The NCN has made available funding worth nearly € 65 million to researchers  with a doctorate and scientists with particularly long-standing experience, who wish to conduct research projects, establish research teams, or engage in international collaboration. On 14^th June, the Centre announced its new calls: SONATA 13, SONATA BIS 7, MAESTRO 9 and HARMONIA 9.A new feature to the calls announced today is the interview with projects’ principal investigators in SONATA, SONATA BIS and MAESTRO. It may be held in English, which also makes the grants available to international researchers, a group in short supply in many Polish research centres. We are also making it a rule for the Expert Team in MAESTRO, the most prestigious among our call types, to be composed entirely of scholars based outside Poland. We hope that this will additionally improve the call's level, said professor Zbigniew Błocki, Director of the NCN.

It is the 13^th time that proposals have been accepted under the SONATA funding scheme, welcoming applications from holders of a doctorate degree awarded within 2 to 7 years of applying. The call’s budget has been set at nearly € 17 million. The call’s objective is to support innovative research using state-of-the-art equipment and original methodologies. In the current edition of the call, the project’s principal investigator is required to have published (or have had accepted for publication) between one and ten papers, of which one should be attached to the project proposal.

This is already SONATA’s third consecutive edition where the principal investigator may apply to the NCN for a reduction of obligatory teaching hours by 50%. The research centre where the investigator is employed will receive funds from the NCN that will allow it to hire a substitute, allowing the principal investigator to be able to devote more time to the project itself.

SONATA BIS is a call announced to establish new research teams by researchers who have been awarded a doctorate within 5 to 12 years before the year of grant application. In this call there is also the possibility of applying for a reduction of obligatory teaching hours. The budget of the call’s 7^th edition will amount to nearly € 29 million.

As in SONATA, here the project’s principal investigator is required to have published (or have had accepted for publication) academic papers. In this instance, the numbers are between three and seven. Three most important papers should be attached to the proposal.

MAESTRO is the most prestigious of NCN's calls, seeking participation from advanced researchers willing to carry out ground-breaking projects, surpassing the current boundaries of knowledge. More than € 9.5 million will be distributed among the awardees of the call’s 9^th edition.

A prospective principal investigator in a MAESTRO project is a researcher with at least five papers published in quality scientific journals over the past 10 years (three of the most important papers should be attached to the proposal), has served as principal investigator to at least two projects under national or international funding opportunities, and who has otherwise been academically active.

Some of the call’s evaluation criteria have been made more specific. For a principal investigator to receive the highest possible score, it is required from them to document, among others, their participation in expert panels on international calls, a high citation rate, and an award or at least an admission of their research proposal in the second stage of an ERC funding opportunity.

This time researchers applying for this grant of excellence will face an international panel of experts even in the first stage of the merit-based evaluation. It is therefore required that, unlike in the call’s previous editions, the project’s short description be written in English.

HARMONIA, announced for the 9^th time, is a call for research projects carried out as international collaboration, non-co-financed from international resources. This year, its budget will exceed € 9.5 million.

Apart from projects carried out in direct collaboration with a partner from abroad, the funding may be also given to research conducted under international programmes for bi- or multilateral collaboration, and also to Polish research teams using large-scale international research infrastructure.

Both the Polish principal investigator and the leading partner are required to back their application with 3 to 7 published (or accepted for publication) papers, of which three should be attached to the proposal. The project’s short description should be written in Polish.

The call closes on 15^th September 2017, and the publication of results is scheduled for 15^th March 2018. For detailed information see the National Science Centre’s webpage.

On behalf of the Research Council of Lithuania we would like to inform you about the call for proposals for Post-Doctoral Fellowships. The Research Council of Lithuania, the main RTD project funding body in the country, on April 14^th, 2017, launched the first call for proposals for project funding under the measure No 09.3.3-LMT-K-712 “Strengthening the Skills and Capacities of Public Sector Researchers for Engaging in High Level R&D Activities,” activity “Promotion of Post-Doctoral Fellowships” of the Operational Programme for European Union fund investments in 2014–2020.The purpose of the measure is to support post-doctoral fellowship studies, to enhance the scientific skills of young researchers through practical activities and the exchange of scientific ideas, as well as promoting the setting-up and development of scientific communication and networking.

