MSCA co-funds 31 doctoral training and postdoctoral fellowship programmes with €105.6 million
The European Commission will provide co-funding for 14 doctoral training and 17 postdoctoral fellowship programmes.
The European Commission has announced the results of the 2025 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 €105.6 million to fund 31 projects – 14 doctoral training programmes and 17 post-doctoral fellowship programmes of outstanding quality, subject to successful conclusion of the grant agreement preparation process.
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 136 applications for this call, of which 134 were eligible and evaluated. With 31 selected projects, the success rate for this call is 23%.
These collaborative programmes are often implemented by international partnerships. They cover over 519 organisations in 47 countries in the EU, countries associated to Horizon Europe and beyond, including 69 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Coordinating organisations
Selected projects are coordinated by organisations in 12 countries.
Partners from Member States, Associated Countries, and Third Countries
Many of the selected projects have implementing partners who contribute to the recruitment of researchers. The projects also include 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, countries associated to Horizon Europe, as well as third countries just by reviewing the list of associated partners.
Frontier research in all fields
Selected projects span various scientific disciplines and will train skilled and innovative researchers in areas such as
- cutting edge topics in physics like astroparticle physics and quantum physics
- novel imaging methods for diagnostics and therapy
- sustainable energy systems to support Europe’s sustainability goals
- synthetic cell research
- forest-based bioeconomy
- ecological transition in the field of soft matter science
There are also a handful of research and training programmes that have a fully bottom-up approach allowing researchers full freedom to propose their own topics in any field.
An overview of the evaluation results, cut-off scores and statistics has been published on the MSCA COFUND 2025 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.
All information is conditional on the successful preparation of the grants for the initially shortlisted proposals and the continuity of their partnerships.
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