[staff-physics-and-astronomy-HL-UHD-UD] Announcement of a NWA quantum/nano funding opportunity

[Beta NAT Secretariaat]

Announcement of a NWA quantum/nano funding opportunity

Dear colleagues, here is an announcement of a funding opportunity within the quantum/nano area of the "National Science Agenda" (NWA) program. Our route can identify a few "innovative projects" for funding by NWO: size between 50 k€ and 150 k€, duration up to 24 months. We have a total budget of 300 k€, so enough for two or three proposals.

We have had similar calls in the past, what has changed now is that the engagement of society needs to be much more intense: while in the past we could add an outreach component as societal engagement, now the engagement has to be pro-active: NWO speaks of "co-design and co-creation" of the research by societal partners. How this is implemented will be field specific, it need not be "citizen science", but it is clear that NWO want to see societal engagement at an early stage of the project.

To promote this, NWO now also insists that the project lists a specific societal stakeholder as "collaborator". A collaborator is not an applicant, they can not receive salary costs, but they can receive material budget.

Many restrictions for a relatively small grant, indeed. But you can think of this as a small fish to catch a much bigger fish: We wish to use this call for proposals to collect ideas for a much bigger NWA funding opportunity: The "NWA ORC" thematic grant for consortia, which may award over 6 M€ to a collaboration that addresses a quantum/nano theme with a major societal component.

We will run the innovative project call in two rounds, preproposal and full proposal. For the preproposal we only need two pages of text, which describe:

1) applicant + societal stakeholder
2) brief description of the project (in the general area of quantum/nano science), focusing on its innovative character
3) expected scientific and societal impact
4) how will societal organizations and/or citizens be engaged pro-actively in the project, in the design and/or the execution
5) requested budget, duration

The preproposals will be evaluated by the quantum/nano coordinators (listed below); preference will be given to proposals that could form a pilot for a NWA ORC theme. Selected preproposals will then be expanded into a full proposal, to be submitted to NWO. They can still reject a selected proposal if it does not satisfy their requirements.

Please submit your preproposal to <beenakker at lorentz.leidenuniv.nl<mailto:beenakker at lorentz.leidenuniv.nl>> before May 25, 2024. We then expect to have made a selection by mid-June. Full proposals have a 12 September deadline, NWO decides in February 2025.

Feel free to email us with questions.

The quantum/nano coordinators:
Carlo Beenakker, Albert van den Berg, Julia Cramer, Ronald Hanson, Gijsje Koenderink
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