Academy of Finland grants close to €36 million for 15 research infrastructures

The Finnish Research Infrastructure Committee at the Academy of Finland has decided on nearly 36 million euros in funding for the building and upgrading of national and international research infrastructures. The funding will be divided between 15 research infrastructures.

Of the total funding granted, 20 million is based on the European Union’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) and Finland’s Sustainable Growth Programme. The Academy granted RRF-based funding to eight topflight research infrastructures that met the criteria set for RRF funding. The RRF-funded projects promote the goals of the green transition and digitalisation.

The RRF funding was granted to support research on the aquatic environment (marine research, hydrology, ice and wave formation), atmospheric and environmental research, food research, linguistics and language resources research, and quantum and high-performance computing services. In all, 8 million euros of the RRF funds was allocated to support research related to digitalisation. The RRF funding was conditional on compliance with the ‘Do No Significant Harm’ principle, whereby the projects must not cause significant harm to the environment.

In addition to the RRF-based funding, the Academy of Finland granted nearly 16 million euros in FIRI research infrastructure funding for seven research infrastructures. The FIRI funding will support public opinion research, the research environment for future wireless communications technologies, management of data in health and life sciences, medical imaging, open spatial information systems, understanding of forest dynamics, and the digitalisation, management and open distribution of species data.

The Finnish Research Infrastructure Committee is set to make more funding decisions on 31 January 2022 based on the FIRI research infrastructure call that was open in spring 2021.

The Academy of Finland provides funding for the acquisition, establishment, strengthening and upgrading of nationally significant research infrastructures that promote scientific research.