We are announcing the SONATINA 10 call. It is designed for researchers at an early stage of their careers and offers an opportunity to gain the experience and skills needed for further academic development.
SONATINA 10 is open to researchers who obtained their PhD degree between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2025. Proposals may also be submitted by candidates who do not yet hold a PhD; however, if such a proposal receives a positive expert evaluation, it may be funded only if the principal investigator is awarded a PhD degree by 15 May 2026. The eligibility period may be extended in the case of career breaks, including those related to childbirth or incapacity for work. Each researcher may receive a SONATINA grant only once.
Projects may be planned for either 24 or 36 months. The grant provides funding for basic and applied research, as well as full-time employment of the principal investigator for the entire project duration at the host institution (where at least one discipline has been assigned a scientific evaluation category) other than the one from which the principal investigator has earned a PhD degree.
A central element of the SONATINA grant is a mandatory fellowship at a foreign research institution for a period of 3 to 6 months. During the fellowship, the principal investigator will receive a guaranteed monthly scholarship of PLN 7,500, along with lump sums to cover subsistence, accommodation, and travel costs, depending on the destination country.
For the first time in the history of the call, the fellowship component will be funded by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange. Under the terms of the agreement in place, proposals will undergo a merit-based evaluation performed by the National Science Centre. NAWA will approve the results of the evaluation and award fellowship funding to SONATINA winners, who will only be required to submit proposals within a dedicated programme launched by NAWA. This cooperation model between the two agencies has been operating successfully for many years, including within the NAWA Polish Returns programme, where NCN finances the research components.
There are no minimum or maximum funding limits for a single SONATINA project; however, all costs included in the budget must be well-justified.
The NCN Council has allocated PLN 50 million for the tenth edition of SONATINA. NAWA has earmarked up to PLN 4.8 million for fellowships, with the final amount to be confirmed in the call text.
Call for proposals and evaluation procedure
The SONATINA 10 call for proposals will be open in the OSF submission system from 16 December to 16 March 2026, until 2 p.m. CET.
Proposals will be evaluated by inter-panel teams consisting of experts from the relevant fields, i.e. the Humanities, Social Sciences and Art Sciences (HS), the Physical Sciences and Engineering (ST), and the Life Sciences (NZ). Experts are selected by the NCN Council from among outstanding Polish and international researchers holding at least a PhD degree.
The merit-based evaluation of the proposal will, as usual, be carried out in two stages. In the first stage, each proposal will receive at least two individual reviews, and the team will evaluate it during the first panel meeting, taking the submitted reviews into account. In the second stage, at least two reviews will be prepared by external reviewers, and the principal investigator will additionally be invited to an interview conducted in English at the NCN headquarters in Kraków in July 2026. The team will make the final decision on the proposal based on the individual reviews and the outcome of the interview. The results will be announced by the end of September 2026.
Across all SONATINA calls to date, 375 proposals have been recommended for funding, with total funding of nearly PLN 279 million. Examples of funded projects, along with abstracts for the general public, are available in the NCN project database.