part of the research project in the OSF system should be given in PLN (1 EUR= 4,3122 PLN). 
  3. We strongly encourage all applicants to read information on eligible costs included in the Annex to NCN Council’s Resolution on funding granted within calls for proposals for international research projects (UNISONO, p. 6-13).
  4. If one international project includes partners from two different Polish Host Institutions, these institutions must apply as a consortium (please see also UNISONO – p. 2: IV, § 8 and p. 9:  footnote 16). Each Host Institution comprising the consortium has a separate budget, but the limit on the remuneration, referred to in paragraph 2.1. of the above mentioned document, applies to the consortium as a whole.
  5. We invite all researchers who plan to apply within the CHIST-ERA call to contact the NCN.

Contact:

Dr Jakub Gadek, jakub.gadek@ncn.gov.pl, tel. +48 12 341 9152

Sylwia Kostka, sylwia.kostka@ncn.gov.pl, tel. +48 12 341 9018

 

Planets of other suns

Principal Investigator :
Prof. Andrzej Niedzielski
Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń

Panel: ST9

Funding scheme : OPUS 4
announced on 15th September 2012

What is the future of the Solar System? How long can we stay on our planet and where should we move to when it turns out that move we must? Answers to questions of this kind, once belonging mostly in the domain of science fiction, nowadays are offered by research projects committed to the search and study of other stars’ planets.

Since the discovery of the first extrasolar planetary system by A. Wolszczan & D.A. Frail in 1992, more than two thousand planets orbiting other stars have been found. The Penn-State-Toruń Planet Search (PTPS) started in 2007, an initiative of Pennsylvania State University’s professor Aleksander Wolszczan, who collaborated with professor Andrzej Niedzielski of Nicolaus Copernicus University. Initially the project was based solely on observations of stars carried out with the 9.2 m Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas. Currently the project also uses other telescopes, which allow for exact measurements of changes in the speed of about one thousand stars. PTPS is one of the largest projects of searching for planets in the proximity of stars older or larger than the Sun.

The aim of PTPS is to observe and study a number of new planetary systems that already show the impact of their hosting star’s evolutionary changes. This research will help explain how a star’s evolution affects its orbiting planets. The project draws on state-of-the-art observations using some of the world’s largest telescopes, such as the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas and the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo on the Canaries. The material collected through the observations – high-definition stellar spectra – is used for detection of new extrasolar planets and for detailed analysis of their hosting stars.

Apart from describing new planets and their orbits, particularly interesting are all kinds of anomalies in the stars under investigation that might point to past disturbances of a planetary system in the wake of changes inside an aging star. Such singularities may take place in the chemical make-up of stars, their rotation periods, and they can also manifest as planets’ odd orbits. It was in the BD+48 740 star’s planetary system that for the first time traces were found of a past catastrophe where one of the planets was engulfed by a star. Next to HD 219415 and BD+49 828, planets similar to Jupiter were located, with very distant orbits of 5.7 and 7.1 year periods. In the planetary system of the TYC 3667-1280-1 star – its mass almost twice and its bulk six times that of the Sun – an extremely rare Jupiter-like planet was found, on an orbit twice that of Mercury’s. Since PTPS’s inception, over 20 planetary systems have been discovered, including 3 comprising two planets.

The research has its continuation in the project titled Planets of other suns (OPUS 10). Using a number of European telescopes, thorough examination will be given to planet candidates as well as very rare brown dwarfs (“failed stars”). An analysis will be presented of about a dozen stars overabundant in lithium, an element which should not be present in these stars; the relation of this chemical singularity with planets will also be investigated.

Project title: The PennState-Toruń Planet Search for planets around evolved stars

Prof. Andrzej Niedzielski

Astrophysicist, director of the Chair of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Toruń Centre for Astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus University. Since his doctoral dissertation (NCU, 1992), his research interests have been focused on stellar spectroscopy. Since 2007 he has been the principal investigator of PTPS, a project which, apart from discovering dozens of planetary systems, has resulted in a number of doctorate dissertations and scholarly papers describing the specific qualities of the stars from the project’s sample.

Prof. Andrzej Niedzielski

Polish Info Days in London and Glasgow

Mon, 10/24/2016 - 11:03

We are pleased to invite representatives of research institutions as well as researchers willing to conduct research in Poland to information meetings organised in Glasgow, on the 4th November, and London – on the 5th November. During these meetings representatives of all the main research funding institutions in Poland: the National Science Centre, the Foundation for Polish Science and the National Centre for Research and Development will present their research funding portfolio.

