Research teams from the Jagiellonian University Faculty of Chemistry, Faculty of Geography and Geology, and Faculty of Philosophy will carry out bilateral projects in collaboration with researchers from the Czech Republic within the framework of OPUS 24+LAP/Weave scheme. For that purpose they will receive nearly 3.2 million zlotys from the National Science Centre.

The grant winners include:

• Prof. Kinga Góra-Marek from the JU Department of Inorganic Chemistry, who will carry out the project ‘Go Green CO2 – exploration of paths for sustainable production of green platform chemicals’ in collaboration with researchers from the J. Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The project is focused on the description of the influence of the nature of well-defined metal ion centers in Al-rich and Si-rich *BEA zeolites which offer the highest catalytic activity in CO2 and CH4 processing to produce CH4 to CH3OH, CH3OCH3. The aim of the project is to construct sophisticated counter TMI ion/oxo structures in zeolites, providing simultaneous processing of CO2 and CH4 resulting in methanol, dimethyl ether or/ and acetic acid.
• Dr hab. Agnieszka Wypych, Prof. UJ from the JU Human-Environment Systems Research Centre, who will carry out the project ‘Atmospheric circulation and weather extremes in Central Europe and their representation in climate models’ in collaboration with researchers from the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute. To improve the reliability of climate projections in Central Europe (represented here by Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Germany), this project concentrates on an extensive validation process of state-of-the-art climate models and downscaling methods based on various reference datasets of climate observations, to identify their strong and weak points and then apply the gained knowledge.
• Dr. hab. Tomasz Kowalski, Prof. UJ from the JU Institute of Philosophy, who will carry out the project ‘Representations of algebraic semantics for substructural logics’ in collaboration with researchers from the Palacky University Olomouc. The objective of the project is to investigate representations of certain classes of residuated structures, which capture the semantical essence of substructural logics, otherwise known as "resource sensitive logics", that is, logics that take seriously the fact that our resoning capabilities are finite.

In the latest OPUS 24+LAP/Weave call, which concluded in May, the NCN received 1921 proposals with a total budget of nearly 2.7 billion zlotys. Researchers could request funding for projects conducted without international partners, as well as bi- or trilateral LAP projects involving foreign cooperation or access to large international research equipment. The call was open to researchers at all career levels.

LAP is a new proposal evaluation standard adopted by European research-funding institutions, designed to facilitate the funding application process for international research teams and streamline proposal review. OPUS LAP projects were reviewed at the same time and by the same expert teams as other OPUS proposals, but also underwent an additional evaluation that looked at the research record and the previous projects of the principal investigators in foreign partner teams. Experts also made sure that the contribution of all teams to the project is balanced and complementary.

The full OPUS 24+LAP/Weave results for bilateral Polish-Czech projects are available on the National Science Centre website.