UiT The Arctic University of Norway has established «The Arctic MSCA-PF program» (uit.no/project/arcticmsca) to recruit excellent young researchers planning to apply for a Marie Skƚodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (MSCA-PF) to pursue a career in research. We invite applications from promising young researchers within the field of Language Acquisition and multilingualism. The selected candidate will write a proposal for a 24-month MSCA-PF at UiT together with Prof. Marit Westergaard. This is an opportunity to accelerate your research career while living in the urban research city of Tromsø, uniquely located at the top of the world surrounded by some of Europe’s last pristine wild nature.

This call is one of 74 from pre-selected supervisors at UiT The Arctic University of Norway through the “Arctic MSCA-PF program”. Successful postdoc candidates will be invited for a three-day MSCA-PF symposium June 4-6, 2024 (hybrid physical/digital event, see details at uit.no/project/arcticmsca/program-structure). At this event, the candidates will present their past research achievements, discuss future plans with their potential supervisor and learn how to write a successful MSCA-PF application. The selected candidates will, jointly with the supervisor, write the MSCA-PF application by the deadline of September 11, 2024.

In this call we search for talented, young researchers within the field of Language Acquisition and Multilingualism as presented by Prof. Westergaard:

The AcqVA Aurora Centre (Acquisition, Variation & Attrition) does cutting-edge research on language acquisition and multilingualism. Work in the group investigates both mono- and bilingual first language acquisition, second and third language acquisition, and heritage languages and attrition. The research done in the center has a theoretical foundation, and the focus is on the mental grammars of various populations of speakers. AcqVA Aurora has two labs, AcqVA and PoLaR, and our research methodologies include corpora and different types of online and offline experimental work, e.g. elicitation experiments, acceptability judgements, eyetracking, and EEG/ERPs. From January 1, the newly funded Center for Language, Brain & Learning (C-LaBL) will be hiring a number of postdocs and gradually taking over the research done in AcqVA Aurora. Applicants for the advertised MSCA positions should propose a research project that will strengthen and complement the research of the UiT research community.  

Professor Marit Westergaard, who is the director of AcqVA Aurora as well as C-LaBL, is currently involved in several other externally funded projects, e.g. ADIM (Across-Domain Investigations in Multilingualism), funded by EEA Norway grants (see an overview of projects and research interests here). MSCA proposals that extend the focus of these research projects, e.g. to different language combinations, different linguistic phenomena, or different populations, are especially welcome. 

Please send your CV (max 3 pages) and describe a research project that will strengthen and complement the presented research (max 2 pages) to marit.westergaard@uit.no by Feb 16th 2024. Mark your application "Arctic MSCA". Successful candidates will be contacted in late March 2024.