40.8 million francs for Sinergia projects

With its Sinergia programme, the SNSF finances research that is interdisciplinary, collaborative and innovative. For example, research aimed at improving the prediction of epileptic seizures.

​Last December, the SNSF received 73 applications for Sinergia grants; the success rate this semester was 23%. 65 SNSF grantees will be working on the 17 approved projects, most of which will last for four years. The projects will be funded with 2.4 million francs on average and will cover 41 academic disciplines: humanities and social sciences 32%, biology and medicine also 32%, mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering 36%.

Recognising epileptic seizures and a change of perspective in area studies

One of the projects aims to develop an embedded low-energy system to recognise and predict epileptic seizures reliably, based on machine learning. It is a collaboration of researchers of the Centre hospitalier universitaire vaudois (CHUV), ETH Zurich and EPF Lausanne covering the disciplines of neurology, electrical engineering and informatics. Such a system could potentially improve the quality of life of people with epilepsy.

Using a post-comparative approach, researchers from Basel, Zurich and Edinburgh, working in sociology, political sciences, philosophy, human geography and law, are aiming for a breakthrough in a long-standing debate in area studies. Using examples from Switzerland, Austria and Italy, they will test to what extent concepts that were developed to understand social and political problems in the global South can contribute to understanding similar problems in the North.