Environmental Systems Research

This call is open to all topics and areas in Environmental Systems Research, and researchers from all disciplines (e. g., natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, health sciences, climate research ...) are welcome to apply.

Candidate´s profile

  • VRG Leaders are young researchers (i. e. postdocs, up to 8 years after PhD) who want to establish their own independent research group within an host institute in Austria.
  • At the time of application, the VRG candidates must be based at home institutions outside of Austria. Specifically, this means the VRG candidate (i) must not have an employment contract with an Austrian institution in the timeframe between three months before the submission deadline to the submission deadline, and (ii) must have been employed at a foreign research institution for at least two years in the last three years before the submission deadline.
  • During the duration of the project and upon positive evaluation of the group leader´s performance, the candidate will be offered a tenure-track position.

Funding

  • WWTF will fund up to three positions, with up to 1.8 Mio Euro each (for five up to eight years)
  • The candidate´s salary will be covered by BOKU (in-kind contribution)

The application is done together with a proponent from the host institution. The proponent is an established scientist based at BOKU (“host institution”) that intends to hire & host the candidate from abroad.

Important deadlines

  • The final deadline for submission is on March 10, 2026. The projects are submitted online, via the WWTF Funding Portal.
  • Our next internal step is to gather the list of potential proponents from BOKU. If you are interested to host a VRG leader as proponent, let us know before November 10, 2025, together with the potential research field/topic for the application.

More information is available: WWF VRG Call 2026

 

The BOKU Pre-Award Team of the Research Support, Innovation & Technology Transfer assists researchers interested in submitting such projects. Please, contact us in advance if you wish to submit to this call and for any further questions projektsupport(at)boku.ac.at

Do not hesitate to also check regularly our webpage, where we inform researchers about upcoming calls: https://boku.ac.at/fos

13.10.2025