More than 3,000 research proposals were submitted for these two competitions this year.
“The Presidential research funding program was introduced by the Russian Science Foundation in 2017 on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Its main tasks are to provide a long-term support for the projects of leading researchers at their early career stage and to create career paths for promising young researchers so that they can build their own independent research teams and pursue their best ideas at the frontiers of knowledge. During the implementation of the program, the RSF has funded almost 4 000 projects, these are both individual postdoc projects and projects of youth groups. Youth-tailored funding programs are invariably very popular among young scientists; on average, we support every fourth project,” RSF Deputy Director General Andrei Blinov commented the outcome.
Russian Science Foundation has also finalized the review of interim scientific reports submitted by the youth research group leaders who received grants in 2018. Based on the recommendations of the RSF Expert Council made on the basis of the scientific review of the interim reports, the RSF board decided to discontinue funding of 15 projects due to the failure of the respective project investigators to fulfill their obligations with regards to their scientific plans and publications of the research results. 21 project investigators received early-warnings from the Expert Council referring to somewhat lack of performance and scientific progress in their interim grant reports. Project investigators of the projects terminated will be banned for three years for submission of other proposals to the RSF.