Competitive funding to strengthen university research profiles (Profi 9), call for letters of intent

At the core of the Research Council of Finland’s activities is to provide funding for excellent scientific research. The research we fund is also expected to have high scientific and societal impact and follow the principles of responsible science.

The aim of the funding to strengthen university research profiles (Profi) is to support and speed up the strategic profiling of Finnish universities in order to improve the quality of research. The funding is fixed-term and may be granted to support profiling areas chosen by Finnish universities based on their strategy. The funding aims to boost the development of these areas.

Profi 9 funding will strengthen university research profiles by supporting the recruitment of researchers from abroad, for example from the United States, to Finnish universities. The funding is intended for the recruitment of researchers into posts at career stages 3 or 4 in the recruiting university’s profiling area.

The funding can cover both salary costs and other expenses. Researchers can be recruited into profiling areas that the universities have developed based on decisions taken by the RCF in previous Profi calls (Profi 1–Profi 8). The funding can be applied to one or several profiling areas.

Applications are invited from Finnish universities. Each university can submit one application to the first call stage (letters of intent). Consortium applications will not be accepted.

The application is started by a person authorised by the university. The completed application is submitted by the person via the Research Council of Finland’s online services. The applicant is responsible for the disclosure of the personal data contained in the application and, where appropriate, for requesting the consent of the parties concerned.

Special terms and restrictions

You must immediately notify us if you receive funding from other sources for the same purpose after you have submitted your application to us.

Funding will not be granted for the recruitment of researchers from Russia or Belarus. In RCF-funded projects, cooperation with individual Russian or Belarusian researchers and research teams can only be carried out if the instructions of the site of research, the sanctions against Russia and Belarus, the export control provisions, the travel recommendations of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs or other guidelines by authorities do not prevent it. Funding shall be granted and used in a way that respects the equal treatment of researchers, regardless of nationality.

An application will not be considered (processed) if the applicant or the application does not meet the competence requirements or other key requirements set for the call, or if there are otherwise no conditions for processing the case. A scientific council or another decision-making body may decide not to fund an application based on science policy objectives, or if it is apparent for some other reason that the applicant cannot receive funding with the submitted application. Read more: eligibility.

The RCF Board decides the criteria for the RCF's funding decision (in Finnish).

The call has two stages. The letter of intent submitted at the first call stage shall not specify the persons to be recruited, but justify the recruitment needs in the chosen profiling areas. Based on first call stage, the RCF will prepare for a maximum amount of funding that will allow the university to make a certain number of recruitments and corresponding employment contracts.

Each university can submit one letter of intent, describing the following aspects:

• How does the university plan to strengthen its existing profiling areas through new recruitment? If previous funding from the RCF to strengthen the profiling area has ended, the application should describe how the university has continued investments in the area.
• How many recruitments does the university plan to make, and in which profiling areas?
• How will talents recruited from abroad be integrated into the university community during and after the funding period?

The application consists of a form completed in the RCF online services and its PDF appendix.

As an applicant, you have the right to submit your application in Finnish or Swedish, but we ask that you to submit it in English to facilitate the international review.

When the call opens

• Sign up or log in to our online services. Check and update your personal details. Your up-to-date email address is important when we are in contact with you.
• Instructions on how to fill in the application form are available in the online services.

Application parts in the online services

The different parts of the application are listed below. A comprehensive A–Z index of application guidelines is available on our website. Instructions for filling in the application form are also on the tabs of the form.

• Personal data
  • Personal details of the person responsible for the application
• Site of research
  • Details on the site of research
  • Website of site of research
• Keywords in English and Finnish/Swedish
• Commitment by site of research. Read more: Commitment by site of research

Appendices to be appended on dedicated tabs:

• Action plan
  • Write the action plan on our template, which includes the structure and instructions for the plan. The action plan must not exceed five pages.

Submitting the application in the online services

You can submit the application when you have filled in or attached all the necessary information. A red warning triangle tells you that there is an error or information missing.

You can authorise a person to edit or view the application on the tab ‘Authorisation’.

Submit your application in good time. You can supplement and edit the application and change appendices until the call deadline.

The funding period will start on 1 January 2026 at the earliest and no later than 1 January 2027. The funding is fixed-term. Funding will be granted for a five-year period.

The Profi 9 call has a total budget of 50 million euros, which will be granted for measures supporting the research-related profiling of Finnish universities. The funding to be distributed through this call depends on Parliament’s decision to allocate the necessary funds in the 2026 state budget.

The letter of intent does not include a funding plan. In its decisions on first call stage, the RCF will prepare to grant a maximum of 2.5 million euros per recruitment. An exact funding plan will be included in the full application submitted at the second stage.

