Interdisciplinary consortia for complex challenges: apply for NWA‑ORC 2026
The Research along Routes by Consortia (ORC) programme is an excellent opportunity for researchers to build broad, interdisciplinary consortia that address complex societal challenges in full alignment with science for sustainability, diversity, and justice. These themes offer rich opportunities for collaboration across faculties.
Whether your expertise lies in AI, sustainability, health, governance, education, or the arts, there is space to contribute meaningfully. The current budget of the 2026 round is €87.000.000 euros, divided over the 12 themes. Per theme a budget of €7.250.000 euros is reserved.
A plethora of themes
These themes offer rich opportunities for collaboration across faculties, from Humanities to Science, from Law to Social Sciences, from Medicine to the School of Business and Economics.
For 2026, proposals can be positioned within the following themes:
- Remembering sustainably: nature‑inclusive knowledge of the past for an ecologically sustainable future
- The brain behind family choices: insights for health and equal opportunities
- The right balance in immune responses: multidisciplinary insights for regenerative therapies
- Identities under pressure? Secondary education and youth’s identity development
- Regional Food Futures: Water‑Smart, Climate‑Resilient, and Consumer‑Inspired
- Reinventing work: Artistic research into labour in the digital age
- Locally embedded digital resilience
- Fact and Fiction in the era of Generative AI
- Integrated collaboration on climate‑neutral mobility,logisticsand accessibility by 2050
- Materials that learn and learning how we responsibly use them
- Personalisedcare for patients in a low socioeconomic position (SEP)
- Smart technological infrastructure for sustainable andcustomisedprevention of multimorbidity.
Key condition
A key condition of this funding instrument is that participants must be part of a consortium. This is a group of experts who work on a problem, each from their own area of expertise. In this way, citizens, researchers, non-profit organisations and companies can contribute to solving scientific or societal problems, build a network and acquire new knowledge and use it for further development.