The European Commission has announced the results of the 2022 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) call for Staff Exchanges. 

The Commission will fund with €77.5 million a total of 73 projects promoting cooperation between academic and non-academic organisations in the EU and around the globe to boost innovation and knowledge transfer.

Through Staff Exchanges, organisations can form international partnerships with other leading organisations, strengthen long-term collaborations and increase their capacities. 

Innovation and knowledge transfer

Selected projects will exchange and train researchers and innovators, as well as administrative, technical or managerial staff involved in research activities, to test new ideas and develop new products, services and processes.

Participants will go abroad to enlarge their networks, exchange knowledge, and carry out cutting-edge research.

This call will help researchers and relevant staff in different career stages gain new skills and competencies, in line with the priorities of the European Year of Skills, which focuses on lifelong learning and gaining skills for quality jobs.

International cooperation beyond academia

The European Research Executive Agency (REA) received 196 applications for this call, of which 189 were eligible and were evaluated. With 73 selected projects, the result corresponds to a 38.6% success rate. This was the second call of the scheme under the Horizon Europe programme for research and innovation.

These collaborative programmes are implemented by international partnerships, covering over 656 organisations in 76 countries in the EU, countries associated to Horizon Europe and beyond, including 160 companies and 104 small and medium-sized enterprises.

Selected projects are coordinated by organisations in 23 countries:

• Spain: 13 projects
• Italy: 10
• United Kingdom, Greece and Portugal: 7 each
• France: 5 projects
• Poland and Ireland: 3 each
• Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia: 2 each
• Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Serbia, Slovakia, Norway and Turkey: 1 each

The call was also open to organisations based outside the EU and countries associated to Horizon Europe. The following countries have the highest number of participations in selected projects:

• United Kingdom: 55 participations
• Argentina and United States: 32 each
• China: 17
• Chile: 11
• Brazil and Canada: 10 each
• Thailand, Colombia and Mexico: 8 each
• Cuba, Egypt and Japan: 7 each
• Australia, Malaysia and Morocco: 6 each
• Kenya, Switzerland, India and South Korea: 3 each

Frontier research in all fields

Selected projects span all scientific disciplines and will conduct research in areas such as the application of nanomedicine to treat various lung diseases, the transition to and deployment of 6G networks or the entanglement of indigenous knowledges into university curricula, research, and policy-making.

The projects selected are in the broad fields of

• engineering and ICT: 34%
• chemistry: 16%
• social sciences and humanities: 15%
• environment and geosciences: 11%
• life sciences: 10%
• physics: 8%
• mathematics: 3%
• economics: 3%

An overview of the evaluation results, cut-off scores and statistics has been published on the page of the call MSCA Staff Exchanges 2022.

Once the grant agreements are finalised, the complete list of funded projects will be published on the same page and on CORDIS.

Next steps for successful applicants

The European Research Executive Agency sent out letters on the results of the evaluation to inform applicants of the outcome of the selection.

Applicants should be able to access the results of the evaluation on their personal space of the Funding and Tenders Opportunities Portal.

The letter sent out to the successful applicants contains all the instructions about the next steps to prepare the grant agreement with the agency.

The first projects will start at the earliest in summer 2023. Projects on the reserve list will be contacted once all the grants have been signed.

Next funding round coming soon

The next call for MSCA Staff Exchanges will open on 5 October 2023.