Ural Federal University’s 12 Projects Gets Support From Russian Science Foundation
12 projects of scientists of the Ural Federal University will be supported according to the results of the latest competition of the Russian Science Foundation. This is the third best result among all Russian universities; only Moscow State University and St. Petersburg State University ranked higher than the UrFU. Grants will range from 7 to 15 million rubles per year.
“Despite all the difficulties, we manage to be among the leaders in university science. The Institute of Natural Sciences and Mathematics has traditionally performed very well, preparing a large number of applications and receiving support for both new and existing projects. The university continues to make progress in attracting external funding, and I would like to thank our scientists for their work. Now it is important to meet the expectations and maximize the potential of the winning projects,” says Aleksandr Germanenko, the university’s Vice-Rector for Research.
According to Germanenko, nine of the 12 funded projects are brand new and won the competition for individual scientific groups. Four of them were developed by the Institute of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Two projects each were developed by Institute of Chemical Engineering and the Ural Institute of Humanities. One project was developed by the Graduate School of Economics and Management. In addition, two projects of the university – funded since 2020 in the framework of this competition – received an extension of funding.
One of the major winners was an interdisciplinary project on the development of new-generation multifunctional bioactive multi-target compounds. These are the main candidates for original domestic chemopharmaceuticals for complex pharmacological correction of endothelial dysfunction in the therapy of cardiovascular diseases. The project, headed by Oleg Chupakhin and Mikhail Varaksin, is carried out by the UrFU Institute of Chemical Engineering together with the Belgorod State University (Research Institute of Pharmacology of Living Systems). The amount of funding is 60 million rubles for four years.
“Development of original domestic chemical-pharmaceutical drugs is one of the most important tasks of strategic nature for ensuring drug safety, independence of the Russian Federation. Research and development in this actively developing direction is a resource and time-consuming process of creating a drug – an original bioactive molecule that meets the criteria for safety and specific activity. An important feature of the project is the presence of an industrial partner – the pharmaceutical company Aquion. Such close cooperation contributes to the fastest implementation of our scientific research results in real production and in the shortest possible time,” says Mikhail Varaksin.