27 June 2023
With a new grant instrument called Serendipity grants the LEO Foundation wants to support novel and unexpected research ideas proposed by existing LEO Foundation grantees.
The word serendipity owes its name to an ancient Persian fairytale and can be explained as an unplanned fortunate discovery. In science, serendipity is mainly used to describe discoveries that occur at the intersection of chance and experience. It is these unexpected research ideas that the LEO Foundation aims to support through its new grant instrument, Serendipity grants.
Anne-Marie Engel, Chief Scientific Officer at the LEO Foundation, explains how serendipitous discoveries, driven by the curiosity of researchers, can lead to new advances in science:
“Through our Serendipity grants, we are interested in supporting research ideas arising from unexpected discoveries made by active LEO Foundation grantees. History has shown us that scientific breakthroughs often originate from researchers following their curiosity in investigating unexpected findings. With our Serendipity grants, we would like to support discoveries that, within the context of the pursued project, can be seen as unsuccessful or outside scope but have the potential to generate brand-new insights and knowledge,” says Anne-Marie Engel and continues:
“We are also keen on funding established researchers who wish to pursue exciting novel ideas that may be on the fringes of their current field of expertise, and we promote an approach where openness to new discoveries is key, as we believe it can support researchers in exploring promising new research paths. The idea with this grant type is to allow established researchers, regardless of seniority, to keep developing their research ideas, even if those ideas fall outside the researcher’s recognized area or type of research.
“History has shown us that scientific breakthroughs often originate from researchers following their curiosity in investigating unexpected findings. With our Serendipity grants, we would like to support discoveries that, within the context of the pursued project, can be seen as unsuccesful or outside scope but has the potential to generate brand-new insights and knowledge.”
Anne-Marie Engel, Chief Scientific Officer, the LEO Foundation
LEO Foundation Serendipity grants cover salary and running costs for up to two years
The grant amount applied for can be up to DKK 4 million. Serendipity grants are reserved for existing LEO Foundation grantees globally who, during the course of their work on a LEO Foundation-funded project, have made a discovery or formed a hypothesis that they would like to explore further, but which lies outside the scope of the original project funded by the LEO Foundation.
The grant is intended to cover salary and running costs for a researcher for up to two years to allow further analyses and investigations into the discovery or hypothesis.
As a Serendipity grant is meant to cover explorative investigations and clarify the potential of a research idea, we acknowledge that a Serendipity grant proposal may be of a premature nature compared to classical grant applications and that it may not include preliminary data.
Serendipity in science
Throughout the history of science, many important discoveries have been made by researchers following up on findings made by chance while doing research on something else.
One very famous serendipitous discovery in medical science was done when the Scottish physician and microbiologist Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. Returning from a holiday, Fleming noticed a strange fungal growth in a petri dish he had left in his lab. To his surprise, the fungal growth had killed the strain of staphylococcus bacteria he had originally cultivated in the dish for his experiments. Although not part of his original experiment, he was curious and isolated the strain of fungus to do further experiments. In time, this led to the development of penicillin as a drug to combat bacterial infections, which is widely regarded as one of the major medical breakthroughs in history.
Part of the LEO Foundation grant strategy
The introduction of Serendipity grants is in alignment with the LEO Foundation’s ambitious grant strategy towards 2025. As one of the world’s largest private funders of independent research into skin and skin diseases, the Foundation aims to increase its total grant budget to reach DKK 250 million (EUR 34 million) annually by the year 2025. As part of this, new types of grants are introduced to support the best skin research and the surrounding research ecosystem.
In 2023, the application deadline for Serenipity grants is 24 August (16:00 CEST).
Read more and apply for Serendipity grants here.