National Science Centre to award doctoral candidates and post-doc researchers with scholarships and internships

The National Science Centre has published the results of the ETIUDA 3 and FUGA 4 calls. Thanks to funding from the Centre as many as 93 PhD candidates will benefit from year-long scholarships, as well as  54 researchers – from post-doc internships. The aggregate sum of funding given to young researchers is  around the EUR 8 million mark.

The ETIUDA call is there to help PhD candidates work on their dissertations. In the third edition of the call, applicants were required to have started the registration and conferment procedure for a doctoral degree in a Polish research institution or to commit to start the procedure by 30^th June 2015. The young researchers whose projects were approved for funding will receive a monthly grant of EUR 710 for 12 months in addition to a research stay of between 3-6 months in a research centre of their choice, in order to enhance their research. The ETIUDA 3 call saw 280 submissions, with nearly half of them qualified to the second stage of evaluation. 132 PhD candidates were invited to interviews. The scholarships were granted to 33 per cent of applicants.

Our scholarships [ETIUDA] and internships [FUGA] are intended to support young people in their difficult beginnings as researchers. Awardees of the ETIUDA and FUGA calls are offered relatively substantial resources, of which they can make flexible use. In the calls of both types so far concluded, there have been around 500 awardees, said professor Zbigniew Błocki, director of the National Science Centre.

Applications for funding in the FUGA 4 call were open to individuals with a doctoral degree held for up to 5 years. In response to the call, researchers submitted as many as 214 applications, of which one quarter were approved for funding. Over the course of their internships young researchers will be paid monthly salaries of up to EUR 2 600, totalling over EUR 6 million.

The idea of the FUGA calls is that research internships take place in research institutions in a region of Poland other than that of the applicant’s alma mater. Thus the Centre contributes to supporting the mobility of researchers in Poland as well as helping upgrade candidates' skills by means of their involvement with research teams from different parts of the country. New ETIUDA and FUGA calls will be announced in December 2015.

Young researchers may receive salaries from the National Science Centre’s resources not only as applicants in distinct calls dedicated to them, but also as co-investigators in projects carried out by senior researchers. Our successful applicants are often explicitly required to create new positions for post-docs and PhD candidates. A few dozen new job offers are published on our webpage every month, said professor Michał Karoński, chair of the Council of the National Science Centre.