Image: John Brighenti [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr
Taking stock of funding support for Ukrainian researchers
The passing of the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine underlines many problems—one of which is that the conflict is stagnating without much prospect of resolution.
For researchers displaced to other countries by the conflict and those remaining in Ukraine, this makes the future uncertain.
Last year, universities and research institutions across Europe threw open their doors to those who left the country, with many funders launching emergency support schemes.
Kateryna Dugina, a research associate in food science at the University of Nottingham, won funding in July 2022 through a British Academy scheme for researchers at risk. Before the war, she worked at the Kharkiv National Technical University of Agriculture. Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on 3 March, Dugina said that despite the speed of events unfolding last year, she did not encounter major challenges in putting in an application. This was largely due to the support of her host university, she said.
“It’s very important for the grantholder and for mentors to understand the purpose of the project, of the grant they’re applying for,” Dugina said.
Like many of her colleagues leaving Ukraine, she said she felt “a little bit lost or bewildered”—but her first meeting with her supervisor helped to set a clear path: “We drafted our research plan step by step, which really helped me to get integrated faster and work more effectively.”
Stigma risk
Frank Albrecht is the director of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Philipp Schwartz Initiative, which, since 2015, has provided funding for more than 450 researchers at risk to take up two- to three-year fellowships in Germany. Albrecht said there was a risk that researchers who win emergency funding might be stigmatised.
“What we hear from our fellows is that it is vital to not understand such an undertaking as a humanitarian undertaking,” he said. “It is an academic undertaking.” Albrecht added that stigmatisation is “extremely detrimental” and “entirely unfair” because selection is made on academic criteria.
Albrecht also highlighted an unusual problem for Ukrainian researchers during the early days of the conflict: there were almost too many short-term options for displaced researchers.
“We heard from Ukrainian scholars how difficult it was to identify the right one,” Albrecht said, suggesting that an important lesson learned was the need for better coordination.
The initial surge in short-term support was not followed by equally abundant longer-term support, he added. The situation today is one of insufficient options and opportunities for Ukrainian scientists, Albrecht said.
The Polish Academy of Sciences was among the agencies that did launch a long-term scheme, working in collaboration with the US National Academy of Sciences. The three-year scheme, launched in December, supports a Ukrainian principal investigator in Poland along with funding for four more researchers who may be based in either Poland or Ukraine.
Jerzy Duszyński from the Polish Academy of Sciences said the scheme had attracted an “enormous response” and that more money was urgently being sought from international funders to meet demand. “We think it is not right to have a programme with a success rate of 5 per cent—we want it to have above 10 per cent,” he added.
In September, the EU launched a €25 million (£22m) fellowship scheme for Ukrainian scholars. But for Duszyński, this level of funding was “not much”, adding that “we have to press these kinds of organisations” to increase funding.
National academies across the world have been drivers of support for Ukrainian researchers, Ian Wiggins from the Royal Society told Research Professional News, but the amount of funding needed is now beyond their capacity. “It’s going to be external philanthropy or it’s going to be government money,” he said, adding that conversations were ongoing in the UK about what “a more systemic level of support” would look like.
Brain drain
As the war drags on, there is concern about the potential for brain drain. To counter this, newer schemes, such as those offered by the Polish Academy of Sciences and the EU-funded fellowships, have options for returning to Ukraine built in.
Albrecht said that once researchers and their families settle in a country, returning becomes harder—something the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has seen with conflicts in Yemen and Syria.
Duszyński raised a similar concern: “We should be aware that we cannot brain-drain Ukrainian science because [for] every institution, when we recognise a talent, we try to keep it.”
While the Polish Academy of Sciences scheme has a mechanism for transferring a research group to Ukraine if the situation allows, it also selects Ukrainian researchers who already have international networks.
If the war is still ongoing in five years’ time, Duszyński warned, returning “will be a very difficult decision [for Ukrainian scientists] to make because they will be really rooted”.
This is an extract from an article in Research Professional’s Funding Insight service. To subscribe contact sales@researchresearch.com