01 Sep 2026
MSCA is funding 29 new doctoral training and postdoctoral fellowship programmes
The European Commission will provide €105.5 million in co-funding for 15 doctoral training and 14 postdoctoral fellowship programmes under the 2026 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) call for Co-funding of regional, national and international programmes (COFUND). Through COFUND, organisations can create or enhance their own doctoral training and postdoctoral fellowship programmes, with the goal of recruiting researchers and attracting international talent, with MSCA co-funding a significant share of their costs. Institutions benefiting from such funding need to top it up with their own funding sources.
The European Research Executive Agency (REA) received 141 applications for this call, of which 136 were eligible and evaluated. With 29 selected projects, the success rate for this call is 21%. These collaborative programmes often involve international partners. They cover over 400 organisations in 38 countries, including 65 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The country with the largest number of COFUND coordinating organisations is France (11), followed by Spain (5) and Ireland (3). Austria has one coordinating organisaion.
Selected projects span various scientific disciplines and will train skilled and innovative researchers in areas such as
- life-sciences
- quantum-physics
- sustainable energy
- environmental matters
- space research
10 out of the 29 proposals on the main list are bottom-up programmes (open topics without limitation to specific disciplines). This allows researchers full freedom to propose their own topics in any field.
For more information:
An overview of the evaluation results, cut-off scores and statistics has been published on the MSCA COFUND 2026 call page together with a link to the list of applications proposed for funding.