The annual call for proposals for project grants allows researchers to formulate their research questions freely within Forte’s areas. The purpose is to enable researchers to analyse and contribute to the understanding of a specific research area or question.
What can you apply for? Three year project grant for research about health, working life and welfare.
A NIAS Theme Group is an (international) team of two to four researchers who collaborate on a specific research topic for five consecutive months. While each researcher pursues their own individual project, they also contribute to the team’s collective research efforts. Theme Groups are established either through an application process or may be initiated by the NIAS director.
The Fellowship call (for the 2027–2028 academic year) is open from 15 January 2026 until 16 March 2026, 12:00 noon CET.
A programme initiated by the Max Planck Society (MPG), jointly managed with the National Science Centre in Poland (NCN), and mutually funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (MNiSW) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
The COP21 Paris Agreement recognises the role of cities and calls on them to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change. The EU is committed to implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including Sustainable Development Goal 11 ("Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable"). Many forward-looking cities have set themselves climate goals whose achievement rests on wide scale roll out of highly integrated and highly efficient energy systems.
The transition to a circular economy entails a systemic transformation of entire value chains, covering design, production and consumption phases, so that the value of products, materials and resources can be maintained in the economy for as long as possible, while reducing environmental impact. It also aims at increasing material productivity, including de-materialisation, and exploring new representations and practices of property for individuals and collectives. Such a deep transformation is unlikely to happen suddenly and would rather follow some transition processes and pathways.
Forest fires are a major hazard in Mediterranean Europe and increasingly so in Central, Eastern and Northern European countries. There is a limit in our capacity to deter fires, particularly mega-fires when conditions are most severe. This is the result of unbalanced management strategies and policies that can be effective in fire suppression under normal weather conditions but are insufficient to deal with extreme events such as mega-fires. Areas at risk from forest fires are projected to increase by 200% in Europe by the end of the 21st century, in particular due to climate change.
Emissions of pollutants in air are a major concern worldwide, due to its direct consequence on human health, as well as its additional impacts on climate. In the EU, air pollution is estimated to cause 400 000 premature deaths per year, with cities producing more than 70% of greenhouse gases world-wide. Urban citizens, due to the concentration of population and sources of pollution in densely populated areas, are particularly vulnerable. Actions aimed at air quality improvement contribute, in many cases, also to reduction of GHG and other airborne pollutants emissions.
Global warming and the need for CO2 reduction drives a search for new lower carbon ways of moving: old modes of transportation seem no longer sustainable in the long term. When thinking about the future of mobility, changes in mobility are usually addressed in terms of technology.
Europe's urban areas are struggling to develop themselves into well-connected multimodal and multi-usage nodes for smart and clean mobility. Multiple trends affect urban and inter-urban areas: urban growth, densification, digitalisation, increasing pressure from freight movements and a shift to a service-oriented economy. Moreover, many European cities and regions areas are committed to develop into zero-emission areas.
Innovative solutions in the fields of connected and automated transport, shared mobility, inter-modality, etc. are being deployed or tested for wide-scale implementation, re-shaping mobility and affecting the operation and business models of the transport sector. These changes result in the emergence of new stakeholders and services, new types of data (in particular ‘Big Data’), new risks and socio-economic impacts.