Why You Should Apply for the EPICUR Seed Funding Scheme

What is the EPICUR Seed Funding Scheme?

The University of Southern Denmark is part of EPICUR, the European University Alliance, a conglomerate of nine universities across Europe. Founded in 2019, the alliance fosters collaboration and the exchange of students, researchers and administrative staff. As of last year, it supports collaboration and exchange through the EPICUR Seed Funding Scheme, which allows researchers across at least two EPICUR partner universities to carry out one-year projects with the aim of establishing the foundations for larger consortium applications. The seed funding should also lead to a learning activity for students, such as a workshop or short course, on the basis of the funded research project.

How did the Scheme Benefit Me?

For years, I’ve worked on issues in the classification and diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, such as depression. Because I’m trained as a philosopher, most of this work has been theoretical. But I was getting to the point where, for this research to advance, I would need to carry out my own empirical studies. Securing funding as a philosopher is difficult enough on its own. And securing funding to carry out a study that steps outside the standard methods of our own discipline is even more challenging. The EPICUR Seed Funding provided the resources to get a project I’ve envisioned for the last few years off the ground. With Julian Kiverstein, a philosopher in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Amsterdam, and Martin Vestergaard Kristiansen, a psychologist at Aarhus University Hospital and (thanks to EPICUR) a postdoc at SDU, we put together a proposal to carry out a one-year pilot study, which gave us the opportunity to refine our methods and establish proof-of-concept for the overall study design. We’re now in the midst of the pilot, and I’ve just received funding to carry out the full-scale study, thanks to a Project 2 from the Independent Research Fund Denmark.

Why Should You Apply for the Scheme?

You may already have a project in mind that would benefit from a year of seed funding. But EPICUR is also a great opportunity to develop something new. Since you need collaborators from the other partner universities, you might take this as a chance to establish a new network and build bridges across disciplinary boundaries. While EPICUR prioritises research in certain areas, such as sustainable transformation and global health, the seed funding scheme can support any area of research. It’s great to see SDU, in collaboration with EPICUR, provide the support to get new ideas off the ground.