The budget of the call is up to € 4.35 million.

Eligible applicants are  universities, Lithuanian state research institutes holding the right to carry out doctoral programmes in arts or science, and (or) state research institutes for researcher training alongside universities included in the open vocational information, counselling, and guidance AIKOS system. Postdoctoral research fellows may apply from all over the world and are expected to hold a doctoral degree awarded by a research and study institution, provided no more than five years have lapsed from the doctoral degree award date to the deadline for submission of applications indicated in the call for proposals (the period does not include maternity leave, paternity leave or child raising leave until the child is three years of age); they must be engaged in the research activity provided in the project.

The maximum amount of the project budget is up to € 72,450. The amount of eligible costs is determined for each project individually, and will be reimbursed according to unit costs and flat rates. The maximum funding intensity may exceed up to 100 % of all eligible costs.

The duration of a project shall be 24 months. In the course of the project implementation, the postdoctoral research fellow must be enrolled and attend a fellowship programme at a foreign research and study institution, a research centre, a laboratory, an enterprise, an institution, a library, an archive, an expedition, etc. at least for one month (this may be divided into two parts at least for 15 days).

The call closes at 17:00 (local time) on July 5th, 2017.

The procedure for application submission, information for applicants and call documents can be found at http://www.lmt.lt/en/news/call-for-proposals-gw2j.html

QuantERA Consortium selected 92 pre-proposals, requesting funding of almost € 109 M, that are invited to prepare and submit a full application to the QuantERA Call 2017. The deadline for full proposals submission has been extended to July 11^th, 2017. The Electronic Submission System will be open in mid-June. 

221 pre-proposals were submitted in response to the QuantERA Call 2017. Each pre-proposal was reviewed, evaluated and ranked by the scientific Evaluation Panel, following the criteria recommended by the European Commission: Excellence, Impact and Quality and Efficiency of Implementation. Out of all received pre-proposals, 165 were evaluated above the quality threshold, and among these 92 are invited by the QuantERA Steering Committee to the 2^nd stage of the evaluation process.

Updated Call Announcement can be found here.

Contact:

• In case of any further questions please contact Mr. Mathieu Girerd, +33 1 7354 8213
• Contact at National Science Centre: Sylwia Kostka (tel. +48 12 341 9018); Marlena Wosiak (tel. +48 12 341 9093)

The National Science Centre is pleased to present list of projects qualified for funding in NCN POLONEZ 1 call for proposals.

The National Science Centre has published the results of the twelfth edition of the OPUS, PRELUDIUM and SONATA programmes, and – for the third time – the list of awardees of the POLONEZ funding opportunity. Researchers conducting basic research under the four schemes have been granted nearly € 111 million.

OPUS, PRELUDIUM and SONATA are the most popular funding opportunities operated by the National Science Centre (NCN), a Krakow-based governmental agency for funding basic research. This May has seen the conclusion of their 12^th edition, with ca € 104 million in financing. The results of the POLONEZ 3 opportunity have also been announced, with funding granted to incoming researchers. In the current edition, authors of the winning projects will receive over € 6.7 million.

A total of 4,219 research projects were submitted under the four schemes, of which, 1,042 have been approved for funding.  In the OPUS, PRELUDIUM and SONATA programmes, the success rate has been 27 per cent. It was far more difficult to win funding under the POLONEZ scheme, with only 10 per cent of the competing entrants receiving funding for their projects.

The success rate in our three most popular funding opportunities has increased by 3 per cent in comparison to that of the results published only one year ago, in the 10^th edition, said professor Zbigniew Błocki, director of the NCN. At the moment, the success rate in most funding schemes is around 30 per cent. This is something of a welcome proportion, which allows us to recognise the merit of a fair number of projects, while making sure the system remains competitive.

