Sign up by 8th of September: Support for ERC Consolidator Grant Applicants

European Research Council Consolidator Grants (ERC CoG) are designed to support excellent Principal Investigators with 7-12 years of experience since the award of their PhD. CoG Call 2024 is expected to open 12 September 2023 (deadline 12 December 2023) and fund 291 grants with the budget of 584 million euros.

University of Oulu wants to encourage its researchers to apply for ERC and will provide a support scheme for selected applicants to prepare for the 2024 Calls. All researchers planning to submit ERC Consolidator Grant 2024 can express their interest to be included in the support process by answering to a short Webropol questionnaire by 8.9.2023. The applicants will be asked to provide a short description of the research idea (max. 2000 characters). All information provided will be kept confidential. The Research and Project Services will assess the technical eligibility of the applicants against the ERC Consolidator eligibility criteria. The applicants who are selected for the coaching will follow a pre-agreed timetable for the proposal preparation and submit their final proposal to the call closing 12 December, 2023.

Timetable of the support process for ERC CoG 2024 applicants:

• 2nd half of September: Proposal preparation kick-off: Research and Project Services will schedule a short meeting with the PI to go through the main aspects of ERC, proposal templates and discuss the preparation process.
• October-December: Proposal preparation coaching sessions. The proposal drafts will be reviewed in stages by the Research Funding Specialist of the Faculty and a scientific peer mentor. The coaching will provide the PIs with feedback on e.g.:
• PI profile: CV and Track Record
• Key ideas and concept of the ERC project
• Ground-breaking nature of the research project
• Feasibility of the outlined scientific approach
• 2nd half of November: Final draft proposal reviewed by an external expert specialized in the ERC funding
• limited number of reviews: will be allocated to the PIs based on the advancement of the proposal preparation
• In addition, the following technical support will be provided to the PIs:
  - Annotated proposal templates
  - Budget table and support with the budget preparation
  - Support from the Research Funding Specialists to fill in the Funding and Tenders Portal administrative forms, comment draft applications etc.

Note this call to express interest to be included in the support process is targeted at Consolidator Grant applicants. Support will be available for all the call categories and similar announcements to other categories will be published later.

In case you need any further information, please contact me.

Best regards

Päivi

Päivi Tomperi

Research Funding Specialist (Faculty of Science, SGO, KSI, Kajaani)

University of Oulu

Research and Project Services

Pentti Kaiteran katu 1

PL 8000

90014 University of Oulu

Finland

tel. +358 294 483972

mobile: +358 (0)40 7468503

e-mail: paivi.tomperi@oulu.fi

Room: M202