25 NOV 2019 - 11:53 CET

The European Commission (EC) has decided to co-finance the Complutense with €4.4 million for the development of a programme for the incorporation and training of postdoctoral researchers in which scientific excellence and transnational mobility will prevail.
UNA4CAREER will allow participating researchers to broaden their skills and improve their employability, as well as access career development opportunities with a European dimension.
Madrid, 13 February 2019 - The European Commission (EC) has decided to co-finance with up to €4.4 million a new programme of postdoctoral contracts at the Complutense University of Madrid, which has been called UNA4CAREER. This co-financing is part of the H2020-MSCA-COFUND-2018 call, within the Marie Actions programme Skłodowska Curie (MSCA) of Horizon 2020.

The principles of the programme will be transnational mobility and the development of the research career through interdisciplinarity and intersectoriality within the framework of the recently created network of universities ONE Europe in which the UCM participates.

The MSCA-COFUND call is a co-funding mechanism that aims to stimulate regional, national or international researcher recruitment programmes, promoting excellence in researcher training, mobility and career development. It is a highly competitive call, in line with the other Horizon 2020 calls. In 2017, only 17% of the proposals in MSCA-COFUND were funded.

The UNA4CAREER project, whose sole beneficiary is the Complutense University of Madrid, will be a multi-year programme for the incorporation and training of researchers, open to experienced researchers, where scientific excellence and transnational mobility will prevail. Contracted researchers will be required not to have worked or resided in Spain for more than 12 months in the three years prior to the closing date of their call.

The incorporation of postdoctoral candidates in UNA4CAREER will take place through one of the 94 excellence groups of the UCM. As an added value, the integration with the UNA Europe alliance will guarantee the possibility of developing interdisciplinary and intersectorial research secondments in one of the universities or institutions affiliated to UNA Europe.

How will UNA4CAREER be implemented and what will its benefits be?

The total budget of this project will be € 7.4 million for two calls for 20 contracts each. The contracts will have a duration of 36 months. Of this budget, 3M€ will come from the programme of postdoctoral contracts already existing in the UCM (0,5M€ / year and call) and the rest, 4,4M€, will be subsidized by the EC through the mentioned call H2020-MSCA-COFUND-2018.

In this way, UNA4CAREER will substantially improve the salary conditions of the current postdoctoral program at the UCM, promoting the attraction of talent and allowing its effective internationalization. This programme will allow participating researchers to broaden their transversal competences and improve their employability, as well as to access career development opportunities with a European dimension.

For the Complutense, UNA4CAREER will be an opportunity to strengthen international, intersectoral and interdisciplinary collaboration among all participating organizations, through the development of postdoctoral contract stays, as well as through joint activities, such as dissemination.

UNA4CAREER, as an open network that will allow 40 researchers to combine their work in an international (6 countries), intersectoral (possibility of interacting with more than 500 actors through UNA Europe) and interdisciplinary (4 scientific areas) framework, will definitely help to disseminate the best practices of the Marie Actions Skłodowska-Curie.

The UCM is currently immersed in the process leading to the signing of the grant agreement with the EC, so the UNA4CAREER programme is expected to start in the coming months.

All this initiative has departed from the vice-rectorates of Scientific Policy, Research and Doctorate, International Relations and Cooperation, and Knowledge Transfer and Entrepreneurship UCM. The presentation of the proposal to the corresponding H2020 call has been articulated through the European R&D Office and has been designed in the context of the European network ONE Europe, of which the UCM is a member.

UNA Europa, which is inspired by the European Universities Initiative of the EC, is currently formed by the Complutense University of Madrid; the Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna (Italy); the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (France); the KU Leuven (Belgium); the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany); the Uniwersytet Jagielloński (Poland); and University of Edinburgh (Escocia, Reino Unido).