Image: Stéphanie Gauttier
Insights from life as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellow and reviewer
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions is the European Union’s main funding programme for doctoral education and postdoctoral training.
Postdoctoral fellowships are one of five programmes available under the MSCA.
They support researchers who have completed their PhDs and have a maximum of eight years’ experience to carry out research abroad, either in the EU or another part of the world.
More than €260 million in funding is available for the 2023 round.
The latest call for applications opened on 12 April and closes on 13 September, with projects due to start in June 2024.
Stéphanie Gauttier, assistant professor in information systems at the Grenoble Ecole de Management in France, took part in the previous version of the fellowships under Horizon 2020 and later became an application reviewer. She relates what she learned along the way.
What are the MSCA’s goals?
With postdoctoral fellowships, it’s about applicants’ potential and giving them the best chance possible to conduct their research.
It is important to consider this because people often believe it is only about the science, but it’s not.
The science is important, but it’s also about investing in people.
Where did you undertake your fellowship?
I was at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
I was working on ethics in technology, looking at how we could use wearables at work for stress management.
What did you learn from your time as a fellow?
There were so many things. I have developed expertise in a field that was rather new to me, and it’s been driving the rest of my career development.
I had previously experienced supervision where I did not have much independence or receive much direct feedback.
But when I did my fellowship, I was given a lot of independence and this was important for me to find my way. Today, I try to give space to people so that they can test their ideas.
I also learned a lot about networking. With the fellowship, you almost have a stamp of approval because you got the funding. You have this type of confidence that we don’t always have as researchers.
I still try to cultivate that confidence when I’m doing my research now.
Should applicants emphasise how the grant would help their career progression?
Yes. When I wrote my first draft, I focused on the scientific ideas. I went to the grants adviser at my university, and she looked at it and said, “It’s a nice idea. But you’re not going to win with that because it should also be about your training.”
Her comments made me flip the way I looked at the template; it was the best advice she ever gave me.
The impact of your research is important, but so is the impact of the fellowship on you. How are you going to grow? How will this grant help your career in academia or industry?
What else, aside from scientific excellence, should applicants consider?
You need to mention why your proposed host institution will be good for your career.
When talking about excellence, you should cite people from your future laboratory; when you’re discussing impact, you should talk about why you want to work with a specific supervisor or research group, what you will learn from them and what knowledge you hope to bring.
You should also talk about why you want to attend your host institution—why the resources it has make it the best possible lab for you to carry out your research.
You can apply to stay in the country where you are living if you have been there for less than a year during the last three years, and that was my situation.
I was at Twente on a short-term postdoctoral contract and decided to apply for the fellowship there.
I think working there for a few months made a difference to my application.
I was able to say how I was going to use their infrastructure, what kind of laboratories I would use, what type of equipment—all these things.
As a reviewer, what common mistakes did you notice in bids?
Often, applicants don’t include an abstract at the start explaining who they are, what they want to do, why they want the fellowship.
You start reading their proposal about what is probably an interesting topic, but you have no clue who this person is or what is going on, so it’s very hard to make sense of what you read.
Applicants should remember that we don’t know them and we don’t know what they want to do.
You also see applicants who have not reflected too much on, say, potential gender and diversity issues. But there are points available for this, and there can be gender and diversity issues in a lot of research.
By omitting it, you’re showing the reviewer that you did not get into the spirit of the funding you’re applying to.
These are things that can be easily fixed.
This is an extract from an article in Research Professional’s Funding Insight service. To subscribe contact sales@researchresearch.com