EUTOPIA — a community of six European campuses striving to address global and regional challenges, and to develop a new form of open, inclusive, innovative higher education — is to invest €10.2 million to train early career researchers in fields such as data, health, welfare, and sustainability.
The EUTOPIA Science & Innovation Postdoctoral Fellowships Programme (EUTOPIA-SIF) has been awarded €5.6 million by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework Programme, with that amount boosted by a further €4.6 million from EUTOPIA members.
EUTOPIA-SIF will train a cohort of 76 post-doctoral researchers over five years, to be part of the future generation of science and innovation leaders in Europe — with internationally excellent collaborative research and teaching, and working hand in hand with local government, business and organisations.
The programme will see the researchers work research areas to help tackle real-world challenges like sustainable materials, water and the environment, antimicrobial resistance, cancer and reproductive health, the impact of big data and artificial intelligence, and ethical issues and inequality.
EUTOPIA-SIF will develop new projects with collaborators across the alliance: Vrije Universiteit Brussel, CY Cergy Paris Université, University of Gothenburg, University of Ljubljana, Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and the University of Warwick.
The first call for applications will be published in the Autumn of 2020. Fellows will be offered full freedom to pursue their research project while benefiting from expert mentoring and state-of-the-art research infrastructure.
More than 45 companies, local authorities and non-profit organizations will train or host researchers on secondments to support the programme.
EUTOPIA is an alliance of six universities that have recently been included in the Erasmus+ 'European Universities' pilot project.
The core mission of the EUTOPIA Alliance is to promote a connected and inclusive academic community, addressing global and local challenges, advancing excellence and inclusion, geared towards impact and fostering European economic development and innovation through a deep engagement of the Alliance with its local and regional ecosystems.