What is a Pioneer Center
The establishment of the Pioneer Centers is an ambitious national undertaking initiated by the Ministry of Higher Education and Science and developed in close cooperation (and co-financing) between the Minister, the Danish National Research Foundation, the Carlsberg Foundation, the Lundbeck Foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Villum Foundation and the universities.
The overall framework
The ambition is to attract the very best individual researchers from around the world and to establish three or four co-funded world class research centers that carry out basic research aimed at transformative solutions to major societal challenges.
The Pioneer Centers will be given considerable freedom in terms of their research, financial continuity, and a long-term grant period. Using these resources, the Pioneer Centers, during the grant period, are expected to continuously carry out well-defined, high-risk sub-projects that have a particularly high potential to pioneer the research area at the highest international level.
Subject areas
The Pioneer Centers are intended for all research fields.
A steering committee with representatives from the involved foundations has selected two broad subject areas; artificial intelligence and climate/energy, that, combined, provide an opportunity for all disciplines to be of relevance:
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Description of theme for the Pioneer center initiative: Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The ambition behind the Pioneer Center initiative is to establish excellent research units that carry out fundamental research aimed at providing transformative solutions to major societal challenges.AI has the potential to solve a wide range of societal challenges and will most likely alter parts of our society significantly over the next decades. AI will transform both industries and human lives and interaction, improve health care, reshape the job market, boost growth and environmental sustainability, but also potentially cause challenging transitions, alienation and raise concerns regarding ethics and safeguarding of private data.
Harvesting the full potential of AI is contingent on research within all fields, on procuring knowledge that will encompass the complexity involved in the vast applications of AI.
Examples of research fields that will be of importance for a positive transformation of our society by AI:
- Theoretical foundations of AI
- Develop novel, efficient, sophisticated, secure, privacy preserving and ethically sustainable algorithms
- Artificial intelligence in a systems perspective, learning in interaction with the environment
- High performance computing for AI applications
- Data availability, causal relations, uncertainties
- Robotics and automatization
- AI for next generation health care
- Omics technologies, interpretable machine learning, deep learning, precision- and preventive medicine, diagnostics
- AI for energy and climate data analysis
- Clean energy materials, energy distribution and consumption, sustainable transport
- Prediction of climate change and necessary interactions
- Human-centered AI
- Integration of human psychology, ethics, behavior, culture, creativity, democratic institutions, business innovations and other human aspects in the application of AI technology
- AI in politics, private organizations, and the public sector
- Crisis response (migrations crisis, natural and man-made disasters, disease outbreak)
- Language/image processing and AI communication
- AI and security/privacy
- AI and the future of work and skills
- Theoretical foundations of AI
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Description of theme for the Pioneer center initiative: Climate/Energy
The ambition behind the Pioneer Center initiative is to establish excellent research units that carry out fundamental research aimed at providing transformative solutions to major societal challenges.
Our greatest societal challenge is probably that of solving the current impact of energy consumption on the global climate with all the ramifications that has.
Under the Paris Agreement, the world’s countries are committed to cut climate-warming carbon emissions significantly in order to meet the 1.5°C Paris Agreement goal.
The decarbonization challenges are closely connected to all research areas related to the green transition; these include the production, storage and supply of renewable energy and reuse of materials, economic incentives, regulatory instruments, technology push, and human behavior.
Examples of research fields that will be of importance to meet the current goals for carbon emissions:- Energy storage and transmission
- New battery and catalysis technologies
- Synthetic fuels and chemicals
- Artificial photosynthesis
- Functional materials with relevance for energy storage and transmission
- Carbon capture, transportation and storage
- Reducing the rate of climate change by controlled biological processes
- Sustainable energy production
- Wind turbines, solar cells, alternative energy production methods
- Nuclear power, associated safety and responsible waste handling
- Biofuels and turning waste into fuels
- Functional materials with relevance for energy production
- Efficient conversion of alternatively produced energy into electricity
- Energy systems
- Energy supply, planning, infrastructure, migration and mobility, data management
- Smart grids
- Energy market models
- IT based solutions for optimizing energy systems
- Innovation and optimization of energy storage and conversion capacity of systems based on water
- Energy and society
- Mediation of green transition by regulatory instruments and economic incentives
- Sustainable cities, smart cities
- Optimizing energy use in food production and industry
Examples of research fields that will be of importance to understand and counteract human-induced climate change:
- Climate in the Arctic and in the oceans
- Effect of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystems
- Predictions of local and global climate in the light of current and future carbon emissions, including the effect of global feedback mechanisms on the world’s climate
- Energy storage and transmission
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- Jens Kehlet Nørskov, the chair of the board of the Danish National Research Foundation (Chair of the steering committee)
- Thomas Bjørnholm, Director of Science at the Villum Foundation
- Jan Egebjerg, Senior Vice President, Grants & Prizes, Director of Science at the Lundbeck Foundation
- Lene Oddershede, Senior Vice President the Novo Nordisk Foundation
- Søren-Peter Olesen, CEO of the Danish National Research Foundation
- Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, CEO of Carlsberg Foundation
Anchoring at Danish universities
Each Pioneer Center must be linked to one or preferably more Danish universities, which, in close cooperation, will form an environment where – in addition to the main objective of levering Danish research environments – the focus is on educating the next generation of top researchers through research-based teaching and initiatives aimed at exceptionally talented students. Thus, to a large extent, the centers are expected to be integrated into the host institutions by, among other things, involving students at the bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. levels.
The center leader/PI
A Pioneer Center will be led by an extraordinarily accomplished scientist and research leader who will be recruited from the global research community.
The center leader/PI must bring together the best Danish research in the field and raise it to the highest international level. The aim is that by doing so, the center leader will establish and develop a genuinely outstanding research environment with both top researchers and students who can form the basis for creating groundbreaking research results and transformative solutions within the fields of AI and/or Climate/Energy.
Implementation of the Pioneer Center initiative
The Ministry of Higher Education and Science and the Danish National Research Foundation is contributing a total of approximately 400 million DKK to the initiative, while the private foundations are contributing up to 600 million DKK in total.
The grant period for a Pioneer Center is 13 years at the outset, with periodic visits by advisory boards followed by evaluations with a possibility of extension. The financial framework for each subject area is between 200-500 million DKK. The grant includes indirect project costs, which are of limited size.
The Danish National Research Foundation will manage the initiative on behalf of the foundations.
The process of implementation is divided into two rounds that are both based on the Implementation model which was drawn up in 2019 in a collaboration between The Ministry of Higher Education and Science, the Danish National Research Foundation, the private four foundations, and the universities.
The implementation model has been adjusted with regard to search, peer-review process and assessment criteria as described in “Process description for the second round”.
You can download the Implementation model, Process description for the 2nd round, and appendices below here: