Grants Office Newsletter December 2019
2019 is coming to an end soon and once again it was a very successful year in terms of competitive funding. 370 third-party funded projects worth CHF 134 million have started in 2019 and researchers have applied for new projects of a total of CHF 350 million. In this newsletter, we introduce two newly funded projects to you: The Sinergia project “African Contributions to Global Health” and the PRIMA project “Le rire des vers”. We also inform about the new rules for ERC grantees who do not have a professorship at the University of Basel, the procedure for Eccellenza applications and the new Open Access Fund of the University.
Rectorate decides on status of ERC Grantees and co-funding from the University
Based on a proposal of the Grants Office, the rectorate has made the following decisions:
- ERC grantees who do not have a professorship at the University of Basel will be given the status of an Assistant Professorship for the duration of the ERC project. This applies both to incoming researchers and researchers who are already working at the University of Basel
- Departments can apply for up to 20% of the salaries of ERC grantees to be covered bycentral resources of the University.
The detailed decision can be found here.
Please refer to the Grants Office for further information.
SNSF Sinergia project ‘African contributions to global health – Circulating knowledge and innovations’
With ‘Sinergia’ the SNSF promotes breakthrough research with a high potential for shifting existing paradigms. The consortium led by Julia Tischler (Department of History / African Studies, Basel), Jürg Utzinger (Swiss TPH) and Jérôme Chenal (Urban Planning, EPFL) clearly ticks this box by challenging discourses and concepts that reach far into the past but at the same time could not be more topical. The concept of ‘innovation’ is typically framed by the Global North, and one rarely hears of innovations from the South, particularly from Africa. Notably with regard to public health, however, African countries have made developments from which the Global North could (and should) learn. The Sinergia project, funded with CHF 2.2 Million, investigates African contributions to global health, and thereby includes aspects of the (post)colonial past as well as modern drug development, health economics, city planning and urban agriculture. The Grants Office was invited to participate the kick-off workshop of this inspiring, highly interdisciplinary project and would like to share this experience with you.
Interview with PRIMA Grantee Anne-Sophie Bories
Anne-Sophie Bories is one of the three SNSF PRIMA Grantees of the 2018 call. Her project “Le rire des vers” studies the interplay of humor and the versification in French literature, specifically poems, theatre and song texts. For her project, she will use methods from digital humanities to be able to analyze the huge text corpus in depth. The Grants Office interviewed Dr. Anne-Sophie Bories on this project, the application process for the PRIMA scheme and on the influence that digital humanities have on her project and on literature science in general.
SNSF Eccellenza: Deadline 1st February 20209
The next deadline for SNSF Eccellenza Professorial Fellowships and Eccellenza Grants is 1st February 2020. The SNSF requires a detailed letter of support from the Department and a confirmation from the Rectorate. A template for the department letter as well as a budget calculator for the calculation of project costs, can be found in the Grants Tool. In order for the confirmation from the Rectorate to be issued on time, we need to receive the support letter from the department and the grants tool entry by 20th January 2020.
ERC Consolidator Grants: Deadline 4th February 2020
ERC Consolidator Grants are open to talented researchers, with 7- 12 years post PhD experience, who have a strong scientific track record and an excellent research proposal. The next deadline is 4th February 2020: Call details and the link to the online submission system can be found on the ERC website. Applicants require a Host Commitment letter from the Vice President for Research, please contact the Grants Office if you plan to apply. We are happy to support you with your application and to provide you with further information.
Announcement: Open Access Fund starting in 2020
As of January 2020, the University of Basel’s Open Access Publication Fund will fund peer reviewed articles and book contributions in fully Open Access journals and books. Researchers can apply for up to CHF 2’500 for publications that cannot be claimed from the SNSF or Horizon 2020. Further information and the application form will be available on the University Library Website as of January 2020. For questions please openaccess@unibas.ch. Note that costs for Open Access monographies and anthologies can be applied at the SNSF regardless of whether the underlying research results were obtained in SNSF funded projects or not. Check the SNSF OA website for further information.
More Successes!
The Grants Office would like to congratulate:
- Marek Basler, Patrick Maletinsky and Dennis Gillingham for their ERC Consolidator Grants
- Walter Salzburger and Patrick Tschopp and Ilaria Zardo and Michel Calame for their Sinergia projects
- 13 grantees of the new SNSF programme Spark
- Jonathan De Roo, Ansgar Kahmen, Alexander Schmidt and Alfred Zippelius for their SNSF R’Equip Grants
- Christian Cajochen as participant in the Horizon 2020 ITN project LIGHTCAP
- the new participants in three Horizon 2020 collaborative projects:
- CANDY with Peter Scheiffele
- cmRNAbone with Andrea Banfi
- CURE with Markus Kalberer