The Norwegian Centres of Excellence (SFF) scheme is intended to promote long-term research with a high potential for groundbreaking results. The SFF scheme gives Norway’s leading research environments the opportunity to organize themselves into centres in order to achieve ambitious scientific goals. A total of NOK 1.76 billion will be distributed among around 11 new centres in this call.
“The Research Council has received a very large number of strong centre proposals, and the upcoming centres will be of great importance for the entire research system and for future scientific breakthroughs, innovation and competitiveness,” says Executive Director at the Research Council of Norway, Benedicte Løseth, in a press release.
The call for SFF proposals is carried out in two stages. The stage 1 call had an application deadline of 12 November 2025 and received a total of 176 applications. Now, 36 of these applicants are being invited to further develop their proposals for stage 2 of the call.
Tough competition for SFF funding
The proposal initiative “Element Transport in Earth’s Crust”, in short ELEMENTS, is led by Professor François Renard at the Department of Geosciences and Head of the Njord Centre at the University of Oslo, together with Professor Anders Malthe-Sørenssen at the Department of Physics.
Supporting the proposal, Renard and Malthe-Sørenssen have a team of colleagues from the Department of Geosciences and the Njord Centre consisting of: Luca Menegon (GEO), Henrik H. Svensen (GEO), Agnes Kiraly (Njord), Joanna Dziadkowiec (Njord), and Henrik Sveinsson (Njord).
The competition for SFF funding is fierce; ELEMENTS is one of a total of 16 SFF proposals from UiO that are moving forward in the evaluation process for these highly sought-after grants. In the bigger picture, even more applications have been submitted by other research institutions. A total of 36 applicants have been invited to the final round of the application process, according to the Research Council of Norway.
ELEMENTS: Researching critical raw materials
One of the aims of ELEMENTS is to increase our understanding of how critical elements and raw materials (CRM) move and accumulate in the Earth’s crust – knowledge that is essential for both sustainable resource supply and the green transition.
By combining nanoscale fluid science, 4D imaging, field studies in world-class Norwegian rock exposures (including Western Europe’s largest rare earth element deposit), and data-driven modelling, the UiO researchers aim to investigate element transport from the atomic scale to entire tectonic plates.
The research project brings together geosciences, physics, chemistry and computational science to develop a world-leading predictive framework for element transport, with direct relevance for Europe’s security of supply of critical raw materials.
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Read more (in Norwegian):
- Research Council of Norway’s website; Klart for SFF-finale.
- UiO’s online newspaper Uniforum: Universitetet i Oslo har flest med i finalerunden for nye forskingssentre