(Science|Business) Choose Europe for Science pilot winners share plans for postdoctoral researchers

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The results of the Choose Europe for Science pilot call are out. Under the Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions (MSCA), Horizon Europe’s researcher training scheme, 16 projects will receive funding to set up programmes intended to attract researchers to Europe, or persuade those already here not to move abroad.

The programmes all aim to improve the working conditions and career prospects for researchers. The EU funding will support the researchers for up to three years, then the host institutions have to offer candidates a chance of permanent employment for a further two.

The European Commission initially set aside €22.5 million for the pilot, with maximum project grants of €3.5 million. This suggested that between six and seven projects would receive funding. In the end, however, the bids were low enough for the Commission to expand the selection. The 16 winning proposals, drawn from 58 submissions, requested a combined budget of only €19.9 million.

The projects will be coordinated by organisations from nine countries. Spain leads with four, ahead of France and Latvia with three each. Austria, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Portugal and the UK make up for the rest.

Building on the pilot, the Commission intends to extend support with a €51.25-million Choose Europe call in 2027.

Grant agreements are due to be signed in June and July, and the first projects to start in August. The first appointments should follow in September through to early 2027.

A peek into some of the winning projects

Merci

For the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ), which will coordinate the Merci project, the Choose Europe initiative complemented and amplified existing efforts to improve the working environment for researchers. 

“Our postdoctoral researchers already benefit from close mentoring, opportunities to lead projects, complementary training and international mobility, all within an international environment,” said Arnau Jordà Queral, ICIQ’s project communications officer. 

The programme will host four postdoctoral researchers for 72 months. They will work in the organisation’s main research areas, including sustainable catalysis, renewable energy and molecular medicine, under the mentorship of established group leaders. 

“The key targets are to support their transition to independence through supervision experience, regular evaluations, personalised career development plans and secondments with European partners,” Jordà Queral said.

Prime

Constructor Knowledge Labs, a private research institute in Germany, will focus its Prime project on AI for science and learning. “This is an area where global competition for talent is very strong, and unstable employment is one of the main reasons people leave academia or leave Europe altogether,” said Mariia Snigireva, its executive director. “If we want to be credible as a research institute that builds the future of science with AI, we also have to show that we can build better careers, not just better models.”

The aim is to propose an alternative to the traditional “two-year postdoc and then uncertainty” model, Snigireva went on. Over a four-year fellowship period, it will host five postdoctoral researchers, each employed directly by the organisation on a 48-month contract.

The first two years, co-funded by the MSCA, will focus on frontier research in AI, learning sciences and computational methods in science. The following two years, fully funded by Constructor Knowledge Labs, will help fellows “transition into more independent roles with stronger responsibility for leading projects, mentoring students and, where relevant, working with industry partners or spin-off initiatives,” Snigireva said.

The main targets of this AI-driven science programme are to advance AI methods and to apply them to real-world problems in science and education, make personalised career development plans with access to teaching, supervision and leadership opportunities and tailored training, and create mobility opportunities with partners in Europe and beyond.

“The success scenario for us is that Prime alumni continue their careers across European universities, research institutes, start-ups and companies, and do so with strong ties back to Constructor Knowledge Labs,” Snigireva said. A first call for applicants will be released shortly after the signing of the grant agreement.

Key-RSU

For Zaiga Nora‑Krūkle, director of the Institute of Microbiology and Virology at Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU) in Latvia, Choose Europe provides a necessary stimulus for talented researchers to stay and commit in the long term. 

“Rather than supporting individual fellowships in isolation, it allows institutions to reform how research careers work [and] for the first time, offer up to five years of continuous employment, competitive salaries, guaranteed social protection, and a real perspective beyond the initial fellowship,” she said.

The institute will host four of six postdoctoral researchers under the Key-RSU project, in topics from host-pathogen interactions to tumour immunology. The remaining two will be hosted in the RSU Social Sciences Research Centre, working on topics such as food and nutritional security in medical contexts. It is also hoped that the project will stimulate interdisciplinary teamwork.

