The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) are continuing their long-standing collaboration in the field of joint Sino-German research projects.
The initiative aims to bring together relevant and competitive researchers from Germany and China to design and carry out jointly organised research projects of outstanding scientific quality. Funding within this initiative will be available for collaborative research projects consisting of researchers from both partner countries. Within these research teams, each national funding organisation will generally only fund those project components that are carried out within its own country. The collaborative research projects must involve active communication and cooperation between the participating researchers.
It is important to note that there are no separate funds available for these efforts; proposals must succeed on the strengths of their intellectual merit and teams in competition with all other proposals in the funding programme “Sachbeihilfe/Research Grants”. The collaborative projects selected to take part in the initiative will receive research funding for a period of up to three years.
The present initiative is open to joint research projects in the fields of chemistry, life sciences, medical sciences and management sciences. A further call for proposals, dedicated to the fields of mathematics and physics, geosciences, engineering and material sciences and information sciences, is scheduled for launch at the end of 2021 with a tentative deadline in February 2022.
Applicants for a bilateral collaborative project within this call must submit their joint proposal to their national funding organisation. Chinese principal investigators (PI) submit their documents to the NSFC, German PI to the DFG, following the formal requirements of their respective funding organisations. All documents must be written in English. The documents submitted to the DFG and the NSFC must not differ with regard to the scientific content of the proposal or with regard to the applicants involved. More detailed information on the call including specific instructions for applicants in Germany are available in the full call text.
All proposals must be submitted by 3 March 2021 (for first-time users of the DFG’s online submission system “elan” pre-registration is necessary by 17 February 2021).
