Semper Ardens Advance

Semper Ardens Advance

Funds breakthrough Danish research leaders through advanced professor grants to strengthen real-world implementation.

The Semper Ardens Advance programme is the Carlsberg Foundation's flagship large-grant instrument for internationally recognised professors at Danish research institutions who are pursuing breakthrough scientific projects at the highest international level. The Foundation, established in 1876 under the terms of J.C. Jacobsen's bequest and funded by dividends from the Carlsberg Group, supports all fields of basic research without disciplinary restriction. Each Advance award carries a value of DKK 15–25 million distributed over five years, making it among the largest single-investigator or small-group grants available from a Danish private foundation. The 2026 cycle opens 31 May 2026, with a submission deadline of 1 September 2026 at 16:00. Applications are submitted in English through the CF-Grant portal.

Eligibility is strictly limited to tenured professors — and teams of up to four co-principal investigators, all of whom must hold tenured associate professor or full professor positions — at Danish research institutions. The main applicant must maintain at least 80 percent employment at their Danish institution throughout the full five-year funding period, and each team member must dedicate a minimum of 50 percent of their research effort to the project. The majority of the scientific work must take place in Denmark. The programme explicitly prioritises projects that venture into new scientific territory and carry genuine risk of failure; incremental extensions of established research programmes are unlikely to score highly.

Applications consist of a project description (maximum five A4 pages), itemised budget, CVs of no more than two pages per investigator, publication lists (maximum two pages), a research group description, institutional declarations, and a 400-character popularised summary. The CF-Grant system handles submission; questions should be directed to cfgrant@carlsbergfoundation.dk. No scoring rubric or decision timeline is published publicly, but the Foundation's track record of funding high-ambition, high-risk science signals that compelling vision and scientific credibility carry substantial weight in evaluation.