Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fund people rather than projects: researcher mobility, training and career development. They are the most internationally open part of Horizon Europe and, for an individual researcher, often the most realistic.

Postdoctoral Fellowships support an individual researcher moving to a host organisation for one to three years, with the proposal written jointly by the researcher and a supervisor. Doctoral Networks fund cohorts of PhD candidates across a consortium. Staff Exchanges fund secondments of people between sectors and countries, keeping their home employment intact.

Money is paid as unit costs rather than actual costs: a monthly living allowance adjusted by a country coefficient, plus a mobility allowance, plus a family allowance where the researcher has dependants, plus contributions to research and management costs. Nobody submits receipts for salary, which makes the administration unusually light.

The mobility rule is the gate that catches most people. A researcher generally must not have lived or worked in the host country for more than twelve months in the three years before the deadline. It is counted in days, it is verified, and it disqualifies exactly the candidate who already has a good relationship with the host lab.

Evaluation weights differ from the rest of the programme, with Excellence carrying the most weight, and the assessment is genuinely about the researcher's development rather than the results alone. A proposal that describes brilliant science and says nothing about what the fellowship does for the fellow's career scores badly, and that surprises applicants coming from other schemes.