Credit: FNR Annual Report 2026

On Thursday 7 May 2026, the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) launched its Annual Report 2025, combining the year’s funding figures with 25 first-person accounts from researchers reflecting on the long-term impact of public research funding in Luxembourg.

According to the FNR, the report concludes the 2022-2025 performance contract between the FNR and Luxembourg’s Ministry for Research and Higher Education.

Data shows that in 2025, the FNR committed €95.92 million in new funding to 238 projects selected from 931 evaluated submissions. Since 2008, the organisation’s total funding commitments have reached €1.265 billion.

Marking 25 years since the adoption of the law establishing the FNR in 1999, the report departs from its traditional annual format by focusing on researchers’ personal experiences. 25 portraits, based on interviews conducted during the anniversary year, explore how successive FNR grants helped shape research careers and opened opportunities for European and industrial funding.

Among the researchers featured is Djamila Aouada, Deputy Director of SnT at the University of Luxembourg, whose team developed a database of more than 3,000 body scans used internationally in research on human body modelling and deepfake detection, highlighted the FNR.

The report also underlines the work of Emmanuel Defay from Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), whose projects on electrocaloric cooling and waste-heat conversion led to publications in Science and Nature, as well as a European Research Council grant.

Christiane Hilger from the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH), together with her team identified more than thirty allergens from animal sources, and Tom Wirtz from LIST, whose work on high-resolution elemental imaging expanded through a series of national, European and industry-funded projects.

The full series includes researchers from the University of Luxembourg, LIH, LIST and the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), working across the four National Research Priority areas: Industrial and Service Transformation, Personalised Healthcare, Sustainable and Responsible Development, and 21st Century Education. The full collection is available on fnr.lu. According to the FNR, the stories illustrate how long-term public funding creates the conditions for future research projects and innovation.

“What you read in these twenty-five stories is something the annual figures cannot show on their own. Researchers describe results that took ten, twenty, sometimes thirty years to come together, and they describe them as the product of successive grants, not single ones. Funding one good project rarely produces one good outcome. It produces the conditions for the next project and the one after that. Public research funding is patient by nature and that patience is part of what makes it work,” said Isabelle Mossong, Secretary General of the FNR.

The report showcased that between 2018 and 2025, the University of Luxembourg received the highest number of CORE projects funded by the FNR, with 238 projects, followed by the LIST with 55 projects, LIH with 30 projects and the LISER with 21 projects. Overall, the FNR committed €222.12 million to 346 CORE projects across six research domains during the period.