Seed grants
To encourage the development of interdisciplinary research at the interface between life sciences, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, physics, and computer science, the InLife Initiative is pleased to launch its ‘Seed Grants’ call. Four grants of 65,000 € over 2 years will be offered.
Opening of the call for applications: November 4th, 2025.
Submission deadline: January 6th, 2026, at 4 pm.
Four grants of 65,000 € will be offered.
Projects should concern one of the two strategic scientific axes of InLife:
Engineering for life
- Methodological developments: chemical or physical tools to probe or mimic living systems, nanomaterials for cellular targeting, instrumentation for single-cell screening, robotic tools, etc.
- Design of biological objects: bio-inspired systems, molecular programming, synthetic biology, biomechanics, microphysiological systems, etc.
Theoretical approaches to biological systems
- Modeling of biological objects: quantum chemistry, modeling of dynamic systems, individual-based modeling, etc.
- Mathematical tools and approximations: probabilistic and statistical methods, partial differential equations (PDEs), statistical analysis of emergent properties, etc.
- Computational tools: for processing and integrating multimodal and multiscale data, AI and statistical approaches, etc.
Conditions
The project will be presented by a person, referred to as the coordinator, holding a permanent position in a laboratory affiliated to the Sorbonne University Alliance.
If any, the partner will also hold a permanent position, and will be coming from a different team than that of the coordinator. The partner’s team will be affiliated to the Sorbonne University Alliance or to one university of the European University Alliance 4EU+ and its associated partners.
InLife encourages collaborative, risk-taking and original projects that should be designed for a period of 2 years.
Notes:
- Two people from the same team can participate in two independent projects
- One person can be involved only in one project
- A short CV of the coordinator (1/2 page), and the partner if applicable
- The project
- Title
- Abstract (250 words)
- Key words (up to 5)
- Context, State of the art, Objectives and Methodology (up to 3 pages, references not included)
- Detailed justification of the interdisciplinary dimension and the relevance to one of the two axes (up to 1/2 page)
- Financial requests
A single pdf file named ‘COORDINATOR NAME_Seed Grants 2026’ should be submitted by email initiative-inlife@sorbonne-universite.fr before January 6, 2025 at 4 pm.
The scientific evaluation panel in charge of the project selection will be composed of external peer reviewers, chosen for their scientific expertise related to the projects being evaluated. Each proposal will be evaluated by two members of the scientific evaluation panel. The evaluation criteria are the quality and originality of the scientific project, the strength of its interdisciplinary approach and the relevance to InLife strategic axes.
The selected projects will be funded up to a maximum of 65,000 € per project. The allocated funds will be available until the end of 2027. The following costs are eligible: staff expenses, instrument and material costs, outsourcing/subcontracting, mission expenses and travel costs.