The initiative is a bilateral funding measure by two funding bodies: the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). The programme succeeds the former Joint Research Projects funded by the Sino-German Center for Research Promotion.
The initiative aims to bring together relevant and competitive researchers from Germany and China to design and carry out jointly organised research projects. Funding within this initiative will be available for collaborative research projects consisting of researchers from both partner countries. Within these research teams, each national funding organisation will fund as a rule only those project components that are carried out within its own country. The collaborative research projects must involve active communication and cooperation between the participating researchers. The collaborative projects selected to take part in the initiative will receive research funding for a period of up to three years.
The objectives of the initiative are:
- to promote high-quality research projects in the participating countries
- to stimulate mobility of researchers between the participating countries
- to promote training of researchers to accelerate the exchange of new scientific knowledge among researchers and between researchers and other interested group
The initiative is open to joint research projects in all fields of the natural, life, management and engineering sciences.
The call for proposals is open to researchers based at universities, academic institutions and research centres in Germany and China. Funding is available for bilateral collaborative research projects comprising researchers from the two participating countries. Within a research project, contributions from Germany and China should be roughly balanced with regard to scientific contents.
Applicants of a bilateral collaborative project within this call must submit their joint application to their respective national funding organisation. Chinese applicants submit their documents to NSFC, German applicants to DFG, following the formal requirements of their respective funding organisation. All documents must be written in English. Please note that the documents submitted at DFG and NSFC must not differ with regard to the scientific content of the proposal.
All proposals must be submitted by 7 March 2018.