The overall objective is to attract both international talent and Latvians who have moved abroad, giving them “compelling reasons to stay” in the country, Nora‑Krūkle said. “Importantly [. . .] we encourage mobility and secondments, but within a framework that ultimately strengthens commitment to the European Research Area and to RSU as a long-term research base.”

Amber Horizons

Under the Amber Horizons project, the University of Latvia has defined 11 positions for postdoctoral researchers and plans to recruit at least eight through a competitive, merit-based process. The targeted work areas include advanced technologies, health and life sciences, environmental and climate research and societal resilience. The initial 36-month phase will be backed by EU funding and a further 24 months financed by the university itself.

“Too many European fellowships still end just as researchers become most productive,” the university’s research department said in a statement. “Our approach is to transform the early-career researchers’ role into long-term research leadership opportunities, making the programme part of a broader institutional renewal.”

Securing the funding is also seen as a chance to make a point about institutions in the Widening countries, seen by policymakers as lagging behind the rest of Europe in research and innovation. 

“For us, this is an opportunity to demonstrate that a university in a Widening country can offer competitive conditions, strong infrastructure and meaningful career prospects at the European level,” the research department said. “If we want a truly integrated European Research Area, we need to ensure that excellent researchers can build their careers anywhere in Europe, not just in a few leading regions.”

Terradapt

French engineering school CESI applied to Choose Europe for Science over its national competitor, Choose France for Science. According to Yohan Dupuis, head of research and valorisation, the French scheme was more complex to apply to, likely more competitive, and not as suitable for the school’s internationalisation strategy.

“Competition for the European initiative seemed more open to me,” Dupuis told Science|Business. “We’re not a public institution but a non-profit, private, generative organisation. Today, that’s a model much better understood internationally than in France.”

There was also a difference in ambition. “The French mechanism only supports the salary and working environment of the researcher, whereas with the European one, we’re talking about supporting a profound cultural transformation of our institution,” he added.

Through the Terradapt project, CESI will offer seven post-doctoral research positions created for a five-year period, with permanent contracts offered as soon as the successful candidates join. 

One aim is to diversify the international make-up of the school, which presently skews to French-speaking countries such as Lebanon, Algeria or Tunisia. There are “very few internationals in the non-francophone sense of the term,” Dupuis said. “The idea, as our director of international development says, is to bring the world to us, and this also involves the composition of our faculty.”

A further advantage of the European scheme is a flexibility in recruitment compared with the French scheme, which insists on excellence criteria alone. CESI plans to host up to three researchers based on excellence criteria, and another two or three prioritising scholars in at-risk situations. 

“We have planned three rounds of calls for applications and at the end of each round, we will look at how each position was filled, keeping in mind that the evaluation criteria are fundamentally the same for all researchers,” Dupuis said.

Da Vinci

The Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences will coordinate the Da Vinci project, a network of computational innovators. “Moving beyond short-term fellowships to a five-year employment model is a deliberate step toward making Europe a primary destination for global talent,” said Emmanouella Chatzidaki, IMBA’s head of scientific affairs. 

The goal is to “expedite the impact of foundational basic biology,” she went on, and to this end IMBA hopes to attract top-tier international computational minds to a basic research environment. “The most transformative leaps are guided by basic research, where nature’s fundamental logic and primary principles are first revealed. By integrating AI and deep learning with experimental biology, the Da Vinci network is designed to accelerate this directional cycle of discovery.”

Togas

The Togas project at the University of Antwerp builds on its experience coordinating YUFE4Postdocs, which is working to attract more than 50 postdocs to institutions in the Young Universities for the Future of Europe alliance. 

“The Togas programme goes one step further,” said Liesbet Cockx, MSCA coordinator in Antwerp’s department for research, innovation and valorisation. “We will be piloting, within three of our faculties, the training and development of an all-round competence profile aligned with a long-term academic career perspective, and we will introduce a novel pre-tenure track career progression model for postdoctoral researchers.”