The OPUS 12 call was open to all researchers, notwithstanding their years of experience and degrees earned. It is, therefore, no wonder that it has seen the largest number of entries, totalling 1,786. Of those, 409 have been approved for funding, with almost € 73 million to be distributed among their authors.

One of the awardees is dr hab. Przemysław Bąbel, affiliated at Jagiellonian University. Dr Bąbel will continue his research on pain in the project titled “Social Context of Pain. The Effect of Social Information concerning the Pain on Pain Experience and Pain Memory,” worth over € 211,700.    

The PRELUDIUM 12 call  has been dedicated to persons at the early stages of their research pursuits, who hold no doctorate. This time, beginner researchers have submitted 1,171 proposals, of which 372 have been approved as research projects to be carried out with the help of € 9.34 million in funding.

Under the PRELUDIUM scheme, Aleksandra Hernik of Poznan University of Medical Sciences, will perform research on the causes and course of hematological disorders that accompany conditions of the thyroid gland. Her project has been granted funding in excess of € 35,600.

SONATA is a call for projects carried out by researchers with a doctorate degree held for up to 7 years at the time of application. The programme is intended to support researchers at the beginning of their career with the opportunity to carry out innovative research, using state-of-the-art technology or an original methodology. There were 882 entries in the current call, of which 224 have been selected for funding. The call’s budget has been set at nearly € 21.8 million.

Among the grantees is dr Andrzej Siódmok of the Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences. In his project titled “Colourful Precision for the Large Hadron Collider”, he will work on improving measuring methods by developing Monte Carlo event generators, which are “virtual hadron colliders” of sorts. Dr Siódmok will be granted ca. € 32,600 in funding.

POLONEZ 3 is among those NCN calls that are geared towards bolstering internationalisation of research in Poland. The programme enables incoming researchers to move to Poland for fellowships in Polish host institutions. Of the 380 proposals submitted, 37 have been approved for funding, totalling over € 6.7 million.

Incoming researchers who have received the grant in POLONEZ include dr Asiya Bulatova, who has been accepted as a fellow to the University of Warsaw. Her project titled “Science of the Self: Human Agency in Formalist Theories of Literature and Biomedical Research, 1917–1925” has been granted € 141,300.

Ranking lists

Why is there more matter than antimatter in the universe? The reason might be hidden in the neutrino nature: one of the preferred theoretical models assumes, that these elementary particles were identical with their own anti-particles. This in turn would lead to an extremely rare nuclear decay process, the neutrinoless double-beta decay. The experiment GERDA now has reached a most important improvement in the search for double-beta decay by reducing the disturbances (background) to an unprecedented low level making it the first “background-free” experiment in the field. This achievement is reported in the recent NATURE article appearing April 6^th, 2017.

Neutrinos are ghostly particles which are extremely hard to detect. They play a central role in how the sun burns, how supernovae explode and how elements are formed during the big bang. Determining their properties has advanced our understanding of elementary particles considerably, best documented by the fact that so far four Nobel prizes have been awarded to neutrino related research. One fundamental property is still unknown: are neutrinos Majorana particles, i.e. identical to their own anti-particles? In that case double-beta decay will exist. Strong theoretical arguments favor this possibility and the above mentioned absence of anti-matter in our universe is likely connected to the Majorana character of neutrinos.

GERDA uses high-purity germanium detectors enriched in the isotope ⁷⁶Ge.  Since the germanium is source and detector at the same time, a compact setup with minimum additional materials can be realized leading to low backgrounds and high detection efficiency. The excellent energy resolution of germanium detectors and the novel experimental techniques developed by the GERDA collaboration provide unprecedented suppression of disturbing events from other radioactive decays (background events). Since double-beta decay has a half-live many orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe, the reduction of background events is most crucial for the sensitivity.

The novel techniques employed by GERDA reduced the number of background events in such a way, that now it is the first “background-free” experiment in the field. No double-beta decays have been observed during the first five months of data taking and a lower half-life limit of 5x10²⁵ yr was derived. Until the end of data taking in 2019 no background event should be left in the energy region where the double-beta signal is expected and a sensitivity of 10²⁶ yr will be reached. This makes GERDA best suited to discover a signal, which would manifest itself by a small number of events at the signal energy.

