22 December 2016
From 1 January 2017 onwards the current Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) will form a new organisation together with other NWO units. The FOM Governing Board took the final decision for this transformation on 21 December 2016. FOM will continue to exist as a legal entity, with new articles of association and a new name, the Foundation NWO Institutes. Nine institutes will eventually reside under this. The awarding of grants to Dutch physics will continue within the new NWO Science Domain. The name FOM will therefore disappear after 70 years.
15 December 2016
NWO is currently undergoing major changes. It is acquiring a clearer and more coherent structure at both the administrative and organisational levels. As a result of that it will be better equipped to optimally carry out its core tasks of funding scientific research in the Netherlands, stimulating innovation in research, and managing eight national research institutes both now and in the future.
13 December 2016
Today the research facilities that will be given top priority in the world of Dutch science in the coming four years were announced. State Secretary of Education, Culture and Science Sander Dekker accepted the Roadmap for Large-Scale Scientific Infrastructure containing the 33 selected facilities and clusters during a presentation in The Hague. The facilities on the Roadmap are eligible for NWO funding. Eighty million euros is available to be distributed among these facilities every two years.
11 November 2016
In the CAS-NWO Programme – Joint Research Projects: The Future of Brain and Cognition, four projects have been selected for funding. The Sino-Dutch research teams are led by two excellent researchers from both countries and will perform innovative research about the relationship between the brain and cognition. A total of 1.5 million euro is available in this programme.
14 October 2016
Maureen van Eijnatten (25) from VU University Medical Center has won the Young eScientist Award 2016. The prize aims to stimulate a young scientist demonstrating excellence in eScience: the development or application of digital technology to address scientific challenges.
5 October 2016
University of Groningen researcher Bernard Feringa has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016. He shares the prize with the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Sauvage and the American researcher James Fraser Stoddart. They were awarded the prize for the design of molecular machines . Ben Feringa works at the University of Groningen and is chair of the NWO Chemical Sciences Board. In 2004, he received an NWO Spinoza Prize for his contributions to this field of reasearch. NWO warmly congratulates Feringa on this outstanding achievement.
13 September 2016
Today four top researchers received the NWO Spinoza Prize from the State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science, Sander Dekker and NWO chairman Jos Engelen. The award ceremony was held at the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague. The Spinoza Prize is the highest award in Dutch science. During the awards ceremony physical-organic chemist Wilhelm Huck, philosopher Lodi Nauta, internist/infectious disease specialist Mihai Netea and nanophysicist Bart van Wees presented their plans for using the research prize worth 2.5 million euros per person.
31 August 2016
The board transfer at the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) will take place on 1 October 2016. The current Governing Board will then transfer the governance responsibility to the new director professor Stan Gielen and Caroline Visser. They will jointly form the Governing Board until the new Executive Board assumes its responsibilities with effect from 1 January 2017. The change of governance is part of the transition towards a new NWO.
20 July 2016
Dealing with research data responsibly is part of good research. Therefore all calls for proposals that NWO publishes after 1 October 2016 will contain a data management protocol. In this protocol, NWO will ask all researchers who apply for funding to think in advance about relevant data that their research will yield and how they can share this with other researchers. NWO will ask researchers awarded funding to produce a concrete plan for storing their data and making this reusable.
19 July 2016
NWO is making 3 million euros available for a Replication Studies pilot programme. In this programme, scientists will be able to repeat research that has been carried out by others. The pilot focuses on replicating studies that have a large impact on science, government policy or the public debate. This is the first special funding programme in the world for the repetition of such ‘cornerstone research’. With this initiative NWO wants to facilitate innovation in science and encourage researchers to carry out replication research.
