Academy of Finland Newsletter, April 2012
The Academy of Finland newsletter keeps you updated on leading-edge scientific research funded in Finland and on other news from the Finnish world of science and research. If you want us to send this to someone else in your organisation or if you do not want to receive these newsletters in the future, please let us know at viestinta@aka.fi.
Features:
Finland and Sweden invest EUR 3.5 million in Nordic clinical medical research
EUR 13.7 million to Academy Projects in health research
Academy funding to research on neurodegenerative diseases
Academy and FAPESP sign cooperation agreement
Joint call: Academy of Finland and Hungarian Scientific Research Fund
Finland foremost country in Russian studies
Finland ranked as innovation leader in Europe
NIRPA final report published
Millennium Technology Prize in June
New brochure on Centres of Excellence in Research is out
Academy of Finland at a glance
Click on the links for more on these stories
Finland and Sweden invest EUR 3.5 million in Nordic clinical medical research
The Academy of Finland and the Swedish Research Council have granted a total of EUR 3.5 million to Finnish and Swedish researchers for bilateral clinical medical research. The three-year projects to be funded focus on topics such as the association between Pandemrix influenza vaccination and narcolepsy and the various treatment options for rheumatoid arthritis. The aim of the funding is to strengthen clinical research in Finland and Sweden with a view to maintaining the internationally competitive position and tackling the grand challenges faced by society. This is the first time that the two research funding agencies cooperate in this way within clinical medical research.
EUR 13.7 million to Academy Projects in health research
The decisions on Academy Project funding within the Academy of Finland’s September 2011 call have been made. Academy Project funding by the Research Council for Health totalled some EUR 13.7 million. The average funding per project was some EUR 430,000. In the September 2011 call, the Research Council received a total of 197 applications for Academy Project funding; 33 were granted funding. The number of applications increased by almost 25 per cent compared to the year before. The review panels, composed of foreign experts, found the scientific quality of the applications overall good. The applications scored with the highest grades were found competitive on an international level.
Academy Projects are the key funding opportunity provided by the Academy for research projects, designed to offer funding for projects where researchers themselves select the topics. Non-tied project funding is a way to guarantee renewal in scientific disciplines as well as the freedom of scientific research. Academy Project funding provides researchers with an opportunity to carry out scientifically ambitious research, to achieve new breakthroughs and to engage in high-risk research. Most of the funded research involves international cooperation.
Academy funding to research on neurodegenerative diseases
The Academy of Finland has awarded close to EUR 600,000 for research on neurodegenerative diseases. The funding is related to a pilot project within the Joint Programme in Neurodegenerative Disease Research (JPND) and was granted to Professor Hilkka Soininen from the University of Eastern Finland and Professor Juha Rinne from Turku University Hospital. Soininen and Rinne will receive EUR 398,500 and EUR 199,564, respectively, for their three-year research within the project BIOMARKAPD, Biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
Joint Programming is one of the EU Commission’s main initiatives in support of the European Research Area (ERA). It involves building a new approach with the aim of strengthening research funding collaboration and pooling national resources in Europe in the interests of addressing specific societal challenges. Joint Programming focuses on urgent European or global challenges that cannot be solved through national measures alone. Launched in 2010, the Joint Programme in Neurodegenerative Disease Research (JPND) was one of the first JP initiatives. The JPND Strategy was published in February 2012. The programme involves 25 countries.
JPND opened its first call in May 2011 under the theme “Neurodegenerative Diseases – a call for European research projects for the optimisation of biomarkers and harmonisation of their use between clinical centres”. The aim is to establish multinational, collaborative research projects that will add value to existing research through addressing novel approaches to improve and harmonise the use of biomarkers in the area of neurodegenerative disorders. Based on a scientific review, four research projects will receive funding worth more than EUR 15 million in total. BIOMARKAPD includes two Finnish research teams.
Academy and FAPESP sign cooperation agreement
The Academy of Finland has entered into an agreement on research funding cooperation with the State of São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). The agreement is the first step in research funding collaboration between the Academy and FAPESP. The collaboration, whose specific research themes will be defined later, is aimed at launching joint calls for research projects and supporting researcher mobility within the funded projects. The Academy and FAPESP also aim to organise joint seminars to promote networking between Finnish and Brazilian researchers.
With an annual budget of some USD 500 million, FAPESP is one of the main funding agencies for scientific and technological research in Brazil. The State of São Paulo is the most advanced of the 27 states of Brazil in terms of economy and industry. São Paulo accounts for 35 per cent of total GDP and about half of all research performed in Brazil (based on the number of scientific publications and doctoral degrees).
Besides FAPESP, the Academy has a cooperation agreement with the Brazilian research funding agency National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). The Academy-CNPq agreement was signed in 2006.
