Just before Christmas, the Research Council of Norway confirmed funding of the Interdisciplinary Researcher Project (Fellesløftet). This is an initiative where the Research Council contributes with a larger allocation in a joint team with the host institutions. Together they fund large research projects that work interdisciplinary to produce new knowledge that would not be possible to achieve without this interdisciplinary collaboration.
Researchers at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences were awarded the following four projects:
- CBA leader Dag O. Hessen from the Department of Biosciences with partners from the same department, the Department of Geosciences and the Department of Chemistry received support for a project focused on biogeochemical processes governing boreal C cycling.
- Nadia Larsen from the Department of Mathematics with partners from the same department and the Department of Physics starts a project to quantum computation and many-body theory.
- Thomas Plagemann and Vera Goebel from the Department of Informatics with partners from the Faculty of Medicine and Oslo University Hospital will use machine learning to study responsible explainable machine learning for sleep-related respiratory disorders.
- Are Raklev from the Department of Physics with partners from the same department and the Department of Mathematics will developing solvents for unclogging the calculational bottleneck in high-energy physics.
In addition, the following researchers from our Faculty are partners in these three projects led by the Faculty of Medicine:
- Eivind Hovig from the Department of Informatics is a partner in the project Polygenic and psychosocial interplay in brain development across mental disorders led by Ole A. Andreasen.
- Andreas Carlson from the Department of Mathematics is a partner in the project Biophysics of double bilayer membrane compartments with Irep Gözen and Harald Stenmark.
- Ørjan Martinsen from the Department of Physics is a partner in the project SmartSense: Decoding metabolic and epigenetic disorders caused by adolescence sleep deprivation’led by Philippe Collas.
ERC Success
The European Research Council (ERC) is a special program in the category of excellent research funded by the EU. The ERC aims to promote scientific quality and bold and innovative research on the international research front by investing in the best researchers and the best ideas. These are prestigious awards in international top class.
The MN Faculty had as many as six researchers in the ERC Starting Grant final and was awarded two:
- Eivind Andreas Baste Undheim from CEES at the Department of Biosciences is the project leader for the VenomEvolvability project.
- Andre Laestadius from the Hylleraas Center at the Department of Chemistry is the project leader for the REGAL (Regularized density-functional analysis) project.
In addition, we have four finalists for the ERC Consolidator Grant and one for the ERC Advanced Grant. The Advanced Grant finalist and three of the finalists of Consolidator Grant belong to the Department of Geosciences, which manifests its position as one of Europe's foremost geosciences institutions.
Our Geosciences Seventh Best in Europe
The Nature Index also recently ranked UiO's research in geosciences in seventh place in Europe and in third place outside the United Kingdom, only beaten by ETH-Zurich and the University of Utrecht. Geosciences is a common term for subjects that study the earth: first and foremost geology, geochemistry, geomorphology, glaciology, hydrology, meteorology and geophysics. These subjects are particularly strongly linked to the Department of Geosciences, but also across the academic environments at the Faculty. The ranking confirms our internationally strong research environments and supports the Faculty's strategy of being among Europe's leading research environments. Read more about the geosciences ranking at Titan.uio.no (only available in Norwegian).
The Research Council of Norway’s Evaluation
In 2022, the Research Council of Norway's third subject evaluation will take place. Here, the focus should be more on 'strategic institutional development' than in previous evaluations, and a description of 'organizational conditions that can hinder or promote research' is requested. The societal relevance of research also seems to be given a greater role than before. The Research Council further wants the evaluation to provide a 'basis for a substantial assessment of the research's content'. It is unclear exactly what lies beneath this request. What seems clear, however, is that this evaluation should inspire us to a basic discussion of which factors (both internal and external) that promote good research both at MN and at UiO as a whole. First out is Natural Sciences, which in the Research Council of Norway's categorization does not include Life Sciences.