The announcement of funding decisions is expected for late June.

A major concern of discovery research calls is to make research careers more attractive to young researchers (i.e. under 40 years of age) in Hungary by encouraging them to start independent thematic research projects. In 2016 the NRDI Office made major changes to the system of discovery research calls to enable young researchers to compete for funding of their independent research projects under a dedicated funding scheme. Also this year, funding is provided to researcher-initiated thematic projects in two separate schemes based on the age criteria. The two sub-programmes received altogether 838 proposals with a funding request of over HUF 27.3 billion (EUR 89.5 million). Out of this, share of young researchers is around one-third, which corresponds to last year’s rate.

Similarly to last year, the Postdoctoral excellence programme (PD_18) provides support to the wage-like expenses of researchers starting their research career. This scheme received 202 proposals with a total funding request of over HUF 3.1 billion (over EUR 10 million).

The sub-programmes of the call for research projects based on international cooperation (NN_18, ANN_18, SNN_18) aim to promote basic research cooperation between domestic research groups and their foreign partners, strengthen the international embeddedness of Hungarian science, and increase the international recognition of domestic researchers and research institutions. The call, which had a total budget of HUF 1 billion (EUR 3.3 million), received 40 international cooperation project proposals and (under so-called lead agency agreements) 16 Hungarian-Austrian and 19 Hungarian-Slovenian joint project proposals, with a total funding request of HUF 2.7 billion (EUR 8.8 million).