Funding will be granted under the full cost model, and the host university is required to contribute to the funding with at least 15%. Discretionary government grants cannot overlap. The funding of an initiated profiling area or measure may, however, be continued with a new Profi funding decision. The funding is granted to support the profiling measures specified in the action plan of the application. The RCF will not make advance payments on the funding.

The maximum allocation for one five-year funding period comes to 2.5 million euros. The funding is intended to cover the salary costs of researchers recruited from abroad and other expenses related to their research work. The researcher must work full-time at the applicant university and be placed at career stage 3 or 4 in the university’s profiling area. The recruited researcher and any research team will be based at a Finnish university and will work mainly in Finland. The funding period will not begin until the researcher starts working in Finland.

The recruitment should target researchers who, at the time of recruitment, are operating abroad on a non-temporary basis. Researchers can be recruited into profiling areas that the universities have developed based on decisions taken by the RCF in previous Profi calls (Profi 1–Profi 8). Each university can apply for funding to one or several profiling areas.

In addition to the recruited person’s own salary, the total costs may include the salaries of a research team and other research costs (“starter package”). In addition, the RCF’s funding can be used to reimburse costs of moving to Finland, provided that the practices of the site of research do not prevent this.

The RCF’s funding may be used to cover, for example, the following direct research costs:

• salary costs of researcher recruited to Finland
• research team salaries
• other costs of carrying out the research
• travel expenses (incl. expenses for moving to Finland in line with practices of site of research)
• costs of integration into Finland and the Finnish research environment
• collaboration and mobility in Finland
• international collaboration and mobility.

RCF funding cannot be used for economic activity. Read more: Economic operator.

Only for compelling reasons can government grants be awarded to cover salary costs in cases where the applicant has obstacles related to illegal employment, as referred to in section 7(2) of the Finnish Act on Discretionary Government Grants.

Research team salaries

As a rule, research team staff hired with RCF research funding and supervised by the recruited researcher must have an employment relationship. We recommend that they be hired for a period of employment no shorter than the funding period, unless a shorter contract is necessary for special reasons dictated by the implementation of the research project. Short-term research, studies or other assignments (max. duration six months) may also be carried out in the form of outsourced services.

Instructions on job titles at different stages of the research career.

What is required from the site of research?

The site of research is a Finnish university.

We require that the site of research provides the research project with all necessary basic facilities. These are determined based on the nature of the research and are the same as those available to other research staff at the site: office and laboratory premises, equipment (incl. computer equipment), and telecommunications, telephone, mailing, copying and library services.

The costs of ensuring immediate open access to peer-reviewed articles are included in the overheads of the site of research. The costs associated with storing and sharing research data are regarded as overheads for the project’s site of research. Only exceptionally and for justified reasons can they be accepted as research costs to be covered by RCF research funding. The site of research also commits to ensuring that the data management plan can be implemented at the site of research, and that the measures to be taken comply with good data management practice. After a positive funding decision, the site of research will also approve the data management plan of the project.

When accepting the funding, the site of research is responsible for ensuring that necessary statements and permits from ethics committees have been obtained before the start of the project. The site of research is also responsible for ensuring that the applicant has not been found guilty of research misconduct in the last three years.

How to submit and supplement the application

The deadline is non-negotiable. We will not consider (process) an application that has not been submitted by deadline. The first call stage (letters of intent) closes on 22 May 2025 at 16.15 Finnish time.

The second call stage (full applications) opens on 29 October 2025. The decisions on the second stage will be made in two parts. First, applications submitted by 26 November 2025 will be decided in January 2026. Second, applications submitted by 13 May 2026 will be decided in June 2026.

Make sure to submit the application in good time before the deadline. The system will only accept applications that contain all obligatory information. The applicant is responsible for ensuring that the content of the application appendices is correct.

You can edit and supplement the application until the deadline. For example, you can change the appendices to the application. If you notice that your application lacks important information after the deadline, immediately get in touch with us via our helpdesk, so that the application can be reopened for supplementation. Once the review process has started, supplementations can no longer be taken into account. The review will start two working days after the call has closed.

We may ask you to supplement the application. In that case, you will receive a supplementation request by email. If you do not supplement the application by the given deadline, or if the application is substantially incomplete even after a request for supplementary information, we may declare it inadmissible (i.e. it will not be processed). Make sure that your email address is up to date.

How the application becomes pending

According to section 17 of the Finnish Administrative Procedure Act and section 8 of the Act on Electronic Services and Communication in the Public Sector, the sender is responsible for the application arriving by the set deadline. An application becomes pending when the online application and the obligatory appendices have been submitted in the online services. The system will confirm a successful submission by sending an email to the address you have provided.

