Studies of the Arctic climate in a year-round perspective, alternatives to quantum computers and studies of nerve cells to understand changed emotion and cognition with autism, are what some of the 18 projects that receive funding from Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation are about.
Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation has granted a total of SEK 541 million to 18 outstanding basic research projects in medicine, science and technology that are considered to have the opportunity to lead to future scientific breakthroughs.
“What is extra gratifying about this round is that 60 percent of the projects that have been granted funding are led by women. The applications that the universities have prioritized in previous years have had significantly fewer female main applicants, it shows that the universities have now heeded our call for a more even gender distribution and that the female principal investigators pass the international evaluation at least as well,” says Peter Wallenberg Jr, Chair of Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
With this year's call, Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation has during the years 2011-2020 granted funding for 218 basic research projects totaling SEK 6.8 billion.
Grants in 2020:
(More information about the projects is available on the relevant university website)
Medicine:
Project: ”Anger Management: Neuronal Network Organization, Plasticity and Sex-Specificity in Aggression and other Social Behaviours"
Grant: SEK 20,400,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Christian Broberger, Stockholm University
Project: ”Adipose tissue senescence and metabolic disease in man”
Grant: SEK 31,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Dr Kirsty Spalding, Karolinska Institutet
Project: ”Vascular organotypicity in health and disease”
Grant: SEK 38,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Lena Claesson-Welsh, Uppsala University
Project: ”Brain circuits in decision-making”
Grant: SEK 32,200,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Docent Marie Carlén, Karolinska Institutet
Project: ”Developmental trajectories for human B-cells”
Grant: SEK 39,200,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Qiang Pan-Hammarström, Karolinska Institutet
Natural sciences:
Project: ”Multilevel efficiency of bird flight: Generating vortices to travel the world”
Grant: SEK 22,900,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Anders Hedenström, Lund University
Project: ”Year-round climate feedbacks of winter phenological (mis)matches of plants and microbes across the Arctic”
Grant: SEK 28,900,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Docent Ellen Dorrepaal, Umeå University
Project: ”Decoding cell fate with lineage-tracing in utero transduction”
Grant: SEK 40,100,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Dr Emma Andersson, Karolinska Institutet
Project: ”Decoding bacterial toxin-antitoxin systems: from high-throughput discovery to molecular mechanisms and biotechnology”
Grant: SEK 29,600,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Dr Gemma Atkinson, Umeå University
Project: ”Development of new therapeutic strategies based on the discovery of ZC3H11A - a stress-induced protein required for efficient virus growth”
Grant: SEK 25,000,000 over three years
Principal investigator: Professor Leif Andersson, Uppsala University
Project: PlantEra: ”Biomolecular and structural comparisons of ancient and modern plants– tools for tracing phylogeny and survival strategies during mass extinctions”
Grant: SEK 28,600,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Vivi Vajda, Swedish Museum of Natural History
Technology/physics/mathematics:
Project: ”Creation of heavy elements in neutron-star mergers”
Grant: SEK 29,600,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Docent Andreas Heinz, Chalmers University of Technology
Project: ”The 2D-Materials Frontier”
Grant: SEK 29,000,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Johanna Rosén, Linköping University
Project: ”Metasurface-Emitting Lasers: Tomorrows Light Sources for Applied Photonics”
Grant: SEK 38,100,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Mikael Käll, Chalmers University of Technology
Project: ”Type Theory for Mathematics and Computer Science”
Grant: SEK 34,700,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Thierry Coquand, University of Gothenburg
Project: ”The Origin and Fate of Dust in our Universe”
Grant: SEK 27,700,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Kirsten Kraiberg Knudsen, Chalmers University of Technology
Project: ”Combining intense extreme ultraviolet and relativistic electron pulses”
Grant: SEK 25,600,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Per Johnsson, Lund University
Project: ”Galactic Time Machine”
Grant: SEK 20,400,000 over five years
Principal investigator: Professor Sofia Feltzing, Lund University
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.
More than SEK 29 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.