FCT announced the results of Call Associate Laboratory Status

Today, February 24, FCT published the provisional results of Call the award of Associate Laboratory LA) status, in which 40 institutions or consortia of institutions were approved for the award of Associate Laboratory status. This Call the allocation of additional funding for specific LA activities of €23,843,000 per year, starting in 2021 and for a period of 5 years, which is in addition to the €53,469,000 per year already granted to the Research Units that are part of the LAs. The results are available hereand the evaluation reports here.

The LA are structural components of the National Scientific and Technological System and consist of research and development (R&D) institutions or consortia of R&D institutions that make explicit institutional commitments to pursue national scientific and technological policy objectives. To this end, these laboratories must have sufficient human resources and scientific infrastructure to enable them to promote scientific and technical careers for PhDs on a sustained basis.

Started in 2019, the process of granting AL status was prepared and conducted by FCT with criteria of transparency and the involvement of the scientific community, in which extensive informal discussions were held on the regulation of the process, culminating in a public discussion and publication of the Associate Laboratories Regulation on November 12, 2019.

The application process for this Call open on a rolling basis, with a single annual evaluation period. The applications now being evaluated were submitted between September 28 and October 29, 2020. R&D units funded by FCT with an Excellent or Very Good rating and a minimum of 80 PhD researchers integrated at the time of application were eligible to apply, either individually or in a consortium. Forty-five applications were submitted, covering a total of 118 Units and 10,088 integrated Researchers. The evaluation was conducted by a national panel coordinated by Manuel Nunes da Ponte with the collaboration of an international scientific council. All applications were presented and discussed publicly. (videos of the sessions).

The LAs approved in this evaluation exercise are spread across the entire country, and in the case of consortia, they may cover more than one region. There are 15 in the North, 7 in the Center, 15 in Lisbon, 2 in Alentejo, and 1 in Algarve.

By major scientific areas, the LAs are distributed as follows: Life and Health Sciences: 6; Exact and Engineering Sciences: 18; Natural and Environmental Sciences: 12; Social Sciences and Humanities: 4. Of the 40 LA coordinators, 13 are women (33%).