EURIZON Fellowship Program for Ukraine: – Ongoing Evaluation procedure
18 August 2023
After the deadline of the call for fellowships in May 2023, more than 750 applications were submitted. Due to this extremely high response, the EURIZON Secretariat announced that the evaluation process will take longer than previously foreseen, with the selection results to be announced several weeks later than initially expected and with the earliest starting date for awarded teams in fall 2023 (October).
The peer review effort is impressive: we have been reaching out to more than 250 scientists, with expertise in a large variety of scientific domains and coming from all over the world, who are currently assessing the applications. Each research project is being evaluated by two scientists. The final decision on the list of awarded proposals will be taken by the EURIZON Scientific Review Panel (SRP) by end of September 2023 (early October at the latest).
Due to the high number of applications, the EURIZON Fellowship Secretariat and the European Commission are working to significantly increase the budget of the call, in order to guarantee a higher success rate and to fund more Ukrainian scientists than initially planned. The initially foreseen budget is 1.5 Mio €.
Despite these efforts, we regret that EURIZON Fellowship won´t be able to support a large number of highly deserving research projects. The very preliminary and partial results of the evaluation process, indeed, reveal already the high quality and the innovative potential of many proposals, showing also the excellent commitment to science of the Ukrainian teams, despite the extreme working conditions.
Our aim is to guarantee a transparent and sound selection process in the shortest time possible. We are aware of the hardship and the difficult circumstances our Ukrainian applicants and their teams and families are constantly enduring. Support programmes targeting scientists who stayed in the country are indeed urgently needed in these dramatic times for Ukraine.
We thank our external experts for their solidarity and generous offers of support and our Ukrainian teams for their patience and understanding.
EURIZON Fellowship Secretariat
