The initiative aims to bring together relevant and competitive researchers from Germany and China to design and carry out jointly organised research projects of outstanding scientific quality. 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 generally only fund 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.
It is important to note that there are no separate funds available for these efforts; proposals must succeed on the strengths of their intellectual merit and teams in competition with all other proposals in the funding programme “Sachbeihilfe/Research Grants”. Applicants to be funded by the DFG are required to fulfil the eligibility requirements of DFG Research Grants. This includes the duty to cooperate (“Kooperationspflicht”) within Germany for members of non-university institutions with permanent positions.
The collaborative projects selected to take part in the initiative will receive research funding for a period of up to three years.
Research areas
The present initiative is open to joint research projects in the fields of mathematics and physics, geosciences, engineering and material sciences, and information sciences. A further call for proposals, dedicated to the fields of chemistry, life sciences, medical sciences and management sciences, is scheduled for launch at the end of 2020 with a tentative deadline in February 2021.
Submission of project proposals
Applicants for a bilateral collaborative project within this call must submit their joint proposal to their national funding organisation. Chinese principle investigators (PI) submit their documents to the NSFC, German PI to the DFG, following the formal requirements of their respective funding organisations. All documents must be written in English. Please note that the documents submitted to the DFG and the NSFC must not differ with regard to the scientific content of the proposal or with regard to the applicants involved.
All proposals must be submitted by 12 February 2020 (for first-time users of the DFG’s online submission system “elan” pre-registration is necessary until 29 January 2020).
