The good results in this highly competitive call consolidate the excellence of the ICM and its potential to attract research talent.
The Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM) has been awarded three Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (MSCA-IF), the most prestigious postdoctoral fellowships granted by the European Commission. The good results in this highly competitive call consolidate the excellence of the ICM and its potential to attract research talent.
MSCA-IF grants, which aim to train and recruit researchers for individual projects lasting 12 to 36 months, will enable the recruitment of 1,630 scientists, 209 of whom will work in Spanish centres.
The winning candidates, from France, Germany and Spain, will join the ICM when the health crisis caused by Covid-19 will allow them, and will remain at the Institute for two years. All of them were able to benefit from a series of training sessions focused on obtaining these scholarships and funded by the Severo Ochoa grant.
The first candidate is Pierre Ramond and will lead the FROM (Functional Redundancy of the Global Ocean Microbiome) project under the supervision of the ICM researcher Ramiro Logares. In the framework of this project, the Ramond will delve into the functional redundancy of the ocean microbiome.
The second candidate is Walter Menapace and will be involved in the TURBOMUD project, supervised by the ICM researcher Eulàlia Gràcia. The candidate will use the MSCA-IF fellowship to characterise, in the Gulf of Cadiz, the connection between mud volcanoes and turbidites generated by earthquakes to obtain a better definition of the seismic risk in the region.
As happened in the previous call, Spain was in 2020 the EU country with more projects funded under the Marie Sklodowska Curie Individual Actions (MSCA-IF-2020) programme of the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development. In total, the 2020 call has had a budget of €328 million, of which €33.3 million (17.33%) has been awarded to Spain.
From 2014 until now, more than 9,460 research projects have been funded thanks to the Individual Actions of the MSCA Programme, 1,100 of them in Spanish institutions, with Spain having obtained nearly 190 million euros.