Circle U. Funds 13 New Turbo-Projects
13 projects – including seven with participation from Aarhus University – have received seed funding from the university alliance Circle U. The funds support small, bottom-up projects that can potentially grow larger over time.
From artificial intelligence in the dentist's chair to a Circle U.-lympiad.
Researchers and technical administrative staff from Aarhus University are involved in seven of the 13 projects, which have just received financial support from the university alliance Circle U.
The alliance's so-called Seed Funding Scheme has distributed € 120,000 to projects, all aiming to develop new collaborations across the nine universities.
AU is leading one of the projects under associate professor Ruben Pauwels from the Department of Dentistry and Oral Health. Together with colleagues from both AU, Oslo, and London, he will work towards new ways to train AI models for accurate diagnostics.
In addition, Aarhus University is a partner in six other projects:
- Science, Environment, and Gender: The Reception of "Silent Spring“ nowadays (Anne Jensen/TECH)
- Accelerating the Societal Dimension of Open Science Training through Citizen Science (Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen/NAT)
- Consumption Reduction to Induce Social and Environmental Sustainability (Mirja Hubert and Nina Mølgaard / Aarhus BSS)
- Co-creating Cultural Competency Education—Transcending multilingualism and multiculturalism (Ana Kanareva-Dimitrovska and Ann Carroll-Boegh / Arts)
- Generative AI, health literacy, and well-being of citizens (Helle Maindal/Health)
- Building a New Generation of Young Researchers to tackle climate issues and air quality: atmospheric pollutants, first aggregation stages, and water interactions in aerosol formation (Merete Bilde, Marianne Glasius, Jonas Elm / NAT)
- Circle U-lympics, a warm-up for Paris 2024 (Lotte Skovborg/IC, Marianne Fibiger/Arts, Anne Møller Jeppesen/Health Studies)
A total of 66 applications were submitted for the Seed Funding pool, which was evaluated by a panel of 11 researchers. One of them is the dean of Circle U.’s Open Campus, Prof. Eivind Engebregtsen, who emphasized that the high quality of the applicant field made the final decision difficult:
"Both the breadth and the quality of the applications precisely demonstrate why the Seed Funding instrument is so relevant for the partners in Circle U."
Each grant is around 10,000 euros, but the idea is that the projects will serve as a springboard to strengthen cooperation within Circle U. and eventually lead to larger projects. A new round of Seed Funding grants is expected to be announced in 2024.