Awarded grants

We are very happy to announce that N4 researcher Elisabeth Stoltz Sjöström recently has received two large grants from the Swedish research council.

The first awarded grant of 37 million SEK is in the category Doctoral programme grant within medicine and health for the project ‘InSyNC – Integrating a sustainability perspective in nutrition care. A national doctoral programme’.

This is a collaboration between the three Swedish universities: Uppsala University, Umeå University and University of Gothenburg, and has three focus areas: Nutrition and eating from a life course perspective, Nutrition in health promotion efforts and Access to high quality essential nutrition care through digitalization and innovation.
The InSyNC research school will fund ten PhD students and will greatly strengthen the dietetic education and help build a new generation of teachers that will develop research and teaching skills, expertise in nutrition and dietetics, and will be trained in applying a sustainability perspective through all these areas.

The second awarded grant, of 16 million SEK, within the Clinical Therapy Research category, is for the PEPS-trial; ‘Probiotic supplementation of extremely preterm infants in Scandinavia: A double-blind randomized control multicenter trial to reduce the risk of necrotizing enterocolitis and mortality’ where along with Elisabeth Stoltz Sjöström, Professor Magnus Domellöf was another of the co-applicants.

‘This randomized, controlled trial aims to determine whether a specific combination of probiotic strains can reduce the risk of necrotizing enterocolitis in extremely preterm infants’ said Professor Magnus Domellöf.

We caught up briefly with Elisabeth after the grants had been announced.

Congratulations on your recent successful grants! How are you feeling?

Thank you so much! It feels so exciting and it’s fantastic that the dietitian’s expertise in nutritional care gets such unique national platform. It is a success and highlights the connection between the collaborating Universities and the also the education at the dietetic programs!

How did you celebrate?

I celebrated with my family, research groups and of course with my colleagues at work and maybe there were a little sip of the finest champagne!

Can you tell us a little more about how the grants will be used within the two projects and next steps?

For InSyNC, the grants will mainly be used for salary to doctoral students but also for scientific advisory boards, internationalisation, lecturers, and annual symposiums. The call for all PhD-positions will be announced during the spring of 2023. There will be three PhD-positions at the Department of Food, Nutrition and Culinary Science at Umeå University. Ten doctoral students will be recruited to InSyNC and all doctoral students will start their education during autumn 2023.

For the PEPS-trail, we have started to recruit infants in Stockholm and soon the other regions in Sweden as well as neonatal units in Denmark will begin to recruit study participants. Within the project we have a doctoral student, who also is a dietitian that I am co-supervising. The grant will go towards the doctoral student’s salary but most of it will be required within the project due to the study design.