The Elite Research Initiative is the unifying brand name for a series of initiatives designed to honour and support the biggest research talents in Danish research The initiative aims to raise awareness of excellent researchers and their research. In addition, Elite Research highlight the researchers as role models to attract more young students for a career in research, in order to fulfil the ambition to make Denmark one of the leading and most competitive knowledge societies in the world.
The Elite Research Prize is awarded to outstanding researchers with international experience and a PhD-age of maximum 15 years. The Ministry for Higher Education and Science annually distributes five prizes. Each prize is 1.2 million. 200,000 is a personal award and 1,000,000 goes to research.