Support Services for ERC Advanced Grant Applicants – Sign up by 9 January

European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants are designed to support excellent Principal Investigators who have a track-record of significant research achievements in the last 10 years. European Research Council’s (ERC) Work Programme 2022 will have a budget of 555 million euros to support some 223 Advanced grants.  Advanced Grant Call 2022 will open 20.01.2022 with a deadline 28.04.2022. 

University of Oulu wants to encourage its Advanced Grant level researchers to apply and will provide a support scheme for selected applicants to prepare for the 2022 Call. All researchers planning to submit ERC AdG 2022 can express their interest to be included in the support process by answering to a short Webropol questionnaire by 9.1.2022. 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 Advanced Grant 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 in April 2022.

Timetable of the support process for 2022 ERC AdG applicants:

• January: 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.
• February-April: Proposal preparation coaching sessions. The proposal drafts will be reviewed in stages by the Research Funding Specialist of the Faculty and a 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
• early April: Final draft proposal reviewed by an external expert specialised 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.

For more info: janika.luukinen@oulu.fi