MSCA co-funds 27 doctoral training and postdoctoral fellowship programmes with €104.8 million
The European Commission will provide co-funding for 12 doctoral training and 15 postdoctoral fellowship programmes.
The European Commission has announced the results of the 2024 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) call for Co-funding of regional, national and international programmes (COFUND), part of the EU’s key funding programme for research and innovation Horizon Europe.
The European Commission will provide €104.8 million to fund 27 COFUND projects, 12 doctoral training programmes and 15 post-doctoral fellowship programmes of outstanding quality.
Through COFUND, organisations can create or enhance their own doctoral training and postdoctoral fellowship programmes, with the goal of recruiting researchers and attracting international talent with MSCA co-funding a significant share of their costs. Institutions benefiting from such funding need to top it up with their own funding sources.
This scheme spreads the MSCA's best practices by promoting high standards and excellent working conditions and allows organisations to increase their attractiveness and research and innovation capacities.
International cooperation
The European Research Executive Agency (REA) received 81 applications for this call, of which 78 were eligible and evaluated. With 27 selected projects, the success rate for this call is 35%.
These collaborative programmes are implemented by international partnerships. They cover over 463 organisations in 36 countries in the EU, countries associated to Horizon Europe and beyond, including 202 companies and 83 small and medium-sized enterprises.
Coordinating organisations
Selected projects are coordinated by organisations in 12 countries.
This pie chart shows the countries of coordinating organisations. The top countries are Spain with 9 projects, France with 6 projects and Germany and Finland with 2 projects each.
Partners from Member States and associated countries
The selected projects have implementing partners who contribute to the recruitment of researchers and associated partners who support the projects in other ways.
Though we cannot extract all the information on implementing partners at this stage, we already see the wide involvement of EU member states and countries associated to Horizon Europe just by reviewing the list of associated partners.
This bar chart shows the number of partners from EU Member Stats and Horizon Europe Associated Countries. The top countries are Spain with 97 partners, France with 53 partners, Germany with 37 partners, the Czech Republic with 28 partners and Finland with 26 partners.
Third country participation
The call was also open to organisations based outside these countries, which can join projects as associated partners.
The projects have the following participations by third countries.
This pie chart shows the third countries participation as associated partners. The top countries are Switzerland with 9 partners, Canada with 8 partners and Australia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Japan with 2 partners each.
Frontier research in all fields
Selected projects span various scientific disciplines and will train skilled and innovative researchers in areas such as
- the integration of digital solutions in addressing ageing challenges
- the enhancement of quantum devices as well as the development of new quantum hardware and software
- the development and implementation of safe, reliable and sustainable battery storage technologies
- the translation of interdisciplinary research-based knowledge in climate mitigation and adaptation into helping solve real world problems and challenges
While some of these are multidisciplinary research and training projects, others were developed fully with a bottom-up approach.
An overview of the evaluation results, cut-off scores and statistics has been published on the MSCA COFUND 2024 call page.
Once the grant agreements are finalised, the complete list of funded projects will be published on the afore-mentioned page and on CORDIS.
High-quality programmes
Selected programmes will promote international, interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral collaboration to
- foster high quality training of around 1000 researchers and innovators at doctoral and postdoctoral level in academia and beyond
- allow them to enlarge their networks and share knowledge to carry out cutting-edge research
- provide them with new knowledge, skills (including transferable skills) and career development perspectives
- boost their creativity and entrepreneurship
They will carefully consider important aspects such as
- open science
- community engagement
- research valorisation
- gender in research and innovation content
- ethics
- high-quality supervision
These programmes will allow organisations to
- attract international talent to EU Member States and regions
- increase their visibility and attractiveness
- boost research and innovation capacities
Applicants should be able to access the results of the evaluation on their personal space of the Funding and Tenders Opportunities Portal.
Next funding round open now
The 2025 call for COFUND is now open for submissions and will close on 25 June 2025.
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