Four CRS Seed Grants Funded
CRS Seed Grants: Four projects approved
To foster innovation and establish collaborations in interdisciplinary research synthesis and meta-research, the CRS launched the first Call for CRS Seed Grant proposals in January 2026. With a total of ca. 80’000 CHF available, the evaluation committee selected four proposals for funding:
- ARRIVE-Check: Automated Assessment of ARRIVE Reporting Quality in Animal Studies Using NLP and LLM-Assisted Document Analysis
Alexandra Bannach-Brown, Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Bern - REPRO-SIGN: State of Reproducibility in Sign Language Processing
Mathias Müller, Postdoctoral Researcher, Digital Society Initiative und Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich - When Benchmark Rankings Mislead: A Meta-Research Study of Evaluation Robustness in Biomedical Image Analysis
Prof. Oliver Faude, and Paul Ritsche, PhD student, Department of Sport, Exercise and Health, University of Basel - Evaluating Evaluation: Benchmarking Practices for Foundation Models in Single-cell Perturbation Prediction
Siyuan Luo, PhD candidate (defended), Laboratory of Nutrition and Metabolic Epigenetics, ETHZ / Department of Molecular Life Sciences, Robinson Group, University of Zurich
The CRS has received 42 applications for CRS Seed Grants. The CRS thanks all applicants for their thoughtful and interesting proposals.
Evaluation
Each application was attributed to two reviewers, taking into account possible conflicts of interests (joint publications, work at the same institute/department, or personal relations). The reviewers were recruited from within the CRS Steering Committee and the CRS Advisory Board. Each reviewer provided an assessment based on the evaluation criteria described in the call, including an overall grade on a five-level scale. Funding decisions were taken in one evaluation meeting of all reviewers.
A majority of applications were submitted by researchers at the Universities of Zurich (13 proposals) and Bern (11 proposals). The funding available was sufficient for the proposals that received at least once the best overall score, and no score below the second-best score. With 42 applications, this resulted in a success rate of 9.5%.
Next Call for Proposals
A second call for proposals will be launched in the first half of the year 2027. The available funding and research themes will be the same as in the first call. We will further develop the evaluation procedure with the goal of providing more useful feedback to the applicants and adopting recent innovations in peer review.