Applying to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions - Postdoctoral Fellowships

If you are a Researcher interested in applying to the scheme

1. Check that you meet the eligibility criteria:

• you are in possession of a doctoral degree, and
• have a maximum of 8 years full-time equivalent research experience, and
• comply with the mobility rule: you must not have resided or carried out your main activity (work, study, etc.) in the country of the beneficiary (for European Postdoctoral Fellowships), or the host organisation for the outgoing phase (for Global Postdoctoral Fellowships) for more than 12 months in the 36 months immediately before the call deadline. Detailed description outlined in the MSCA Work Programme
• comply with the resubmission rule: applications submitted to the previous call are not eligible if they have received a score below 70% and they involve the same recruiting organisation and individual researcher

2. Contact your potential Supervisor to determine if they are prepared to support an application. The Supervisor will evaluate your CV and the proposed research plan. You will need to identify the Supervisor yourself; Edinburgh Research Office (ERO) does not currently provide Researcher and Supervisor matching services. You might already know an Edinburgh academic from meetings, conferences. You can also have a look at the University of Edinburgh Schools’ webpages where you can view the research profiles of academic staff.

The Supervisor is the academic appointed by the beneficiary to supervise the researcher throughout the whole duration of the action.

If you are a University of Edinburgh academic who is interested in supporting an application for an MSCA-PF, please first check with your school/institute/centre’s research support team if there is a local selection process and deadline in place.  ERO does not run centralised selection and shortlisting for this scheme, but many schools/centres do.

Your local research support office should always be your first point of contact for any research funding application, to confirm local procedures and requirements.

The Supervisor should email europe@eri.ed.ac.uk to notify us of the applicant’s name and email address. You should also download the supporting resources and send them to the applicant (link below).

In order to ensure the greatest chance of success, the proposal should be prepared by the Researcher in cooperation with the Supervisor. We recommend that the Supervisor and the Researcher work together in order to decide on: the research activities and objectives, the researcher's training and career needs (including training on transferable skills), implementation of the research (including timetable), planning for publications and participation in conferences. 

Interested researchers submit an application together with a Host Organisation. The submission of the proposal and other actions that follow this procedure (such as withdrawal) fall under the final responsibility of the University of Edinburgh (Host Organisation) as represented by the Supervisor.