Research

The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, SSF, funds research in science, engineering and medicine via grants totalling approximately SEK 600 million annually. This amount will be increased to SEK 1 billion annually starting in 2018.

The Foundation funds Swedish research via research group grants, individual grants, graduate schools and grants to promote greater mobility.

Research group grants are grants in the order of SEK 25-30 million distributed over five years. The calls for proposal are formulated slightly differently each time, and we aim for a good mix among our priority areas (see below). The total allocation for a research group grant varies between SEK 100-300 million and is then sufficient to fund 4-10 major research projects.

SSF has three programmes to promote mobility: Industry Doctoral Student,  Research Institute Doctoral Student, which is new, and Strategic Mobility. Calls for proposals are issued every year for all three programmes, with grants totalling more than SEK 60 million annually.

One programmes aimed at young successful researchers is Individual Grants for the Advancement of Research Leaders (FFL). Each recipient of an FFL grant gets SEK 12 million in order to establish an independent and innovative research group. FFL grants are announced every third year.

At present, SSF is sponsoring one graduate school, the Neutron Scattering Graduate School, which SSF will fund for 5-6 years in the amount of SEK 120 million, and which is expected to train and graduate roughly 20 doctoral students in neutron scattering. An additional SEK 100 million has been set aside for an extension. This venture should be viewed in the light of the fact that ESS, the European Spallation Source, is being built in Sweden.

Priority areas

High-priority areas for SSF are:

• Biotechnology, medical technology and other Life Science Technologies
• Materials Sciences & Technologies
• Information, Communication & Systems Technologies