Career Grant for Early-career Researchers

The Career Grant for Early-career Researchers call gives you as an early-career researcher the possibility to improve your leadership skills, run your own project, and contribute to the clear advancement of the state of knowledge within Formas’ areas of responsibility. It is also meant to contribute to the next step in your career. The Career Grant aims to broaden your perspectives, help you to become more independent, and enable you to take the next step in your career. This is done by taking on a new or partially new focus for your research compared with your previous work.

To expand your opportunities for improved career development, your project should include national or international mobility to other research environments. The mobility is intended to improve your abilities and opportunities to contribute to research relevant to society and of the highest scientific quality. It should also contribute to new impressions, ideas, and perspectives, preferably in, for you, new or partially new subject areas. Your research mobility and the project in general should also expand your networks and your skills in cooperating and collaborating with others.

Knowledge creation is a complex process, created under widely varying conditions, timeframes, methods, and publication patterns. There are a variety of ways of pursuing a research career, all of which can lead to research of high scientific quality. As applicant, you are given wide-ranging flexibility to design the project and the mobility according to the conditions and needs of your field of research.

Focus Areas

• Granted research by Formas must belong to one of Formas’ areas of responsibility: Environment, Agricultural Sciences, and Spatial Planning. The call encourages questions about policy instruments, regulations, and political decisions, but also about norms, values, and behaviours that touch on perspectives cutting across all of Formas’ areas of responsibility. This includes questions considering the conditions and needs of different groups, so that the project can contribute to knowledge that is reflective of and relevant to different groups in society.
  • Environment
    • The area of responsibility Environment deals with the interaction between people and the environment and the promotion of sustainable societies and viable ecosystems. Research can cover issues relating to climate, the environment, oceans and water, biological diversity, ecosystem services, resource efficiency, and a chemical-safe future.
  • Agricultural Sciences
    • The area of responsibility Agricultural Sciences deals with the overall topics of forestry, agriculture, land use, food systems, animal health, and animal welfare. Questions about the interaction between humans and the biological and physical geographical resources on land and in water that they depend on for the life on this planet are fundamental for the area. Within the forest area, the role of forests and forestry is central to several societal goals.
  • Spatial Planning
    • The area of responsibility Spatial Planning deals with urban, rural and regional planning, design, and construction of the built environment, as well as the use, management, recycling, and demolition of buildings, homes, places, landscapes, and infrastructures. It also deals with the relationships between places, buildings, and social functions, how they are used, and how people move from one place to another.

How much can you apply for?

• 1.5 million SEK per year on average over the years applied for. Funding can be applied for three or four years.

What can you apply for?

• Research projects where you formulate your own question within Formas’ areas of responsibility: Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning.
• The call includes requirements for national and/or international mobility.
• For this call, co-applicants are not permitted.

The Intended Target Group for the Call

• Formas Career grant is aimed at individual researchers early in their career and their home organisation.

Who can apply?

• Early-career researchers. The call has two tracks:
  • Career age 0–3: for those who received a doctorate (degree certificate issued) no earlier than 1 January 2021 and no later than 1 October 2024.
  • Career age 4–7: for those who received a doctorate (degree certificate issued) no earlier than 1 January 2017 and no later than 31 December 2020.
• The administrating organisation must be a Swedish university, institute of higher learning, or other administrating organisation approved by Formas.

For more information, visit Formas.