The Nessling Foundation’s 2016 call for grants showed how widely environmental challenges and their solutions are understood in the research field today. Thank you to everyone who submitted their applications by the deadline and the warmest congratulations to grant recipients! The projects that received funding can be seen here.
The Nessling Foundation’s general call for grants had two parts in 2016. The Foundation’s board awarded the grants for personal PhD and post doc work, as well as for the communication of environmental information on 21.11.2016. The two-part project funding call’s decisions will be made on 20.12.2016.
The board awarded 2 191 805.73 euros of grants altogether for research and communication projects promoting environmental protection for the year 2017. In addition to this, the Foundation received 319 applications in total and 110 project grant applications (the results of which will be announced in December). Funding was awarded for 82 projects, of which 45 were continuations for PhD and Post doc projects. The grant award rate for new applications in November’s awards was just 10 percent.
We emphasized post doc research in the call. We received 128 post doc project applications, of which 41 in total were funded. Sixteen of these were new projects (the grant award rate for new post doc projects was thus 13 percent).
We received a total of 160 PhD project applications, of which 44 projects were funded. Ten of these were new PhD projects (the grant award rate for new PhD projects was 6 percent).
The expert committee reviewing the applications in autumn 2016 had especial praise for carefully written communication and interaction plans. The standard of applications improves each year, and unfortunately many excellent projects that met all our criteria could not be funded.
Our expert committee rated the applications based on the following criteria, released in the application announcement:
- The societal relevance and solution-orientation of the results
- The scientific standard of the research and research group
- The innovativeness of the research
- The cooperation between researchers/research groups/organisations
- Communication of the research and interaction with stakeholders (especially knowledge users)
- The training environment (if the grant was sought for PhD work)
Special attention in the assessment of applications was paid to the solution-orientation and communication and interaction plans of the projects.
Projects that failed to receive funding may have done so due to, for example, the following policies announced in the application instructions:
- Each research group/fellow may only submit one research project application, and a new research project will not be granted funding if the group/fellow currently has a Nessling project in progress.
- The Foundation awards funding for the employment of assistants or travel expenses only alongside personal grants.
- The Foundation does not award funding for the finishing of PhD work or another project. Projects eligible for funding must be under halfway complete.
- Attention was also paid to the mobility of researchers this year.
