Information für die Wissenschaft Nr. 74 | 19. Oktober 2020

New Edition of the French-German Call for Proposals in the Natural, Life and Engineering Sciences

ANR-DFG 2021 NLE

The French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) are continuing their annual joint calls for French-German projects in the Natural, Life and Engineering Sciences. This is based on an agreement signed by both agencies, which was confirmed by the DFG’s joint committee (“Hauptausschuss”), establishing joint French-German projects as a standard offering within the DFG’s research grants programme.

For the 2021 edition of this call, ANR will act as the lead agency, i.e., joint proposals describing the bilateral projects as a whole have to be submitted firstly to ANR, which will be responsible for processing proposals and conducting the review process. The DFG will require a copy of the proposal documents to be submitted on its web portal for proposal submissions.

ANR requests pre-registration by the French project coordinator. This only includes formal data (title, acronym, participating scientists, financial estimates, etc.) and is required before 1 December 2020 at 1 p.m. on ANR’s submission website. Details can be found on ANR’s website (see below).

This pre-registration is a necessary condition for submitting a full proposal. ANR will notify the French coordinators when the submission site for full proposals opens. DFG will update its dedicated webpage when this information becomes available.

For the preparation of the full proposals, please check carefully:

  • ANR’s generic call document
  • ANR’s annex for ANR-DFG NLE proposals
  • The DFG’s dedicated webpage

Please note that proposals in the social sciences and humanities must be submitted in the dedicated ANR-DFG call in social sciences and humanities (with separate deadlines). This also applies to transdisciplinary projects when the proposed approach mainly centres on these fields, and/or when the principal investigator is from the social sciences / humanities.

The 2020 edition could be carried out without any delays. As a result, 55 French-German projects were selected for funding, out of 272 eligible submissions.

Further Information

Information concerning ANR’s rules and procedures is available at:

For further information from the DFG concerning eligibility criteria, the submission process, contacts and status updates please refer to:

Please note the DFG’s data protection notice on research funding, which can be viewed and downloaded at

If necessary, please also forward this information to those persons whose data the DFG processes because they are involved in your project.