Many new research projects at RU funded by IRF

The Board of The Icelandic Research Fund (IRF) has completed the allocation of grants for new research projects for 2025. A total of 381 valid applications were received by the Research Fund, 64 of which were funded, or 17%. The IRF is the leading competitive research fund in Iceland. The fund grants projects in all areas of science, from grants to doctoral students to grants of excellence.

Grants for new projects amount to ISK 1.1 billion this year, but since the projects are generally for three years, the total cost is close to ISK 3.2 billion in the years 2025-2027, as reported in IRF’s announcement.

The following projects at Reykjavik University were funded:

Project grants

• Magnús Már Halldórsson, Department of Computer Science: Comparative Complexity via Coloring
• Christoph Lohrmann, Department of Computer Science: On the implementation of ensemble feature selection and its application to stock market prediction
• Hlynur Stefánsson, Department of Engineering: Microplastics in Glaciers
• Valdimar Sigurðsson and Jacob Lund Orquin, Department of Business and Economics: The Foundations of Attention Management & its Applications for Health and Sustainability in Marketing
• Sigríður Björk Þormar and Linda Bára Lýðsdóttir, Department of Psychology: The mental health effects of volunteering at the scene of a volcanic eruption on Icelandic search and rescue teams

Postdoctoral fellowships

• Rosemary Erin Haskell, Department of Psychology: A data-driven approach to understanding sex-specific responses to early life adversity
• Cecilia Rose Collins, Department of Engineering: Entangled Strands: Novel Syndemic Disease Perspectives and 3D Imaging of Metabolic Disease in the North Atlantic Past

Doctoral fellowships

• Reed Patrick Acton, Department of Computer Science: Moving from objects to transformations to account for the finer structures of permutations
• Vasiliki Kyriakou, Department of Computer Science: Effects of Restrictive Non-Determinism on the Expressiveness and Relative Complexity of Bounded Memory Automata
• Bahadir Turkyilmaz, Department of Engineering: Temperature Characteristics and Lagrangian Dispersion in Mixed Convective Turbulence
• Helena Rakel Hannesdóttir, Department of Law: Protection of the Marine Environment from Climate-Related Pollution under the Law of the Sea