Nederlandse organisatie voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek (NWO) – The Netherlands

NWO is the national research organisation of the Netherlands and funds more than 5000 scientists. NWO promotes quality by subsidising excellent research proposals submitted bottom-up by researchers, while also developing top-down thematic activities where required. Funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, NWO is responsible for prioritising research topics and for setting-up and implementing grant schemes. NWO offers a wide variety of funding schemes, opportunities and programmes and funds over two hundred new multi-annual research projects each year aiming at: bottom-up competition for excellent research proposals; initiating interdisciplinary, thematic research programmes in cooperation with other NWO divisions, public agencies, and the private sector; and investing in research infrastructure and large data bases. Both the Social Sciences by the means of the taskforce National Initiative Brain and Cognition and the Physical Sciences division of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) participates in the FLAG-ERA.

Division Social Sciences, National Initiative Brain and Cognition

The National Initiative Brain and Cognition (NIHC) is embedded in the NWO division Social Sciences as a specialized task force that aims at 1) excellent science, 2) promoting the transfer of knowledge to society and 3) increasing synergy and coherence in the research field of brain and cognition. NIHC is dedicated to enhancing and facilitating international cooperation by strengthening both European and global research cooperation, for example by contributing to the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF), the Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) on Neurodegenerative Diseases and the ESFRI initiative EuroBioimaging. NWO Social Sciences is one of the eight divisions of NWO with an annual budget in 2013 of approximately M €75. NWO Social Sciences has ample experience and specific expertise in the Management and Support of European programmes, for example in the ERA-NET NORFACE. NWO Social Sciences is dedicated to enhancing and facilitating international co-operation by strengthening European research co-operation, in particular by actively contributing to European partnerships. NWO Social Sciences has been actively involved in multiple European programmes such as ERA-NETs (e.g., coordinator of NORFACE II), JPI’s (e.g., Urban Europe) and ESFRI initiatives European Social Survey (ESS) and Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Increasingly cooperation with the United States, Canada, India and Brazil are taken forward.

Division Physical Sciences

The NWO Division Physical Sciences encourages innovative, fundamental, strategic and applied research in Astronomy, Computer Science and Mathematics. NWO Physical Sciences actively seeks contact with international initiatives to bring together the best research groups and researchers in the domain of the Physical Sciences.