The program mentioned in the news is the ERC Advanced Grant. This is a grant for established PIs (professors, mostly) across all research fields and gives a shit ton of research funding… up to 2.5M EUR in five years (which looks like they’d give more for relocation?). I personally find increasing ERC funding a great thing to do, but this is in no way for normal ppl with normal careers lol, it’s literally for “top researchers”
I’m surprised they didn’t mention the record number of applicants for the Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship though. MSCA PF is specifically for non-European fresh PhD grads and new postdocs (so not quite top researchers, but close) who come to EU/EEA for work and vice-versa. They saw a record number of 17,058 proposals… +64.6% increase from 2024. Among this, only +17.1% (+181) for EU outbound, but a whopping +70.1% (+6,517) for inbound. I thought the MSCA numbers tells this story much clearer. Also fun fact, the MSCA PF funding pool got a -3.1% slight reduction despite the massive increase in submitted proposals… but anyways here is the 2024 report for scale
Additional context:
The program mentioned in the news is the ERC Advanced Grant. This is a grant for established PIs (professors, mostly) across all research fields and gives a shit ton of research funding… up to 2.5M EUR in five years (which looks like they’d give more for relocation?). I personally find increasing ERC funding a great thing to do, but this is in no way for normal ppl with normal careers lol, it’s literally for “top researchers”
I’m surprised they didn’t mention the record number of applicants for the Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship though. MSCA PF is specifically for non-European fresh PhD grads and new postdocs (so not quite top researchers, but close) who come to EU/EEA for work and vice-versa. They saw a record number of 17,058 proposals… +64.6% increase from 2024. Among this, only +17.1% (+181) for EU outbound, but a whopping +70.1% (+6,517) for inbound. I thought the MSCA numbers tells this story much clearer. Also fun fact, the MSCA PF funding pool got a -3.1% slight reduction despite the massive increase in submitted proposals… but anyways here is the 2024 report for scale
Thanks that brings a better perspective indeed!