The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) has recently announced the review results of the 2025 projects. OUC has been approved for 211 projects of various types, a year-on-year increase of 12.8%, marking a record high in the university’s history. Approved direct funding amounts to 118 million RMB, up 12.3% year-on-year, reaching a new high for the 14th Five-Year Plan period.

The foundation of basic research has been further consolidated. By establishing a new working paradigm, the number of applications submitted by OUC during this year’s centralized application period exceeded 1,000 for the first time, and the number of funded projects surpassed 200. Despite increasingly intense national competition and a continued decline in the overall funding rate, OUC achieved a funding rate of 22.4% for General Program and Young Scientists Fund projects, and 30.9% for the Young Scientists Fund alone, keeping the university among the leading institutions nationwide. Continuous breakthroughs have been made in key-category projects. By building a major-project breakthrough mechanism and organizing applications around major national needs, the contribution of senior professors to NSFC proposals has continued to increase. In 2025, OUC secured seven NSFC Key Program projects and one Key International Cooperation project, both record highs. High-level talents are also emerging at an accelerating pace. Two faculty members were approved for the Young Scientists Fund (Category A) and four for the Young Scientists Fund (Category B), matching the university’s best historical result. During the 14th Five-Year Plan period to date, ten scholars at OUC have received support from the Distinguished Young Scholars Program and sixteen from the Excellent Young Scientists Fund.

In recent years, OUC has focused on strengthening organized research and promoting high-quality, connotative development of basic research. First, by conducting a comprehensive review of its NSFC performance over the past five years and analyzing new trends and changes, OUC has systematically identified weak links in basic research and defined stabilizing the funding rate, increasing the contribution of talent, and prioritizing talent-oriented projects. Second, the university has adopted data-driven management and refined target setting. Indicators have been introduced to assess the appropriate number of proposals and key breakthrough points more accurately for each unit, shifting from experience-based management to evidence-based decision-making and providing scientific guidance for NSFC applications. Third, OUC continues to optimize a comprehensive mechanism for identifying, training, recommending, and supporting scientific and technological talents, and is building a systematic, staged and modular talent-cultivation scheme to tap deeply into the pool of basic-research talent. Fourth, OUC has been following policy adjustments of the NSFC, and has paid particular attention to the crucial stages of proposal preparation and has strictly upheld academic integrity, establishing a four-dimensional quality-control system for applications, and implementing tailored strategies for each school and college, thereby improving proposal quality across the entire process.