GERDA, one of the leading experiments in the field, is an international European collaboration of more than 100 physicists from Germany, Italy, Russia, Switzerland, Poland and Belgium (http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/gerda/). It is located in the underground Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso of the Italian research organization INFN. From Poland, scientists from the Institute of Physics of the Jagiellonian University (IP UJ) in Krakow participate in the project since its beginning (2004). The present members of the group led by prof. Marcin Wojcik are mgr Nikodem Frodyma, dr Marcin Misiaszek, dr Krzysztof Panas, dr Krzysztof Pelczar and dr Grzegorz Zuzel. They are working on the most relevant background and data analysis problems. Development of several experimental techniques leading to background minimization (purification of gases, removal of radio-isotopes form active surfaces, development of LAr veto), development of original data analysis procedures (pulse shape discrimination) and construction of novel hardware (ultra-fast PMT scalers, patented resistor-less charge sensitive amplifier) are they main achievements.

Research carried out within GERDA by the group from the Jagiellonian University is financed by the National Science Centre in the frame of the HARMONIA, SONATA BIS and OPUS progremmes. More information (in Polish) about the project can be found under the following address: http://zdfk.if.uj.edu.pl/.

A new study finds that bears communicate through their feet while walking. By twisting their feet into the ground, bears leave their scent. This scent is produced by foot glands and contains 26 specific compounds that inform other bears, for example about the sex of the animal. This ritual is repeated by other individuals, mostly males, which step exactly in the same places, leaving a trail of smelly holes in the ground. This reveals as an important way for animals with large home ranges to exchange information with their neighbours. The results of the research of international team led by scientists from the Institute of Nature Conservation of PAS was already published in “Scientific Reports”.

Picture 1. Bear feet (photo credit: Djuro Huber, none usage restrictions)

A specific type of walk in bears, called “bear dance” or “cowboy walking”, has been observed long before America was discovered, as proved by the mimicking dance of the native-American Ute people as a part of their spring ceremonies. A study published today in “Scientific Reports” clarifies why bears walk in a mysterious way. Everything started when the researchers observed in the field that different bears repeatedly walk in the same trail stepping exactly in the same holes in the ground. “In a perfectly established ritual, one after another, bears vigorously twist their paws into the ground following a marked trail, while sniffing the tracks left by other bears using the trail before. We found that mostly males are doing that. These observations encouraged us to go deeper into the meaning of this behaviour”, says Javier Naves, a member of the research team from Estación Biológica de Doñana CSIC in Seville.

“The world of smells is a huge one, and yet mostly unknown. An arising issue was how to collect brown bear scents’”, says Agnieszka Sergiel, the leader of the study from the Institute of Nature Conservation in Kraków. After several trials, the researchers succeed in collecting scent samples from the paws of wild bears using sterile wooden sticks and cotton, and analysed them with a gas chromatograph. They identified 26 volatile compounds, of which six were exclusive of males. One of these male compounds is a cembrenoid that is also a trail and recognition pheromone in some termite and ant species. “We found prominent glands in bear feet which produce and can release secretion when pressed. This explains why bears walk in such a way” - adds Sergiel.

Picture 2. Holes left in the ground by brown bears marking with their feet while walking (photo credit: Javier Naves, none usage restrictions)

Many species of mammals rely upon scent to communicate. Most bear species have large home ranges, are non-territorial and spend most of their time alone. “In such scent trails, bears can exchange information and get to know who is around, who they have to avoid and who they would love to meet. Our study contributes to understanding of the evolution and ecology of communication in mammals” – explains Nuria Selva, a member of the research team from the Institute of Nature Conservation.

The study was conducted by an international team of scientists and led by researchers from the Institute of Nature Conservation of Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow, and Estación Biológica de Doñana CSIC in Seville. Research was funded among others by the National Science Center in Poland, in the coordinated by Dr Nuria Selva Fernandez (HARMONIA 4 call).

