Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation is awarding SEK 900 million to 30 research projects that, following evaluations by international experts, have been judged innovative and at the forefront of international research.
The research spans a broad range of fields. Examples of the projects’ aims include energy- and data-efficient AI; understanding extreme floods shaped by both human activity and natural processes; improving our understanding of the mechanisms underlying fibromyalgia and psychiatric conditions; simulating the first galaxies; developing new materials to remove hazardous water contaminants; conducting studies to restore lost hearing; creating new magnets for emerging quantum technologies; and investigating various aspects of cancer.
“It is especially gratifying to see that 43 percent of the awarded projects are led by women. For many years, the Foundation has encouraged universities to achieve a more balanced gender distribution when nominating project applications. This now appears to be having an effect, as the outcome following international evaluations has been around 40 percent in recent years,” says Peter Wallenberg Jr, Chair of Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
Grants are awarded for basic research in medicine, the natural sciences, and engineering to projects considered capable of leading to future scientific breakthroughs.
“This is fundamental, independent, curiosity-driven research that will provide new knowledge but generally does not lead to immediate applications. Instead, it creates a foundation for further research that may ultimately result in new treatments, methods, or products,” says Siv Andersson, Deputy Executive Director of Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
From 2011, when Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation introduced the project grant program, through 2026, 334 projects have been awarded a total of SEK 9.2 billion.
2026 project grants:
(More information about the projects is available on the respective universities’ websites.)
Natural Sciences:
Project: Arctic lake productivity transformed under climate change
Grant awarded: SEK 26,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Ann-Kristin Bergström, Umeå University
Project: HYdrogen as CURRENcy – deciphering the multi-scale architecture and thermodynamic limits of the electron marketplace in microbial consortia
Grant awarded: SEK 33,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Associate Professor Courtney Stairs, Uppsala University
Project: SynPlant: Programmable plant-based materials
Grant awarded: SEK 26,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Associate Professor Eleni Stavrinidou, Linköping University
Project: Tipping points in protein–lipid co-assembly (TIPPOINT)
Grant awarded: SEK 25,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Emma Sparr, Lund University
Project: Decoding extreme floods driven by human–nature interactions (DecodeFloods)
Grant awarded: SEK 27,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Giuliano Di Baldassarre, Uppsala University
Project: Elucidating the design principles of distal control in rubisco catalysis
Grant awarded: SEK 27,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Johannes Messinger, Umeå University
Project: Filming the hidden workings of life at the atomic scale
Grant awarded: SEK 32,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Magnus Andersson, Umeå University
Project: Progressive nitrogen limitation as a driver of the boreal forest carbon sink (NitroLimit)
Grant awarded: SEK 26,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Michael Gundale, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Project: From groundwater to the atmosphere: the impact of hydrological extremes on methane production and emissions
Grant awarded: SEK 35,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Ryan Sponseller, Umeå University
Project: Enemy at the gates: how bacteria sense and defeat viral infection at their membrane
Grant awarded: SEK 36,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Vasili Hauryliuk, Lund University
Medicine
Project: Harnessing immune niches for efficient CAR-T cell therapy of brain tumors
Grant awarded: SEK 25,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Anna Dimberg, Uppsala University
Project: Do antibiotics, bacteria and gut mucosa together drive cancer development?
Grant awarded: SEK 25,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Dan Andersson, Uppsala University
Project: Regenerative blueprints for hearing restoration
Grant awarded: SEK 30,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Associate Professor Emma Andersson, Karolinska Institutet
Project: Neural Pathways for Motor Control: Structure, Synapses, and Behavior
Grant awarded: SEK 29,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Gilad Silberberg, Karolinska Institutet
Project: The Inflammatory Proteome–Protease–Peptidome (P3) Atlas: From Homeostasis to Pathology and Therapeutics
Grant awarded: SEK 30,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Johan Malmström, Lund University
Project: Decoding peripheral immune-muscle-metabolic pathways in fibromyalgia
Grant awarded: SEK 27,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Johanna Lanner, Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences
Project: Molecular Architecture of Tissue-Specific Insulin Resistance in Humans
Grant awarded: SEK 36,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Juleen Zierath, Karolinska Institutet
Project: Splicing Codes Controlling Brain Circuit Connectivity in Health and Disease
Grant awarded: SEK 37,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Rickard Sandberg, Karolinska Institutet
Project: Endogenous γdTCR ligands: the hidden regulators of γdT cell fate and function
Grant awarded: SEK 35,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Associate Professor Taras Kreslavsky, Karolinska Institutet
Project: Killing cAncer With URacil (KAWUR)
Grant awarded: SEK 25,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Thomas Helleday, Karolinska Institutet
Engineering/Physics
Project: Multimodal Representation Learning of Human Olfactory Perception
Grant awarded: SEK 28,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Danica Kragic Jensfelt, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Project: HYDRA: HYdration-Driven Regulation of Condensate Assembly
Grant awarded: SEK 28,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Foivos Perakis, Stockholm University
Project: Black-Hole Dynamics and Gravitational Physics
Grant awarded: SEK 30,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Associate Professor Henrik Johansson, Uppsala University
Project: Pushing the Frontier of Water Purification – Pioneering Multifunctional Materials and Methods by AI-guided Discovery and Smart Design
Grant awarded: SEK 32,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Johanna Rosén, Linköping University
Project: Stranger Things – from Hypernuclear Interactions to Neutron Stars
Grant awarded: SEK 37,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Karin Schönning, Uppsala University
Project: Nanoscale control of altermagnetism
Grant awarded: SEK 34,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Kimberly Dick Thelander, Lund University
Project: MUSIC – Mapping and Understanding Spatio-temporal adaptation In Cancer
Grant awarded: SEK 27,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Maria Tenje, Uppsala University
Project: New magnets for new quantum technologies
Grant awarded: SEK 28,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Olle Eriksson, Uppsala University
Project: AI Goes Efficient
Grant awarded: SEK 25,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Giovanni Volpe, University of Gothenburg
Project: Zooming into Cosmic Dawn
Grant awarded: SEK 24,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Oscar Agertz, Lund University
Contact:
Peter Wallenberg Jr, Chair, Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation
Phone: +46 (0)8-545 017 80
Email: [email protected]
Siv Andersson, Professor of Molecular Evolution and Deputy Executive Director of Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation
Phone: +46 (0)8-545 017 80
Email: [email protected]