Three new National Research Programmes: What will their focuses be?

National Research Programmes (NRP) promote research projects aimed at addressing Switzerland’s most pressing challenges of national importance. On 20 March 2026, the Swiss Confederation commissioned the SNSF to launch three new NRPs. The new topics to be launched were chosen by the Swiss Federal Council and are based on priorities of the Federal Administration.

The programmes will support interdisciplinary research and include elements of transdisciplinary research. Each will combine insights from different academic disciplines and engage actively and continuously with relevant stakeholders. This programme design will ensure that the findings are scientifically robust, useful for policy and relevant for practice.

Calls for proposals for the three new NRPs are scheduled to be published in September 2026. The submission process will comprise two steps with researchers being invited to submit Expressions of Interests by 22 November 2026, and corresponding full proposals until 19 January 2027.

NRP 85 "Mental Health of Adolescents"

NRP 85 aims to improve mental health promotion, prevention and early intervention services for adolescents in Switzerland. It will fund research that improves the evidence base on effective and scalable prevention and early intervention approaches, that advances understanding of systemic risk and protective factors for adolescent mental health, and that supports the development of policy-relevant and practice-oriented solutions.

NRP 85 consists of two research areas:

• Research area 1 "Prevention and early intervention approaches" will examine how evidence-based interventions can be adapted, developed and evaluated in Swiss contexts, with a particular focus on innovative, low-threshold and scalable approaches that extend beyond the traditional healthcare system and meet the needs of diverse and vulnerable adolescent populations.

• Research area 2 "Systemic risk and protective factors" will investigate how structural conditions in formally organised environments – such as education, vocational training and mandatory military and civil service – influence adolescent mental health, with the goal of identifying systemic characteristics that support or hinder positive developmental trajectories.

All projects are encouraged to engage with non-academic partners and should produce outputs that can inform policy development, system design and the implementation of prevention and early intervention strategies. Projects in research area 1 are required to have a non-academic project partner and to include transdisciplinary elements in their project design. The programme has a total budget of 7 million Swiss francs.

NRP 86 "Digital Resilience of Critical Infrastructures"

The programme aims to strengthen the resilience of Switzerland’s critical infrastructures towards cyberattacks and other digital disruptions. It will fund research that improves the knowledge base on vulnerabilities and risks, that develops technically viable and socially acceptable solutions, and that proposes governance and coordination mechanisms for an agile collective cyber defence.

NRP 86 consists of four research areas:

• The research area "Data" will examine what qualifies as relevant cybersecurity data and how access to as well as the curation, protection and sharing of such data can be improved among academia, public authorities and critical infrastructure operators.

• The research area "Best practices" will assess which organisational, technical and operational practices can be regarded as state of the art and how they can be adopted, tested, adapted and transferred across Swiss critical infrastructure sectors.

• The research area "Incentives" will investigate the economic, regulatory, behavioural and institutional conditions that shape cybersecurity investment and identify ways to align organisational decisions with system-level resilience.

• The research area "Collective defence" will explore how operators, suppliers, authorities, regulators, researchers and users can coordinate responsibilities, information exchange, risk assessment and joint responses before, during and after cyber incidents.

All projects are required to involve non-academic partners and to produce outputs that can be adopted in policy, governance, organisational practice, technical implementation, training and public decision-making. The programme has a total budget of 5 million Swiss francs.

NRP 87 "Deglobalisation and Supply Chain Resilience"

NRP 87 investigates how deglobalisation dynamics and supply-chain disruptions reshape the constraints, vulnerabilities and policy choices facing Switzerland.

The programme focuses on two closely connected research areas:

• The first research area examines the political and economic dynamics of deglobalisation, including the fragmentation of global markets, the erosion of multilateral rules, the rise of coercive economic statecraft, sanctions, export controls, protectionism and the regionalisation of production networks.

• The second analyses Switzerland’s supply-chain vulnerabilities and resilience capacities by identifying critical dependencies, chokepoints and channels through which disruptions may cascade across firms, sectors, regions and the wider economy.

Across both areas, projects will contribute to three dimensions of inquiry: analysis, resilience mechanisms and policy design. The programme will produce risk assessments, dependency mappings, scenarios, stress tests, datasets and comparative analyses. It will also assess the effectiveness, costs and sustainability implications of strategies such as diversification, substitution, redundancy, strategic reserves, circular economy approaches, early-warning systems, data-sharing, joint procurement and public-private coordination.

Involvement of relevant non-academic actors is a key characteristic of NRP 87. Each project must include at least two non-academic actors. The programme has a total budget of 5 million Swiss francs.