A government programme offering funding to encourage Polish academics at Western universities to return to Poland has brought 71 scholars back in the five years since it was launched. The largest number, 20, came back from the UK, with a further 18 from the US and nine from Germany.
“The Polish Returns [Polskie Powroty] programme gives the opportunity to attract intellectual capital to Poland,” said Dawid Kostecki, the head of the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA), which oversees the initiative.
He claimed that the main motivation for those returning is “modern patriotism”, but also added that Poland’s “ever better research infrastructure” gives scholars the chance to “conduct research at a very high level”, reports the Polish Press Agency (PAP).
Kostecki was speaking at the launch of the sixth edition of the programme at the Polish Institute in Rome, which was also attended by education and science minister Przemysław Czarnek. This year’s budget for funding returns is 16 million zloty.
🇵🇱🇮🇹 Minister @CzarnekP w @PLInst_Roma uczestniczył w ogłoszeniu naboru do programu @NAWAPoland #PolskiePowroty, którego celem jest umożliwienie powrotu do kraju oraz podjęcie zatrudnienia w polskich uczelniach i instytutach badawczych wyróżniającym się polskim naukowcom. pic.twitter.com/C1tvBqxAtd
— Ministerstwo Edukacji i Nauki (@MEIN_GOV_PL) May 22, 2023
The project was first launched in 2018 under Czarnek’s predecessor, Jarosław Gowin. It offered scholars salaries of up to 350,000 zloty (€78,000) per year, payable for up to four years, plus funding to create research teams at Polish universities.
“Over the last few decades, several thousand academics have left Poland – talented young people who were looking for conditions for scientific work and creative exchange of ideas abroad,” said Gowin at the time.
“We want to provide them with the financial and organisational conditions so that they can conduct groundbreaking scientific discoveries and research in Poland, build research teams around them, and educate Polish students,” he added.
In 2018, 22 academics took up the offer, receiving funding of between 1 million and 2.2 million zloty each. In 2019, a further 20 Polish scholars received grants totalling 38.6 million zloty to return from countries including the UK, US, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Poland's top two universities have risen to their highest ever positions in the prestigious QS @WorldUniRanking.
The University of Warsaw and Jagiellonian University have broken into the global top 300 for the first time https://t.co/hC9WNjNF61
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) June 9, 2022
To qualify for the programme, applicants must be Polish citizens holding a PhD and working at a foreign university, research institute or research department of a company who can “demonstrate internationally recognised academic achievements”.
Among those to attend yesterday’s launch of the latest programme – which offers grants of up to 2.4 million zloty – was Grzegorz Pasternak, one of the beneficiaries of the first funding round in 2019.
Pasternak, an engineer, received financing to return from the University of Trento in Italy and continue his research on microbial fuel cells at Wrocław University of Technology in Poland.
From the kerosene lamp to mine detectors and vitamins to variable stars: many immense contributions to science have been made by Poles – some of them household names, others less so.
Here are ten scientists and inventors who have changed the world https://t.co/X4mGGplwl4
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) September 8, 2022
Main image credit: Argonne National Laboratory/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
