Academy of Finland grants €14.6m in Academy Project funding to support health research

The Academy of Finland’s Research Council for Health today decided to grant Academy Project funding for 36 research projects. The four-year funding totals 14.6 million euros. The Academy Project funding scheme provides researchers with funding to hire a research team.

Professor Mika Rämet, Chair of the Research Council for Health, said: “The most important decision criteria was the scientific quality of the proposed projects. We also focused on research impact and scientific renewal.”

The aim of the Academy Project funding scheme is to attain internationally as high a scientific standard of work as possible and to support scientific breakthroughs and top-tier international research collaboration. The leader of an Academy Project, the principal investigator, must have the qualifications of a professor or docent.

The application success rate (for applications submitted to the Research Council for Health) was 19.4 per cent. Following the September 2017 call, the Research Council for Health had 186 applications for Academy Project funding reviewed by 14 international peer review panels. High-level international peer review is the Academy of Finland’s key tool for identifying the best and most promising research projects.

The new Academy Projects will explore topics such as mechanical stress response and adaption in nuclei, the treatment of acute appendicitis, and the associative links between socioeconomic status, stress and health behaviour in preschool children.

Seven applications were granted shorter-term funding for two years. The aim of this funding is to support particularly innovative and high-quality projects, which have been identified by the review panel or the Research Council as containing risks that might be too great for a four-year funding period.

Mika Rämet said: “On the other hand, the projects had so much potential impact that we felt it was important to support them in starting their activities. We’re hoping that the two-year funding will allow the projects to advance to a level that will enable them to compete for longer-term funding. The Research Council has had excellent experiences with the results of this type of high-risk funding. For instance, the funding has increased the researchers’ chances of securing funding from the ERC.”

Academy Project funding is granted primarily to teams of researchers with doctoral degrees. The Academy of Finland encourages researchers in Academy Projects to engage in international mobility that will support the research, for example, so that researchers hired to the project work abroad for a fixed period. The project may also hire foreign researchers who already work or who will work in the Finnish scientific community.