Ten teams have been awarded the Unusual Collaborations ‘25 grant! The teams gathered at CUCo’s Nest this week for a festive award ceremony. The UCo funds are usually allocated by means of a lottery. This year the teams decided to take an unusual approach instead! They came to an agreement to all apply for an equal share of the budget that was available in the call for proposals, so that they could all be funded.
All ten teams were found eligible by the CUCo Board and were each awarded a UCo grant of €90,000 to continue their unusual collaborations in 2025. Teams can apply for the grant after having gone through the Spark grant or having had a preceding Unusual Collaborations grant.
CUCo congratulates the teams and wishes them all the best with their exciting, unusual projects.
Please meet the teams! (Please note the project pages will be updated shortly to reflect the latest changes.)
Post-Spark
Complexity
Leveraging complexity science to understand how sustainable health behaviour change emerges, and exploring the mechanisms – both individual and system-based – that underpin the diffusion of a health-related technology and its maintenance over time.
Dismantling Disparities
Investigating academic inequalities and the potential of unconventional, transdisciplinary collaborations to address them.
Frozen in Time and Space (formerly known as Preservation of Female Reproductive Health)
Addressing the ethical and social aspects of human and animal applications of cryopreservation through integrating the two discourses and investigating the public perception.
REL-AI-BLE (formerly known as My Choice Matters) (handshake grant in ’24)
Exploring (dis)trust in AI within climate science, nutrition and health, and teaching, and considering AI’s relations with and impacts on nature.
Unbox (handshake grant in ’24)
Tackling the assumptions and language that collaborations inherit, and building a prototype to help teams examines the (largely invisible) decisions concerning collaboration design, ‘unboxing’ the black box of collaborations.
UCo year 1 to year 2
Better Wave than Worry
Developing a comprehensive portfolio and platform of expertises necessary for the responsible implementation of early-warning signals across various domains.
Clean Future: Wellbeing in ‘dirty work’ (handshake grant in ’24)
Seeking to understand how ‘dirty work’ employees experience the societal devaluation of their work and aspiring to help improve the work conditions and experiences of these employees.
Fair Battery (handshake grants in ‘23 and ‘24)
Accelerating the development of an open-source electrochemical battery technology that can be deployed and maintained in the field, for residential users, small scale commercial use, and rural health posts.
Imagining More-than-Human Communities (handshake grant in ‘24)
Setting out to imagine a more equitable community of humans and nonhumans and to make it a reality in our everyday lives through games that facilitate an escape from anthropocentrism.
Smart Food (handshake grant in ’24)
Developing novel edible smart origami for programmed drug/nutrient release and treatment of the gastrointestinal system and consequently improving the lives of patients suffering from intestinal diseases, malnutrition/obesity.