Direção de Projectos (DP)

On June 20th, FCT launched ERC-PT Careers : a new program to attract and retain researchers with highly competitive profiles at an international level to occupy permanent positions in research and higher education institutions in Portugal.

Funded under the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), this Program aims to encourage national institutions to recruit researchers with projects funded by the European Research Council that are underway or have been completed less than 24 months ago. This new axis of the ERC-Portugal program adds the dimension of attracting and retaining talent, increasing its impact and deepening the complementarity between its axes, now including incentives and services that cover the various cycles of the Calls of the ERC, from the submission of applications and the evaluation process, to incentives and training for future applications, to the attraction and retention of researchers with ongoing or recently completed ERC-funded research projects.

ERC-PT Careers will function as a support instrument for national institutions that, cumulatively:

• Recruit, for an indefinite period of time, researchers with national or foreign affiliation responsible for ongoing or recently completed ERC projects;
• In the case of projects in progress, and at the date of submission of the expression of interest, be institutions hosting these projects.

The amount of financing will be allocated to institutions depending on the period that elapses between the start of execution of the project financed by the ERC and the hiring to occupy a permanent position. When the project financed by the ERC is still running (up to 60 months), the financing amount will be up to 550 thousand euros; If this project has been recently completed (between 60 and 84 months), corresponding to the ERC-PT Follow-up modality, the amount of financing to be allocated will be up to 450 thousand euros. In both types of attraction or retention, the incentive to be hired for a permanent position will occur for the categories of principal investigator or coordinating researcher, or their equivalent in the teaching career.

The period for submitting applications is permanently open until December 31, 2025 (5:00 p.m. – Continental Portugal time), or until the program’s maximum allocation of €11,781,424 is completed, whichever occurs first. More information about the Call must be requested via email: ercpt@fct.pt .

The new ERC-PT Careers fits into the resilience dimension of the PRR, and in particular the “RE-C06-i06 – Science Plus Training” component, contributing to modernizing and deepening the production and transfer of knowledge in all its various cycles.

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