Seed grants 2027
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 for 2027. Four grants of 65,000 € over 2 years will be offered.
Opening of the call for applications: November 13th, 2026.
Submission deadline: January 11th, 2027, at 4 pm.
Publication of the results: February, 2027.
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 one of three following members of the Sorbonne University Alliance: Sorbonne Université, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (MNHN) et Université de Technologie de Compiègne (UTC).
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 also be affiliated to Sorbonne University, MNHN or UTC.
A coordinator or partner who was awarded a Seed grant from InLife in 2026 or a PhD contract from InLife & IPV in 2026 is not eligible for the present call.
We encourage collaborative projects between teams working in different fields in order to promote interdisciplinary approaches. In the case of a single-team project, the interdisciplinary dimension at the interface with the life sciences must be particularly well justified.
We will give priority to supporting emerging projects and new collaborations.
Notes:
- Two people from the same team can participate in two independent projects.
- One person can be involved only in one project.
- Holders of a "chaire de professeur junior" (CPJ) are eligible provided their contract does not end before December 31st, 2028.
- A short CV of the coordinator (1 page), and the partner if applicable, with a link to a ORCID or Google Scholar profile.
- 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 2027’ should be submitted by email initiative-inlife@sorbonne-universite.fr before January 11th, 2027 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 2028. The following costs are eligible: staff expenses, instrument and material costs, outsourcing/subcontracting, mission expenses and travel costs.