Human impact on wild animals, why women suffer more often from autoimmune diseases, the importance of forests and vegetation for the climate and new technology for storing and processing digital data are some examples of research that is now awarded project grants by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
“23 outstanding basic research projects receive grants. For many years, the Foundation has urged the universities to have a more even gender distribution when nominating projects. This year, nine of the decided grants, 40 percent, have a female principal investigator, which shows that they have come a long way,” says Peter Wallenberg Jr, Chair of Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
The 23 projects, in medicine, natural science and technology, have, after an international evaluation process, been judged to have such a high scientific potential that they have the possibility of leading to future scientific breakthroughs.
“The evaluations are based entirely on international competitiveness and are conducted by a handful of prominent researchers in each project's research area. It is nice to see that there are so many projects in Sweden that maintain that quality and that more and more women are stepping forward as research leaders,” says Siv Andersson, responsible for basic research issues at the Foundation.
Since 2011, when Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation established the project grant form, until 2022, 273 projects with a combined budget of SEK 7.5 billion have been granted.
Grants in 2020:
(More information about the projects is available on the relevant university website)
Chalmers University of Technology
Project: Nanochannel Microscopy for Single Exosome Analysis
Grant: SEK 29,100,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Associate professor Elin Esbjörner
Project: Extreme Plasma Flares
Grant: SEK 26,200,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Tünde Fülöp
Project: Light strongly interacting with mechanical motion
Grant: SEK 27,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Associate professor Witlef Wieczorek
Project: Stable Doping of Organic Semiconductors
Grant: SEK 27,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Christian Müller
Karolinska Institutet
Project: Sex matters in autoimmune disease
Grant: SEK 39,100,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Marie Wahren-Herlenius
Project: Immunology human organ donor programme
Grant: SEK 32,200,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Associate professor Marcus Buggert
Project: Proprioceptive control of motor action sequences
Grant: SEK 32,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Dr Francois Lallemend
Project: Metabolic control at the stem cell’s point of no return
Grant: SEK 32,000, 000 over five years
Principal investigator: Associate professor Maria Kasper
Lund University
Project: Decoding Dynamics and Energetics of Allosteric Signaling
Grant: SEK 36,500,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Mikael Akke
Project: The molecular mechanism and thermodynamics of chaperone action
Grant: SEK 27,300,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Sara Linse
Project: Resolving the anti-tumor effects of tertiary lymphoid structures
Grant: SEK 31,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Göran Jönsson
Project: Entanglement and decoherence in ultrafast electron microscopy
Grant: SEK 26,100,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Associate professor Mathieu Gisselbrecht
Stockholm University
Project: Feedbacks between a changing climate and vegetation
Grant: SEK 31,100,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Associate professor Claudia Mohr
Project: Learning the molecular component of the cell
Grant: SEK 30,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Arne Elofsson
Project: Tuning into Dark Matter
Grant: SEK 27,500,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Dr Jon Gudmundsson
Project: A multidisciplinary assessment of human arrival on faunal biodiversity
Grant: SEK 26,700,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Anders Götherström
Uppsala University
Project: The Routes of Glioblastoma and their Patient-Specific Vulnerabilities
Grant: SEK 38,200,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Sven Nelander
Project: Harnessing orbital angular momentum for novel orbital electronics
Grant: SEK 36,100,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Peter Oppeneer
University of Gothenburg
Project: Unravelling the legacy of historical, emerging, and future groundwater pollution
Grant: SEK 30,200, 000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Isaac Santos
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Project: Light-matter interaction in the ultrafast regime
Grant: SEK 25,200,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Anna Delin
Project: From atom to organism: Bridging the scales in the design of ion channel drugs
Grant: SEK 27,100,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Dr Lucie Delemotte
Linköping University
Project: Turning the Air into an AI Computer
Grant: SEK 30,200,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Erik G Larsson
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Project: Decoding cell fate with positional information
Grant: SEK 32,200,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Stephanie Robert
Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation was established in 1917. The Foundation’s aim is to benefit Sweden by supporting Swedish basic research and education, primarily in medicine, technology and the natural sciences. This is achieved by awarding grants to excellent researchers and projects.
Around SEK 33 billion in grants has been awarded since the Foundation was established, with annual funding of around SEK 2,0 billion in recent years, making the Foundation the largest private funder of scientific research in Sweden, and one of the largest in Europe.