On May 3, the website of the European project EURIZON announced the completion of the third and final round of proposal evaluations for the EURIZON Fellowship Programme for Ukraine.
The third round of proposal evaluations for the EURIZON Fellowship Programme for Ukraine has concluded, resulting in the selection of additional 34 groups of scientists in Ukraine. These successful applicants and their team members will all be granted individual funding for a period of up to 12 months.
On April 30, 2024, the third and final batch of 34 Principal Investigators (PIs) and their teams received notifications that they have been selected to receive grants funded by the EU Commission through the "EURIZON Fellowship Programme for Ukraine". This means that a total of 65 research teams have been identified across three selection shifts within this programme under the supervision of the Scientific Review Panel (SRP) composed of 14 executive directors and scientists from pan-European Research Infrastructures and Ukrainian research institutions. As a result, 324 scientists in Ukraine will be awarded individual grants that will support their scientific work at their home institutions in Ukraine and boost international collaborations, even amidst the difficult conditions of ongoing attacks.
When the call for this programme was initially published in April 2023, the organizing team in the EURIZON project anticipated and prepared to handle approximately 70-90 applications. However, when in May 2023 the call was closed with an overwhelming response of over 780 applications, the challenge was a huge one: each proposal necessitated to independent review by two external experts. In response, a call for evaluators was opened in June 2023, and hundreds of experts from all over the world volunteered to contribute to the evaluation process, resulting in more than 1,500 reviews. This comprehensive evaluation procedure, involving the eligibility check, the external independent reviews and the final nomination by the EURIZON Scientific Review Panel (SRP), extended beyond the initially estimated timeframe, causing delays in decision-making for all applicants. The process was challenging also due to the high number of outstanding applications across various scientific fields. The reviewers were highly impressed by the quality of many projects which made the decision-making process even more difficult.
Thanks to the European Commission, the dedicated budget for the EURIZON Fellowship Programme was significantly increased in response to the exceptional interest: the initial budget of 1.5 million euro was tripled. There is a 4.5-million-euro fund that will be dedicated exclusively to supporting the individual members of the winning teams in Ukraine.
The Fellowship programme is covering a wide range of scientific fields, as evidenced by the following overview of successful proposals across the six key research areas:
1-DATA, COMPUTING & DIGITAL RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURES: 5 selected proposals
2-ENERGY: 7 selected proposals
3-ENVIRONMENT: 12 selected proposals
4-HEALTH & FOOD: 8 selected proposals
5-PHYSICAL SCIENCES & ENGINEERING: 24 selected proposals
6-SOCIAL & CULTURAL INNOVATION: 9 selected proposals.
The graphic shows the geographical overview distribution of the 65 winning groups.
The awarded teams (considering respectively the affiliation institutes of the PIs) are indeed located at scientific institutions across the entire country, from Lviv and Drohobych to Kharkiv, from Odesa and Kyiv to Sumy, even extending to Kherson, where the damaging of the Kakhovka Dam and the subsequent flooding of the city in 2023, made life extremely difficult.
The fellowship programme also supports the further integration of the Ukrainian research area into the broader European scientific landscape. All 65 teams in Ukraine have indeed one or more partners in Europe who will collaborate within the research projects, generously contributing their expertise and resources to the research without receiving any portion of the grant. These partners are scientists affiliated to Institutes located all over Europe, spanning Spain, Denmark, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Romania and many more countries.
Examples of the scientific topics of the winning groups are: Economic recovery and Development; Quantum Physics; Historical Science and Sociology; Energy Efficiency and Optimization; Environmental monitoring; Biodiversity; and many more.
The vast majority of fellowship recipient teams include women scientists (86% of the selected teams), and young scientists, aged 35 or younger (95% of the selected teams). Furthermore, a significant portion of the awarded teams, constituting 71%, include five or more team members.
Among the contest winners is the team from Kherson State University:
Congratulations to the contest winners!
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