In a time when social and productive challenges are becoming increasingly complex, promoting high-quality research is not the only task facing universities. We in higher education must also create the conditions that allow knowledge to be translated into tangible contributions to the development of local communities, and the country as a whole.
Within this framework, in 2024 my university launched ProyectAR, an initiative designed to build a bridge between our scientific capabilities and some of Argentina’s most pressing structural challenges. The project called for research proposals aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and prioritised those related to issues such as poverty and hunger, education, reducing inequalities, institutional quality, innovation and health.
ProyectAR is grounded in a contextualised approach to research: conducting research from and within the Argentine reality, while maintaining the capacity to engage with the scientific and social debates shaping today’s world.
The programme is intended to serve as seed funding, strengthening research teams, consolidating research agendas and opening pathways to new funding opportunities. Project selection includes the participation of external reviewers and evaluates not only the quality of the proposals, but also their relevance to the challenges they seek to address, their interdisciplinary nature and their potential impact.
Two experiences that illustrate the journey
In 2024, the project “Accelerating inclusive and sustainable agro-industrial digital transformation: cases and dissemination strategies” was selected. It brought together researchers from the Schools of Communication, Engineering, Business Sciences Rosario and IAE Business School.
- Finding the funding: how to support research projects of any size
- Turning research sustainability from a tick-box exercise into ‘the way we work’
- A clear vision for university-community partnerships
In 2025, the project “VIDA – integrated assessment of psycho-neuro-immune data in cancer patients to predict response to immunotherapy through machine learning” leveraged the expertise of the Schools of Biomedical Sciences and Engineering, the Institute of Philosophy and Hospital Universitario Austral.
In 2026, ProyectAR entered a new phase, further strengthening the connection between Argentina’s structural challenges, the SDGs and our own strategic research priorities. In the current call, which is still under way, the university incorporated its five priority research areas as a central framework and expanded the scope of the programme: instead of funding a single project, ProyectAR now supports five projects, one within each priority research area.
Key lessons for promoting impact-driven research
For us, the experience of working on ProyectAR has generated several insights that may be valuable for other universities seeking to strengthen the connection between research, institutional priorities and societal needs. Here is what we’ve learned:
Start from concrete challenges faced by communities and the country, directing calls for proposals towards issues of genuine relevance. For this purpose, the call was based on a reflection of Argentina’s current context and the challenges the country is facing, to ensure that its research priorities correspond with matters of general societal importance. To assist in identifying and defining these challenges and in directing the research towards areas where it can make a contribution to meeting Argentina’s structural needs, a selected number of SDGs were employed as a reference framework.
Align funding calls with the institution’s strategic priorities, fostering the development of a shared research agenda. A significant evolution of ProyectAR was its alignment with the five priority research lines, defined by the university. In the 2026 edition, projects were required to be explicitly framed within one of these lines: technologies applied to health; precision medicine, translational and clinical research; society, democracy and institutional quality; care, well-being and human flourishing; or innovation, digital transformation and sustainability. Applicants were also required to explain the strategic relevance and potential impact of their projects in relation to the selected priority line.
Actively promote interdisciplinarity by creating opportunities for different disciplines to integrate their expertise around common challenges. Interdisciplinarity was incorporated into the design of the call itself, rather than left as an optional feature of individual projects. All the editions required projects to involve researchers from at least three different academic units, with researchers from different disciplines working together around a common problem. Interdisciplinarity was also explicitly included among the evaluation criteria, with the assessment considering the potential impact of the project on the development of collaborative networks across different fields of knowledge.
Use internal funding as seed funding to strengthen teams and help them access new external funding opportunities. We designed ProyectAR not only as a mechanism for providing internal research resources, but also as a way of helping research teams develop projects with the potential to attract additional funding. Teams were required to submit their project to at least one external national and one external international funding opportunity, during the first year of execution. The university’s research funding office was also established to advise teams and support them in identifying and pursuing suitable funding opportunities. In this way, internal funding becomes a first step towards building stronger research teams and leveraging additional resources.
Employ strategic frameworks, such as the SDGs, to guide research and connect institutional agendas with broader societal challenges. The use of the SDGs in ProyectAR provides a common framework for connecting the university’s research agenda with challenges that extend beyond the institution. Rather than treating the SDGs simply as a thematic reference, the call selected those considered particularly relevant to Argentina’s challenges in the coming years and used them to frame the problems addressed by the projects. This approach helped connect institutional research priorities with a broader international agenda for sustainable development.
Continuously refine funding calls based on experience, adapting their design to institutional priorities and lessons learned from each edition. The 2026 edition represents a particularly significant step in this evolution: funding was increased to and distributed across the five priority research areas.
Beyond the specific characteristics of each project, these experiences highlight one of ProyectAR’s most significant contributions: when different disciplines converge around a common challenge, the capacity to formulate meaningful questions, generate evidence and develop solutions that transcend the limits of a single field is greatly expanded.
In a context where the social relevance of research demands increasing attention and invites deeper reflection, ProyectAR represents one of the ways in which universities can strengthen their impact on society by combining scientific excellence, interdisciplinarity and a strong commitment to addressing the challenges facing the country.
Laura Salinas is coordinator at the office of the vice-president for research and PhD candidate at Universidad Austral.
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