Benjamin Missbach
I design and run research funding programmes, currently at the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), and I gravitate towards the fields that get left out. For the past three years that has been ME/CFS.
At WWTF I managed 13 calls worth roughly €30m in the last 5 years. I'm interested in how grant money can be allocated for maximum scientific and societal value. I review international mobility applications for the Wübben Foundation, advise the Vector Foundation as a member of its Research Board, and support Open Knowledge Maps in democratising access to scientific literature.
I build funding structures for neglected areas of biomedical research. What produces the best ideas, in my experience, is hard competition combined with cooperation and creativity.
Several threads came together in 2023, when I first encountered ME/CFS and associated diseases, and saw how little scientific attention they had attracted. Since then, with WE&ME, we have built most of Austria's ME/CFS research funding: roughly €3m in three years for projects, people and infrastructure.
In ME/CFS funding, patients and patient advocates help design calls, review proposals and vote on funding decisions alongside academics. That is delegated power in Arnstein's sense. We work closely with the Science for ME community.
Track record
2026–present: Expert panel, international mobility, Wübben Foundation
I review onboarding and dual-career provisions in the foundation's professorship programmes. The funding programmes support newly appointed professors in building their groups and making the move to a new institution work.
For the foundation's research calls I assess proposals and draft funding recommendations, covering early-career programmes and innovation projects in the STEM fields, mostly dealing with climate-change-related challenges.
As a local boutique funder, our involvement does not end with the funding decision, unlike most other funders. We support teams throughout their projects, go for site-visits, and try to connect the dots with other disciplines. I've managed 13 calls worth roughly €30m in the last 5 years, spanning Health, Computer Science and Environmental Systems Research, with an annual programme budget of roughly €20m. Since 2023 I've also administered WE&ME's ME/CFS research calls, where patients help design, review and vote on funding decisions, with roughly €3m allocated to projects, people and infrastructure over three years.
One of my pet projects: I recently built an agentic data pipeline that powers the Vienna Research Radar, a curated bi-weekly newsletter on the signal in Vienna's research ecosystem, and we love it!
2017–2021: Project lead, Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft Open Innovation in Science Center
I developed methods for opening up research: crowdsourcing questions with patients and the public, priority setting in medical topics. I secured €4m for SHoW, the research group on non-healing wounds, and co-authored a practical guide to patient and public involvement back in 2019. The guide is something I'm really proud of.
2013–2017: PhD, Nutritional Sciences, University of Vienna, and a little bit of postdoc time
Behavioural nutrition and public health: how sensory, cognitive and situational cues shape what people eat. Research stay at Cornell for a couple of months. Alongside this, meta-analyses on diet and chronic disease risk with Lukas Schwingshackl, and work successfully challenging the diagnostic criteria for orthorexia nervosa.
Publications, and the declining citation count that came with leaving academia.