During 2024 Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation awarded grants totalling almost SEK 2.4 million (2023: 2.2) to individuals, various programs and projects.
Medicine, technology and natural sciences
The Foundation supports long-term, free basic research beneficial to Sweden, mainly in medicine, technology, and the natural sciences.
Grants 2024
121 Wallenberg Scholars was appointed and 15 Wallenberg Academy Fellows received a prolongation grant. The program, provides long-term funding for young, promising Swedish and foreign researchers from all academic fields. Since the program started in 2012, 261 young researchers have become Wallenberg Academy Fellows.
30 research projects in the fields of medicine, the natural sciences and technology that are considered to offer potential for future scientific breakthroughs was awarded SEK 835 million in grants.
Eighteen appointments were approved under the Mathematics program. The object of the program, which was initiated jointly with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, is to return Swedish research in mathematics to the international forefront.
In addition were 24 scholarships granted within ”The Wallenberg Foundation Postdoctoral Scholarship Program” at Stanford University, USA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (MIT) USA, Broad Institute, USA, and Nanyang Technologcial Universituy (NTU) in Singapore.
During the year, a total of 513 million SEK was allocated to the new program on the future use and conservation of forests: Wallenberg Initiatives in Forest Research – WIFORCE, at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU)..
The Foundation also continued to approve significant strategic grants in the fields of life sciences, autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, quantum technology, and sustainable materials. For instance, 740 million SEK was allocated in April to the national program for Data-Driven Life Science (DDLS), which was further expanded in November with an additional 600 million SEK for various initiatives in the area, such as the pilot project AlphaCell, aimed at creating a model for the functions of human cells and tissues.
The supercomputer Berzelius, used for research in areas such as life sciences, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, was upgraded during the year with the help of a 125 million SEK donation from the Foundation.
The Foundation also granted 70 million SEK to the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP) for a new initiative to promote the use of AI-based methods in academic research in Sweden. Grants were also approved for the Wallenberg Centre for Quantum Technology (WACQT) to build a copy of the current quantum computer and create a testbed with a support desk where researchers and companies can experiment with transforming real-world problems into quantum algorithms, which are then run on the testbed's quantum computer.
Read more about the strategic grants
Since 1917
Since the establishment in 1917, the Foundation has awarded grants of over SEK 39 billion for projects, equipment, and individuals, including about SEK 10.3 billion over the past five years.
The Wallenberg Foundations
In 2024 the Wallenberg Foundations awarded grants totalling over SEK 2.9 billion.
“The Wallenberg Foundations” is a collective term for 16 foundations founded by family members, of which the three largest are Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, that mainly supports social sciences and Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation, that focus on humanities.