Joint call: Academy of Finland and Hungarian Scientific Research Fund
The Academy of Finland and the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA) are preparing a bilateral joint call in the field of linguistics to be opened in September 2012. Applications will be invited under the theme “The changing linguistic scenery in Finno-Ugric speech communities and its impact on society and culture”. Funding will be available to four-year joint projects between Finnish and Hungarian researchers. Submitted applications will be reviewed in the Academy’s panels, taking into account the added value generated by the Finnish-Hungarian collaborations.
Finland foremost country in Russian studies
Other countries should model their activities after Finland when developing research in Russian studies, a new survey says. According to the evaluation, carried out by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a scientific research centre, Finnish research in the field has extensive coverage and successfully combines economics, social sciences and research on popular culture and the media.
In an article published in the Norwegian newspaper Nordlys, Finland is commended for not cutting funding for Russian studies after the Cold War, as countries such as the United States and Germany did. The education of Finnish researchers in the field is particularly praised for the fact that – whatever the speciality of the researchers – Russian language and culture always form a part of their studies. Russian studies have been heavily invested in, which shows in Finland's activities in the EU, the article says.
The Academy of Finland has recently launched an action programme dedicated to Russia, coordinating high-quality Finnish research on Russia as well as long-term research collaboration between Finland and Russia. The Academy also provides funding to the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Russian Studies, which started its term in 2012. The Centre is based at the University of Helsinki and coordinated by the Aleksanteri Institute. It also includes researchers from the Department of Modern Languages and the Faculty of Social Sciences as well as the University of Tampere School of Management and the European University in St Petersburg.
Finland ranked as innovation leader in Europe
The 2011 Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) ranks Finland among the top four innovation leaders in Europe, together with Sweden, Denmark and Germany. These top four countries have performed particularly well in terms of business R&D activity and they can boast of good collaborations between the public sector and business and industry. The top four innovation leaders also effectively commercialise new technology and the results of R&D and are active in scientific publication.
As Samuli Rikama from Statistics Finland writes in the agency’s magazine Tieto&trendit, Finland’s strengths are concentrated around the human capital measured by education and publication output, around the economic support for innovation activity and around collaboration and entrepreneurship. In relative terms, Finland is less successful in operational profitability. In recent years, Finland’s knowledge-intensive exports have been on the rise, but are still below the EU average.
NIRPA final report published
The recently published final report of NIRPA, the Nordic Network for International Research Policy Analysis, focuses on current research policies and governance, international trends and the increasing search for efficiency, creating tensions with universities’ quest for autonomy. It also dives into the future, by speculating on the role of research and education. Finally, the report discusses the grand challenges facing society and how to best address them. NIRPA was a NORIA‐net funded by NordForsk with a number of Nordic participants: the Academy of Finland, RANNÍS of Iceland, the Research Council of Norway, the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research, the Swedish Research Council and the Danish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Higher Education.
The objectives of the NIRPA initiative were to enhance joint cooperation within research policy analysis and to promote understanding of how globalisation influences research funding systems in the Nordic countries in general. A possible outcome of NIRPA could be to form a virtual Nordic unit for research policy intelligence. More information is available online at http://forinn.no/post/2012/03/20/Final-report-from-NIRPA-The-Nordic-Network-for-International-Research-Policy-Analyses.aspx
Millennium Technology Prize in June
The Millennium Technology Prize is Finland’s tribute to life-enhancing technological innovation. The 2012 Prize Awarding Ceremony will be held on Wednesday, 13 June at 15.00–17.00 in Helsinki, where the two laureates, Linus Torvalds and Dr Shinya Yamanaka, will be celebrated and the winner of the Grand Prize will be announced. The total prize money is more than EUR 1 million. This year, the prize is also celebrating its tenth anniversary and, thus, the Millennium Technology Week in June 2012 in Helsinki will be packed with interesting events.
New brochure on Centres of Excellence in Research is out
“In the Forefront of Science” is the name of the brochure describing the Academy of Finland’s Centres of Excellence of Research for 2012–2017. The brochure presents each Centre and includes interviews with the researchers involved. Centres of Excellence are the flagships of Finnish research. They are at the very cutting edge of science in their fields, carving out new avenues for research, developing creative research environments and training new talented researchers for Finnish society, business and industry. The brochure is available in PDF format on the Academy’s website at www.aka.fi/publications and it can also be ordered by email from viestinta@aka.fi.
Academy of Finland at a glance
The Academy’s objective is to promote scientific research of a high standard through long-term quality-based research funding, research and science-policy expertise, and efforts to strengthen the position of science and scientific research. In 2012, the Academy will make decisions on research funding worth EUR 327 million. For more information, go to www.aka.fi/eng or send a message to maj-lis.tanner@aka.fi.