The Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA) has announced the results of the first edition of the NAWA Chair programme. Five scientists with international renown will come to stay at Polish universities.
The NAWA Chair programme offers universities and other scientific institutions a long-term financial package from NAWA that covers the stay of a foreign scientist of world renown as well as funding for fundamental research from the National Science Centre (NCN).
NAWA prestigious grants have been awarded to five universities
The funds, amounting in total to more than PLN 10 million, will cover the costs of remuneration for the scientists and the members of the project groups they will establish.
‘Thanks to NAWA grants, scientists of great renown in their disciplines have the opportunity to stay at Polish universities for three to four years and carry out research projects as well as teach classes as guest professors,’ says Dr. Grażyna Żebrowska, Director General of the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange. ‘This is how NAWA supports the internationalisation of science and higher education. We expect that the guest scientists will create good research teams that will achieve groundbreaking results and that they will help Polish scientific centres win more grants and improve their recognisability around the world,’ Dr. Grażyna Żebrowska adds.
Apart from remuneration, the guest professors are also granted the so called research component. The research component is funded by the National Science Centre (NCN). The total amount of funding from the NCN for the research component is approx. PLN 1.6 million.
Visiting scientists with NAWA guest professorships
The first edition of the programme was directed at higher education institutions and other scientific entities that carry out research in the areas of humanities as well as social and theological sciences. The visiting scientists are going to commence their stays at Polish universities in 2021.
Prof. Emilian K. Kavalski from China will be guest professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He is going to carry out a project in the field of international relations titled ‘Promoting Order in the Period of Turbulence.’
Prof. Francis Harvey from Germany is going to visit the University of Warsaw. His project in the area of the humanities is titled ‘Places, People, Events: Innovative Research on Geohumanities to Support Interpretation and Elucidation.’
Prof. Guillaume Thierry from the UK has undertaken to carry out a project on bilingualism titled ‘Releasing the Power of the Foreign Language: Cognitive Foundations of Strategic Language Use and the Foreign Language Effect.’ The institution he is going to visit is Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.
The University of Wrocław, in turn, is going to welcome Prof. Robert Rollinger from Austria, who is going to carry out a research project on Middle Eastern empires: ‘From the Achaemenid to the Roman Rule: the Empire in the Context – the Processes of “Long Lasting.”’
Prof. Georgiy Kasianov from Ukraine is going to visit Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin and conduct a project involving an analysis of history politics in modern Europe after 1989. It is titled ‘Seeking the Past: Politics of Memory in the United Europe and Its Surroundings (Actors, Actions, Results / Late 1980s–2020).’
The second edition of the programme will be announced in April 2021
It will be open to all scientific domains. In addition, the new call will provide for the possibility to invite to Poland also foreign scientific institutions’ staff members who are Polish citizens.