In 2023, 4,483 research proposals were submitted to FAPESP by researchers who had never before applied for funding from the foundation. The figure is 21.75% higher than recorded in 2022 and 26.14% higher than pre-pandemic levels—in 2018, FAPESP received 3,311 first-time proposals. “The ability to attract new talent and ensure that their education and research are funded by the foundation is essential to preserving the quality of São Paulo’s science, technology, and innovation system and increasing its competitiveness,” explains FAPESP’s scientific director, Marcio de Castro Silva Filho. The growth of this indicator is a positive trend after the pandemic caused a sharp drop in the number of proposals. In 2023, FAPESP received a total of 23,091 research proposals—the highest number since 2020. However, the figure is still 34% below the 36,700 applications made in 2019 before the global health crisis. The downturn, caused by the partial interruption of activities at universities and research institutions during lockdowns, affected most funding agencies in Brazil and worldwide. The recovery has been progressive, but slow. Castro Silva highlights that FAPESP established initiatives to simplify and speed up the proposal evaluation process. One was a reduction in the number of documents that need to be presented by applicants. “Currently, the head of a college needs to approve every underground research project submitted to FAPESP by their students. We are going to eliminate this step so that college directors only need to approve proposals that have already been evaluated and selected,” he explains. Another change is the elimination of several stages of the evaluation process that were considered redundant. “On average, a grant request takes 142 days to be evaluated, 85 of them for internal analysis by the foundation. There is room to shorten this process.” A new analysis method will be implemented. “The objective is for the evaluation criteria to be less heterogeneous and the processes to be more fluid,” says Castro Silva.