Publicity and data protection

The letter of intent and its appendices will be public documents after the decisions have been taken. This publicity is based on the Finnish Act on the Openness of Government Activities. We are committed to following regulations on data protection.

The applicant is responsible for the disclosure of the personal data contained in the application and, where appropriate, for requesting the consent of the parties concerned. The GDPR-compliant privacy notice concerning the research funding process is available on our website under Data protection.

RCF funding is granted based on peer review. We mainly use foreign experts as reviewers.

Letters of intent are peer-reviewed by international experts. The experts will assess the feasibility and expected impact of the recruitment plan in the selected profiling areas, as well as the measures described in the application for the long-term integration of the recruited researchers into the Finnish scientific community.

The fundamental principles of the review are transparency, integrity, equity, competence and diversity.

Review criteria

Applications will be reviewed under the following criteria:

• expected impact of planned recruitment(s) on strengthening selected profiling area(s)
• convincingness and feasibility of recruitment plan regarding schedule, risk management and follow-up
• convincingness and feasibility of plans to promote successful integration of researcher(s) into host institution
• convincingness of plans for longer-term retention of recruited researcher(s).

See the review questions and guidelines on our website.

At the first call stage, based on the applications, the written review reports and the objectives of the funding scheme, the General Subcommittee appointed by the RCF Board will decide how many recruitments the RCF will be prepared to fund at each university. The RCF may be prepared to fund all or only part of the planned recruitments. The maximum funding available is 2.5 million euros per recruitment.

The decisions will be made taking into account the relationship between the funding applied for from the RCF and the university’s profiling measures and overall research funding, as well as the criteria for RCF research funding decisions and other guiding policies. The decisions on the first call stage (letters of intent) will be made in June 2025.

As an applicant, you will receive an automatic email message after the decision has been made. After receiving the email, you can log in to the online services with your user ID to view the decision and its justifications. There you can also read the review report(s) on the application.

Universities based on whose letters of intent the RCF has made budgetary reserves will be invited to submit their full applications at the second stage of the Profi 9 call. In the full application, the university will apply for funding for recruitments that have been confirmed by the application deadline, according to the reserves made by the RCF after the first call stage.

Each university can carry out the recruitments for the second stage as they choose.

In the full application, the university applies for funding with one application per person to be recruited. The full application shall include a precise budget based on the employment contract concluded or to be concluded with the person to be recruited and other eligible expenses. The maximum funding for the five-year funding period comes to 2.5 million euros.

Funding plan

As a rule, research funding granted by the Research Council of Finland is co-funding. The RCF’s contribution to the funding is up to 85%of the total costs, and the site of research (host organisation) will cover at least 15% of the total costs.

The funding plan in the full application shall describe the following aspects:

• cost estimate, including an estimate of the annual amount of funding needed, itemised by type of expenditure
• annual expenses, spread equally (e.g. 85%/15%) over all funding years
• all funding granted for the project as well as funding that will be provided by the site of research if the project is launched.

Only costs that pass through the books of the site of the research must be included in the total costs.

The full application must also include the overheads percentage, indirect employee costs and coefficient for effective working hours of the site of research. The site of research maintains these in the online services under the site’s details. The information is provided as percentages.

When the site of research is a university or a research institute, as a rule, the funding must be applied for VAT included. Consult the financial administration at the site of research for more information. RCF funding may also cover VAT costs, but only on certain conditions (see Value added tax and read more in our funding terms and conditions).

In the case of Profi 9 funding, you can deviate from the annual instalments set out in the decision’s cost estimate by notifying the deviation in the RCF’s online services. Applications for an extension of the funding period can be made in accordance with the criteria set out in Appendix 1 to the RCF funding terms and conditions.

The guidelines for the second call stage will be specified and confirmed in the second stage call text, which will be published at a later date.

Based on the budgetary reserves defined after the first call stage, the General Subcommittee appointed by the RCF Board will make the funding decisions on the second call stage for those recruitments that meet the conditions set out in the call. The funding will be granted to the universities and not to the individual researchers themselves.

The funding decisions will be taken in January 2026 for full applications submitted by 26 November 2025 and in June 2026 for applications submitted after that date.

You will receive an email notification after the funding decision has been made. After receiving the email, you can log in to the online services with your user ID to view the decision and its justifications.

• Contact us primarily via the helpdesk (select ‘Application guidance, thematic calls’).
• Technical issues with the online services? Contact us via the helpdesk (select ‘Online services and other technical questions’).
• Our telephone number (switchboard) is +358 295 335 000.
• The RCF has separately invited the universities to an information meeting about the call. Following the meeting, the presentation material will be made available on our website.