Education and Science, Estonia, Financial Services

The funding decision is to be approved by the board of the Research Council after entering into an administrative agreement with the Ministry of Education and Research.

In this round of applications, approximately a half more research projects as last year could be funded, while the percentage of success of the applications satisfied also rose significantly. Even though competition is still extremely strong and very strong research projects will be left without funding, the success of receiving a grant, that is ratio of the number of grants allocated in the number of applications, is higher than the year before for all types of grants, the Research Council said.

The volume of commitment over the whole period of projects is 39,826,550 euros.

During negotiations that followed the preliminary funding decisions, two applicants abandoned their grants and thus, the next in line for funding were awarded the grants.

Of all grant recipients, approximately a third were women and two thirds men. While the applicants and recipients of postdoctoral fellow and start grants are more or less in a good balance, which is considered to be a 40-60 distribution, the share of women among group grant applicants and recipients was much smaller -- altogether 28 % of applicants and 21 % of recipients were women.

"The problems starts from there being significantly fewer women among the applicants for a group grants, we encourage women to apply more for the group grant, as there is no other way to receive it," Siret Rutiku, head of the research funding department of the Estonian Research Council, said.

Altogether 14 postdoctoral fellow grants will be handed out, while the grants were mostly awarded for research at European research institutions and in the United States. Among the applications were target countries from Finland to New Zealand.