“It is with alarm that we are witnessing the public statements made by the Minister of Education and Science about the Ministry’s plans to change the status of the NCN or shut it down. We fear that such steps would have disastrous implications for Polish science”, write 61 winners of the L’Oreal-UNESCO Scholarship for Women and Science in an open letter to the President and the Prime Minister of Poland.

“If the minister gave us an extra 100 million tomorrow, we would give it all away in grants, because this is what we do: we support the best research projects”, says Prof. Z. Błocki in an interview published by “Gazeta Wyborcza”.

In the run-up to the upcoming parliamentary elections, the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS) organises a series of online debates entitled “What has come to PASs in research policy?”. Professor Zbigniew Błocki will join a panel scheduled for 26 September.

Scientists from Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic will conduct a joint Life Sciences project in the framework of the Weave Program. The Polish team will receive nearly PLN 900,000 in funding.

We are pleased to announce the OPUS 26 + LAP/Weave call for research projects, including international cooperation under the Weave programme, and SONATA 19 for PhD holders. The total budget of the two calls is PLN 400 million and proposals will be accepted until mid-December.

“More than half of our funding goes to early-stage researchers. In the highly hierarchical Polish system, we give them a breath of freedom and the independence that comes with an ability to build a research team of their own. This is the great value of our agency, and it should not go to waste”, says Professor Zbigniew Błocki in an interview published by “Forum Akademickie” on 12 September.

“We wish to appeal to the Prime Minister to stop the plans that would strip the NCN of independence and lead to public grant resources being awarded based on criteria other than scientific excellence”, writes a group of FNP Award winners in an open letter to Mateusz Morawiecki. The open letter comes in response to the announcement of a grant system reform.

Together with the Biodiversa+ European Partnership for Biodiversity, we are pleased to announce an international call for proposals: “Nature-Based Solutions for Biodiversity, Human Well-being and Transformative Change” (BiodivNBS). The total budget available to Polish teams is EUR 1 million.