We would like to invite researchers to submit proposals under M-ERA.NET call for proposals. The call targets research in the following topics:

• Integrated computational materials engineering (ICME)
• Innovative surfaces, coatings and interfaces
• High performance composites
• Multifunctional materials
• New strategies for advanced material-based technologies in health applications
• Materials for additive manufacturing

The timetable for applications is:

• Pre-proposals to be submitted: 13^th of June 2017, 12:00 Central European Time,
• Shortlisted applicants to submit full proposals 9^th of November 2017, 12:00 Central European Time.

Applications must be submitted by at least 3 partners from at least 2 different countries participating in the call.

Countries participating in the call: https://m-era.net/joint-calls/joint-call-2017/participating-countries-regions-call-2017.

Both the National Science Centre (NCN) and the National Centre for Research and Development (NCBR) are members of the M-ERA network. Applicants whose projects meet basic research criterion (TRL 1-4) can apply to the NCN, and they do not have to involve an industrial partner. Researchers whose project start from TRL 3-6 and achieve TRL 5-8 can apply to the NCBR and the involvement of  an industrial partner is mandatory.

Call documents:

• Call announcement
• Guide for proposers
• FAQ
• mandatory Pre-Proposal form

Additional information for NCN applicants:

1. On the full proposal stage Polish applicants must register their applications in the OSF submission system (UNISONO application). The application includes the following budget table: http://ncn.gov.pl/sites/default/files/pliki/UNISONO_budget_table.xlsx.
2. 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, s. 5-12).
3. If one international project includes partners from two different Polish Host Institutions, these institutions must apply as a consortium.  Each Host Institution comprising the consortium has a separate budget, but the limit on the remuneration, referred to in paragraph 2.1.2 of the above mentioned document, applies to the consortium as a whole (please see UNISONO, p. 8-9: 2.1.2 a) i b)). Please note that Polish consortia have higher limits on the remuneration.  
4. Budget of the Polish part of the research project in the OSF system should be given in PLN (1 EUR= 4,3295 PLN).
5. We invite all researchers who plan to submit applications within M-ERA.NET call to contact the NCN.

Contact:

Weronika Bieniasz  ,   tel. +48 12 341 9156

Malwina Gębalska, tel. +48 12 341 9017

For the 13th time, the National Science Centre has announced a call for proposals under its OPUS and PRELUDIUM funding schemes. Researchers may apply for funding from a pool of ca € 67 million.

Researchers at the beginning of their career in research who hold no doctoral degree can submit their proposals under the PRELUDIUM 13 call. Although the funding-winning projects will be supervised by an established researcher, their authors will carry out the research themselves. The projects’ completion time may span one, two or three years, with a funding limit of ca. € 14 000, 28 000 or 43 000 respectively. In the current edition of the funding opportunity, the budget has been set at over € 7 million.

Supporting researchers at the onset of their careers is one of the National Science Centre’s priorities. In 2016, we contributed 24 per cent of the research budget towards funding beginner researchers’ projects, internships and scholarships, including the PRELUDIUM programme, said professor Zbigniew Błocki, director of the Centre. This funding scheme is the first step in a beginner researcher’s experience of the research grant system.

All researchers, regardless of their experience and academic degree, may apply for funding under the OPUS 13 call. Resources received may be used for establishing a research team and purchasing equipment required in the research. There is no cap on the funding of individual projects; projects may be carried out within 12, 24 or 36 months. The total funding of the 13^th edition comes to nearly € 60 million.

Proposals must be submitted via the OSF system (https://osf.opi.org.pl) by 16^th June 2017.

The Electronic Submission System (ESS) for the QuantERA Call 2017 is now open. Guidelines and further information can be found under the following link: QuantERA Electronic Submission System.

The Financial Form that should be used for preparing the budget of an international consortium has been approved and is now ready for downloading: QuantERA Call 2017 Financial Form.

Contact:

• In case of any further questions please contact Mr. Mathieu Girerd, +33 1 7354 8213
• Contact at National Science Centre: Marlena Wosiak, tel. +48 12 341 9093