New winners from ELTE at the CELSA competition

Initiated by the University of Leuven, the Central Europe Leuven Strategic Alliance (CELSA) network was established in Prague in May 2016 to support cooperation between partner universities in joint research activities. One of the conditions of the CELSA Research Fund's annual call for application is that projects must involve at least two researchers from different partner institutions, one of whom must be from the University of Leuven. The long-term goal of the programme is to ensure that the projects supported are successful in other call for applications by pan-European research and innovation funds.

In 2020, the CELSA Research Found have published the call for application for the fifth time. This year, the organization has supported 16 research collaborations, three of which have participants from ELTE:

• Gábor M. Kovács, Professor, Head of the Department of Plant Anatomy, Faculty of Science, will work on a project called Discovery of novel bioactive natural compounds from symbiotic microorganisms (DiNoBiNaC);
• Tamás Scheibner, Assistant Professor at the Department of Modern Hungarian Literature, Faculty of Humanities, will work on the project ÉMIGRÉ EUROPE. Civil Engagement Transfers between Eastern Europe and the Low Countries, 1933–1989;
• Petra Varró, Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology and Neurobiology, Faculty of Science, will work on a project called the Excitation-inhibition imbalance in autism-epilepsy comorbidity, a preclinical and clinical study.

ELTE has been successful in the CELSA call for applications for a while now: in 2017, projects by Tibor Jordán and Ádám Miklósi, in 2018 Gábor Sonkoly and Orsolya Réthelyi, in 2019 Krisztina Szécsényi (Faculty of Humanities) and Attila Krajcsi (Faculty of Education and Psychology), and in 2020 Zoltán Novák (Faculty of Science) received funding. The list of all projects funded by CELSA is available here