More information:

Polish Info Days in Glasgow

Polish info Days in London

Contact:

Agnieszka Kossakowska, agnieszka.kossakowska@fnp.org.pl

POLONEZ 3 – presentation

Mon, 10/17/2016 - 14:57

We would like to inform that the presentation regarding POLONEZ 3 is already available.

Please see it here.

Contact:

Beata Krasnopolska, tel. 12 341 9091

Agata Mendrek, tel. 12 341 9139

polonez@ncn.gov.pl

Pain therapy, brain plasticity and automata theory: winners of the National Science Centre 2016 Award announced

Fri, 10/14/2016 - 16:09

Dr hab. Marcin Szwed, dr hab. Katarzyna Starowicz-Bubak and prof. dr hab. Mikołaj Bojańczyk are the laureates of the National Science Centre 2016 Award.  Each scholar will receive the equivalent of nearly €12,000 in recognition of their accomplishments in basic research.The National Science Centre Award was established as a means of promoting young researchers: laureates are chosen from amongst researchers under 40. The award is conferred for outstanding achievements in basic research, i.e. experimental or theoretical endeavours made with a view towards gaining new knowledge, which are not directly commercial application-oriented. The selection of the winners included authors of research projects carried out in Polish research centres, documented with publications.

In the field of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, the award was granted to dr hab. Marcin Szwed from the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, for large-scale research on the plasticity of the human brain in people with impaired eyesight and hearing. The team he coordinates has been successful in disproving some long-standing theses on the division of the brain into separate sense-related parts. The award is sponsored by Grupa Azoty S.A.

I’m grateful to the NCN for awarding me “the scientific Nike” [Poland’s most prestigious literary award] , because this proves that you can come back to Poland and still be able to carry out great science, said dr hab. Szwed. This award comes also as deserved recognition for the team of fantastic people I’m honoured to be working with.

The laureate of the award in Life Sciences is dr hab. Katarzyna Starowicz-Bubak from the Institute of Pharmacology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Among her outstanding achievements is her discovery of the role of the endocannabinoid system in the development and treatment of chronic pain; she has also developed a new pharmacological approach to the therapy of osteoarthtosis-related pain. Her award is sponsored by Biprostal S.A. and Koksoprojekt BIS Sp. z o.o.

This award confirms the significance of my research, which is the successful treatment of pain. It in a way crowns my achievements in this matter, but it also gives me the impulse to do further work, to improve the effectiveness of analgesic procedures in treating patients with chronic pain syndromes, said dr hab. Starowicz-Bubak.

The third laureate of the NCN 2016 Award, in the field of Physical Sciences and Technology, is professor dr hab. Mikołaj Bojańczyk from the Institute of Informatics, University of Warsaw. The award committee has recognised his outstanding contribution to automata theory and logic. The award is sponsored by EDF Polska S.A.

I feel honoured to receive the NCN Award. I consider it a gesture of acknowledgment to a larger community of researchers in Poland who work on the basics of informatics. I believe that this is one of the strengths of Poland’s science, and our researchers can freely compete with their colleagues in the best centres around the world, said professor Bojańczyk.

The National Science Centre Award is conferred by a committee comprising representatives of the Council of the National Science Centre, the Director of the Centre and sponsors. The three winners have been selected out of 49 candidates submitted by eminent scholars. Each person could name only one candidate. Some researchers received multiple nominations.

The award gala took place on 12th October 2016 at the Gallery of 19th Century Polish Art – the Sukiennice. The sponsors’ representatives gave the laureates memorial statuettes. The ceremony host was Grażyna Torbicka and the event was accompanied by an accordion concert from Weronika Sura.

 

I like you and feel the way you feel

Principal Investigator :
Dr hab. Monika Wróbel
University of Łódź

Panel: HS6

Funding scheme : SONATA 4
announced on 15th September 2012

Emotions are contagious. Being around cheerful people can cheer us up, and dealing with someone sad can bring ourselves down. In psychological literature, this phenomenon is referred to as affective contagion or the social induction of affect.

