National Sustainability Programme ended, with results exceeding original commitments

RCPTM ended implementation of the Development of Advanced Technology and Materials Centre project, which was supported by the National Sustainability Programme (NPU) with grants worth 285 million Czech Crowns over the preceding five years for developing its research infrastructure. 34.5 million of the total sum went to investment.

“The Ministry of Education, the grant provider, consistently rated the project implementation very highly. Moreover, in 2017, the budget was increased in response to Michal Otyepka winning an ERC grant,” said Dalibor Jančík, the project manager.

RCPTM staff managed to meet all the objectives, exceeding expectations in some cases. For example, the project’s outputs included more than 25 patents, while only five were projected in the original plan. Publication activity also exceeded expectations: RCPTM originally committed to generating 500 publications in high-impact journals, but over 1400 were generated in the project.

Through the project, the centre’s instrumental facilities have been significantly enriched with, for example, a scanning electron microscopy operating in ultra-high vacuum mode, a spin resonance spectrometer, a supercritical fluidic chromatograph, a supercomputer for solving computational chemistry tasks, and other material and optical research instruments.

The programme was approved by the Czech government in 2012 as one of the tools for increasing competitiveness of Czech science. Its purpose was to promote further development and sustainability of projects within new European centres of excellence, regional and other types of research centres built in the Czech Republic between 2007 and 2015 with financial participation of the European Union, thus benefitting the regions in which these scientific centres operate.