Horizon Europe is well underway, but the world of European R&D policy goes well beyond the confines of the €95.5 billion R&D programme. EU climate, digital, agriculture and regional policies all have significant research and innovation components. National governments often come up with new R&D policies, decide to fund new research avenues, and set up international cooperation deals. This blog aims to keep you informed on all of that and more.
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Finland has opened for researchers a hybrid service connecting its first quantum computer 5-qubit HELMI, developed by the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, to the pan-European supercomputer LUMI, created by the Finnish CSC-IT Center for Science for the first time.
A call is now open for research organisations and Finnish university users willing to participate in pilot projects to experiment with hybrid quantum computing for various uses.
Quantum computers are potentially extremely powerful at specific tasks but might behave unpredictably and need supervision by classical computers.
By connecting 5-qubit HELMI to LUMI, the idea is to allow hybrid computing projects, boost quantum algorithms and software developments and understand the potential of this technology in the real-world.
The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is set to make all of its 44 fully-owned journals open access in the next five years.
This will make the RSC the first chemistry publisher to commit fully to open access, as it follows a wave of publishers and policymakers around the world pioneering open access policies. Most recently, the US mandated all federally funded research to be publicly available.
Over the course of the next year, RSC plans to work with their partners and community to implement the new policy, starting by submitting its portfolio of hybrid journals to the Transformative Journal Programme of cOAlitionS, a European-led research funder partnership committed open access publishing.
Eystein Jansen and Jesper Svejstrup have been named the new vice-presidents of the European Research Council’s (ERC) governing body.
Jansen, professor of paleoclimatology at the University of Bergen, will preside over the EU’s prestigious frontier research fund’s activities in the physical science and engineering , while Svejstrup, biochemist and deputy chairman at University of Copenhagen, will be responsible for the life science domain, starting 1 January 2023.
Both incoming vice-presidents have been members of the ERC Scientific Council made up of 22 distinguished scientists since 2019, helping set out the strategy for the fund and selecting peer review evaluators.
High-level representatives of the Swiss and German education and research ministries met in Bern this week to discuss closer collaboration on education, research, and innovation as well as Switzerland’s potential future association with Horizon Europe and Erasmus +.
The series of meetings, which took place on 26 and 27 October, marked the 15th occasion that delegations from the two countries’ ministries have come together.
The discussions revolved around international research cooperation and further higher education collaboration between the countries.
The possibility of Switzerland joining Horizon Europe, the European framework programme for research and innovation, was also brought up. Germany is one of the biggest proponents of Switzerland joining Horizon Europe, but progress has been stalled due to disagreements between Bern and Brussels over matters such as the Swiss contribution to the EU’s cohesion budget, access to the single market and free movement of people.
More details are available here.
The first 85 judges who will preside over the EU’s newly established Unified Patent Court have now been chosen, a big step forward for the court whose foundation has been hampered by Brexit and legal challenges by the German constitutional court.
The court will be led by the German Klaus Grabinski, elected as president of the Court of Appeal, and Florence Butin of France, chosen as president of the Court of First Instance.
The court will act as the main institution to safeguard and enforce a single patent system within the EU.
The idea is that it will simplify the process of getting patents within the EU, bringing down costs for researchers, scientists and inventors. The court will be the main institution to protect and enforce patents in the EU.
There are currently 24 EU countries in the Preparatory Committee of the court. The UK was a member but dropped out in 2020 after Brexit.
Read more about the appointment of the new judges here.
INSPIRE, a new €5 million Horizon Europe projects, aims to create a sustainable centre of excellence for inclusive gender equality in research and innovation.
Women still have a hard time achieving top positions in academia and research. While they make up half of all European doctoral graduate, only 30% of researchers are women and few of them reach the top of the academic ladder.
The project aims to contribute to countering the trend by combining cutting-edge knowledge, ambitious political approaches and innovative practices to enable academics, equality experts and practitioners to share and create resources in partnership with public and private research institutions.
"The aim is not just to conduct research on equality, but also to provide more practical support for those institutions that are implementing gender equality plans and actions," said Rachel Palmén, coordinator of the new INSPIRE project, led by the Open University of Catalonia.
The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded grants worth a total of €295 million to 29 multidisciplinary research groups.
Nearly 360 proposals entered the first ERC Synergy Grants call under the EU’s Horizon Europe programme. The funding will help groups of two to four researchers bring together complementary skills, knowledge and resources in one ambitious project.
The funded projects involve 105 principal investigators who will carry out their research at universities and research centres in 19 countries across Europe and beyond.
The grants, each worth around €10 million, will help create some 1,000 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students, and other staff in the grantees' research teams.
The European Commission’s Health Emergency and Preparedness Response Authority (HERA) and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) have agreed to strengthen cooperation and information exchange on end-to-end vaccine research and development, manufacturing capacity and capacity building.
EU health commissioner Stella Kyriakides said the cooperation deal will ensure that EU’s health emergency agency gains access to CEPI’s expertise on emerging diseases and international vaccine development. “Collaboration is how we achieve the best protection for Europeans and citizens globally,” she said.
Both sides will exchange information on research, development, manufacturing, and other priorities relevant for medical countermeasures. The letter of intent is available here.
The Commission is supporting CEPI financially via grants under the HERA Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe budget.
The health Knowledge and Innovation Community of the EIT has announced €3 million in funding for Bonescreen and NIB biotec start-ups to develop and establish their businesses over the next two years.
Each company will get up to €1.5 million in investment, mentoring and coaching, and access to EIT Health’s expansive network of investors and innovators across Europe. The funding is part of EIT Health’s Wild Card Programme.
Bonescreen aims to translate two decades of research in medicine and AI into a medical software that would produce automatically generated reports to help healthcare professionals identify the early signs of cancer.
NIB biotec is working on a smart biosensor to diagnose prostate cancer. Using urinary molecules, the solution aims to make the diagnostic path of prostate cancer more efficient by minimising time in hospitals.
Applications for next year’s Wild Card Programme will open soon.
US and Swiss officials, at a meeting in Washington Wednesday, agreed to increase collaboration in quantum information science and technology. In a statement, the White House said their “joint statement” on quantum “builds upon the nations’ shared democratic values and the strong bottom-up collaborations that exist between QIST researchers from the two countries.” It didn’t immediately provide more details.
The announcement, however, is part of a broader US effort to boost collaboration on quantum technologies with its diplomatic partners around the world. Finland, for instance, recently agreed to step up cooperation in the field, and last May President Joe Biden met at the White House with quantum experts from 12 allied nations. The technology is expected to revolutionise the speed and power of computing globally, but could also compromise online security everywhere.
At the same time, Swiss representatives – due to a trade dispute, cut out of full membership in the European Union’s Horizon Europe R&D programme – have been circling the tech world trying to step up collaboration with other nations in several fields.
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