Initially, research on the phenomenon consisted in exposing participants to films or photographs of people showing emotions and testing whether such exposure would influence the way the participants feel. Usually the analyses were carried out without paying attention to social context, ignoring the characteristics of the people appearing in the films and photographs as well as the impression they made on the participants. Some newer studies, however, have shown that in certain social contexts (particularly in relations between people who like each other), affective contagion should be more likely, while in others (particularly in relations between people who do not like each other) the process may be blocked or even discordant affect may occur.

That suggestion was the main inspiration for the research we have carried out in the project. Although the literature provided considerable evidence that supported the notion that liking plays an important role in affective contagion, the majority of this evidence was indirect. We were wondering what the precise role of liking in affective contagion was, i.e., whether emotions and moods expressed by disliked people would “infect” others and – if so – what the direction of this induction would be.

We looked for the answers to these questions in a series of eight experiments. In each of them we manipulated the variables that were related to liking. The person expressing emotions was thus presented either in a way that enhanced liking (e.g., someone whose views were similar to those held by the participant, or someone characterized by positive personality traits) or in a way that impaired liking (e.g., someone whose views were dissimilar to those held by the participant, or someone characterized by negative personality traits). The results confirmed that this kind of manipulation influenced affective contagion, but only when the person expressing the emotion was cheerful (participants “caught” his/her happiness only when they liked him/her, whereas the disliked happy person evoked no reaction).

A sad target person, on the other hand, “infected” participants with his/her sadness regardless of the way he/she was presented. In other words, participants “caught” his/her negative affective state not only when they liked him/her but also when they disliked him/her. The result supports the notion shared by some researchers according to which negative states are more contagious than positive ones. This explains why we often find it difficult to remain indifferent to other people’s sorrow even if we do not particularly like them.

Project title: I like you and I feel the way you do: The role of interpersonal attraction in affective contagion

Dr hab. Monika Wróbel

Social psychologist. Works as an associate professor at the Institute of Psychology, University of Łódź. Her research deals with emotions in interpersonal relations, specifically affective contagion. Author of numerous papers published in Basic and Applied Social Psychology, Social Psychological and Personality Science, European Journal of Psychological Assessment, among others, and a monograph titled Zarażenie afektywne. O procesie transferu emocji i nastroju między ludźmi [En. Affective contagion. On the process of emotion and mood transfer between humans].

dr Monika Wróbel

CHIST-ERA 2016 Call Pre-announcement

Wed, 10/05/2016 - 12:05

We would like to invite researchers to submit proposals under CHIST-ERA 2016 call for proposals. The call, which will be opened on the 12th October 2016, targets research in the following topics:

  • Lifelong Learning for Intelligent Systems,
  • Visual Analytics for Decision-Making under Uncertainty.

Funding is available for international research projects that involve at least three researchers from three different eligible countries. The deadline for submission is scheduled for the 17th of January 2017, 17:00 CET.

More information

Contact:

POLONEZ 3 – invitation to participate in a POLONEZ 3 info chat

Wed, 10/05/2016 - 09:37

We are pleased to invite researchers interested in applying for the POLONEZ 3 fellowship for a web chat in English, that will be held on the 11th October 2016 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. During the chat we would be happy to answer all questions regarding the call documentation, the submission system, etc.

All technical details regarding access to the chat will be announced on the NCN website on the 10th or 11th October by 12 pm at the latest. We strongly encourage applicants to read the call documentation before joining the chat.

Please read the technical instructions regarding the web chat.

Technical instructions for the POLONEZ 3 info chat

  1. You do not have to register to participate in the web chat. Please provide your name and e-mail address in order to join the chat.
  2. The language of the web chat interface is determined by your IP-address. If the language of the web chat is other than English, please click on the flag in the upper right corner of the login window and then switch it to English (print screen 1).
  3. To participate in the web chat please install the latest Adobe Flash Player plug-in. In order to check the validation of the connection and the compatibility of Adobe flash player please go to the web-chat, give your name and e-mail address and click “Enter”. If you pass the test positively, you will see a brief instruction regarding the web chat. When the web chat becomes active (11th October, 2 p.m.), you will see the correct chat window. If you have an older version of the plug-in, you will receive an appropriate message to update your Adobe flash player plug-in.
  4. In order to maximize the font during the web chat, please click on “gear” icon, then click on “font” and choose the right size, e.g. 14 pt (print screen 2).
  5. If you have problems with the connection, please note that the web chat platform uses the port 1935 and the RTMP protocol which must be unblocked in your “firewall”.
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