SLU news

Call for cross-faculty “seed money” projects in breeding

Published: 27 June 2024

As part of the strategy to increase cross-faculty collaborations and to further strengthen breeding research at SLU, the SLU Breeding Network will financially support short-term innovative projects related to animal or plant breeding involving researchers from at least two of the four faculties at SLU: VH, S, NJ, and LTV.

General information

The network will support new and innovative collaborative projects running for one year by allocating “seed money” to successful applicants. Applications for high-risk pilot projects with the potential for attracting future external funding are encouraged. The projects must involve collaboration between researchers (minimum doctoral degree) from at least two faculties at SLU, and fall into the subject of breeding in a broad sense; including cultivar development, livestock breeding, phenotyping, development of genetic resources, domestication, technology development and/or studies of specific mechanisms.

A maximum of 200,000 SEK (with two faculties participating) and 300,000 SEK (with three or four faculties involved) per project can be applied for to cover materials, travel and other running costs. The projects can start in 2024 or 2025 and should run for a maximum of one year. All applicants need to be employed, on a scholarship or admitted at SLU during the time the project will run. The project budget will be paid to the main applicant's department in 2024.

The SLU Breeding Network will provide seed money to two or three projects. Applying for the seed money does not ensure its acceptance.

Application procedure

The application should contain a short description of the research project, including a motivation on how the project will strengthen the collaboration between the faculties. Granted projects must be novel, and grants will thus not be given for already established projects. Projects that previously received seed money from the SLU Plant Breeding Platform calls (2017 and 2018) are ineligible for additional funding. Researchers who got seed funding can reapply, but their proposal must be considerably different from the one that was previously supported. New collaborations are highly encouraged!

The proposals will be evaluated by four reviewers, one assigned from each of the four faculties. The deadline for applications is 30 September 2024. A decision will be made at the beginning of November 2024, and a final report must be submitted to the coordinator of the network, at the latest in January 2026. It is envisaged that the researchers who obtained funding from this call will provide a brief presentation of their findings in a workshop in 2025.

Facts:

The application must contain:

Project title, all applicants’ names and affiliations
A short project description (maximum two A4 pages), including how the project would strengthen interfaculty collaboration and its potential future impact, as well as an approximate timeline of the project duration and intended outputs achieved by the end of the project time.
Budget created by SLU’s project calculator for the applicant's related department. The budget sheet must be signed by the head of the respective department. Describe in the text how the money will be distributed to the remaining applicants.
Short CVs of applicants (maximum two pages per applicant)
Publication list from each applicant, a maximum of 10 publications relevant to the project proposal.

Send the application as a single PDF document to the coordinator of the SLU Breeding Network, Anna Maňourová (anna.manourova@slu.se).

The deadline for applications is 30 September 2024.

Further questions?

Please get in touch with network’s coordinator, Anna Maňourová (anna.manourova@slu.se), or Rodomiro Ortiz (rodomiro.ortiz@slu.se), the network’s chair.

Contact

SLU Breeding Network

Rodomiro Octavio Ortiz Rios (chair)
Department of Plant Breedig, Alnarp
Rodomiro.Ortiz@slu.se

María Rosario García Gil, (vice chair)
Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology, Umeå
M.Rosario.Garcia@slu.se

Anna Maňourová (coordinator)
Department of Plant Breeding, Alnarp
Anna.Manourova@slu.se

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