60 of the winners are in social sciences and humanities and 18 are in applied and technical science fields. Eefje Hendriks, Lonneke Lenferink, Francis Kalloor Joseph, Tom Kamperman, Anastasia Lavrenko and Kirsten Pondman have secured a grant on behalf of the UT. The grants will allow each of them to further develop their research ideas over the next three years.
Awarding the Veni grants was thrown into considerable turmoil last year because of Covid and a big hack at NWO. This meant that the only grants that could be awarded in December were those in the exact and natural sciences (ENW), and in health research and innovation in healthcare (ZonMw) – 89 in total.
Preselection
In order to prevent unnecessary effort, NWO works with a shortened pre-proposal phase. The funding body then makes a first selection from that pool so that fewer researchers spend unnecessary time preparing and submitting extensive grant applications. Only the exact and natural sciences domain has not yet instituted this preselection phase.
A total of 1,280 applications were submitted across all four domains in 2021, of which 759 were submitted as full applications, mostly after passing NWO’s preselection phase. Of those, NWO has funded 167. This is 13 percent of the total number of submissions and 22 percent of the full applications.
The Veni grants are part of NWO’s Talent Programme. Junior researchers are eligible for a Veni grant, while senior researchers have access to the Vidi grant and those at the top of the field can apply for Vici funding grants.
