Within the open public call for Special research program on COVID-19, the Science Fund will finance 14 projects from the following fields: 11 from the Biomedical, 2 from Economics, sociological, psychological research and management of complex systems and 1 project from Biomedical engineering, and IT in the total amount of almost 2.000.000EUR.

The aim of this Program is to finance projects that will contribute to the efficient scientific response to COVID-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and enable better preparedness and the timely reaction of the whole society to this pandemic. This Program includes the development of applicable solutions while supporting applied scientific research, the creation of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary teams, and project applications made by consortiums. This program is inciting the projects that can offer solutions that actively contribute to the fulfilment of the goals of this Program the fastest.

Because of the importance of this subject and urgency to have the project proposals prepared, evaluated, and ready for realization as soon as possible, this Program allowed submission of a short project proposal in the first phase, followed by the submission of the whole proposals in the second phase, only for projects that received sufficient amount of points according to all defined criteria, that is, the ones ranked within the double amount of the defined budget. The open call lasted until 11.06.2020 with 129 short project proposals submitted, 126 of these proposals went to the first phase of the evaluation, after the administrative check, with 26 best-ranked proposals going into the second stage of the evaluation. These 26 project teams worked on the submission of the whole project proposals that were sent into further evaluation, in the period of 22. July to 12. August, 2020.

The Executive Board of the Science of Fund had the final say and officially adopted the proposed ranking list with 14 best-ranked project proposals that were positively evaluated in both evaluation phases.

The Science Fund will finance 14 projects in the total amount of 1.975.435,71 EUR. The minimal amount per project is 46.866 EUR with the maximum amount per project up to 406.612 EUR.

Leading SRO in the project proposals were mainly from Belgrade (13) with one from Kragujevac (1), together with partner SROs form Belgrade, Novi Sad, Kragujevac, and Novi Pazar.

Within the Special research program on COVID-19, total of 131 scientists from SROs from Belgrade, Novi Sad, Kragujevac, and Novi Pazar will be working on the approved project proposals.

The final ranking list of the approved projects can be found on the following LINK.

The projects PIs will receive the official evaluation of their projects via email tomorrow.

The start of the realization of the projects is expected during the second half of October 2020 and the necessary funding will be provided through the World Bank loan, the SAIGE Project. We wholeheartedly congratulate all scientific teams whose projects have been approved and we thank all participants of this public call for their interest and effort.