Again this year, 13 million CHF to competitive research
Institutional Communication Service
The past year has been fruitful for USI in terms of grants assigned to competitive scientific research. From 2014 to 2015, USI professors and researchers were awarded 13 million CHF. The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the European Union awarded 13 million CHF to USI professors and researchers. An amount consistent with the previous year and steadily increasing since USI’s foundation.
Given the direct competition with other universities and national and international research centres, this figure is a good indicator of USI good standings, since it was founded around the principle of research and teaching innovation.
About 13% of the total budget of USI (95 million CHF) is dedicated to research, a sum that is equal to other Swiss universities and sometimes above average.
4.8 million were granted to the Institute for Research in Biomedicine, 4.3 to the Faculty of Informatics, 1.9 to the Faculty of Economics, 1.4 to the Academy of Architecture and 0.8 to the Faculty of Communication Sciences.
Pretty relevant and almost symbolic are the two grants from the European Research Council (ERC), the EU body which finances outstanding researchers of all ages and nationality who wish to carry out cutting edge research in Europe or in countries associated with the UE including Switzerland (until 2017).
The ERC Advanced Grant programme assigned to prof. Michele Parrinello of the Institute of Computational Sciences a grant of 2.4 million for the project VARMET – Variational Metadynamics. The project aims at optimising the time needed for computational simulations in drug design and the study of new material. Two key areas in the field of pharmacology, engineering and nanotechnology.
