20 years of MSCA in numbers
Since 1994, the programme has supported over 120 000 researchers: 80 000 before 2014, and more than 40 000 in the years of Horizon 2020 so far. From 2014 to 2020, with a budget of EUR 6.2 billion, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions will support around 65 000 researchers including 25 000 PhD candidates. Since 2014, 25% of fellows have been nationals of countries outside either the EU or the 16 Associated Countries of Horizon 2020.
During the same time, over 6100 organisations from more than 100 countries have participated in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. More than EUR 400 million has been awarded to organisations outside academia, for example enterprises, principally in the pharmaceutical, electronics, chemicals, and software sectors. Up to 1340 companies, including 786 SMEs, have received funding from 894 projects. The grants have enabled these firms to train researchers and to capitalise on their knowledge.
Nobel prize winnners involved asfellows or supervisors in the MSCA programme:
2013: James Rothman (Yale school of medicine) was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions supervisor. He received the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology after discovering how cells precisely transport material.
2014: Jean Tirole (Toulouse School of Economics) was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions supervisor. He received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on examining competition, and analysing how large companies should be regulated to prevent monopoly behaviour and protect consumers.
2014: Stefan W. Hell (Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg), a German Physician who was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellow at the University of Turku in 1996-1997 and then coordinator for three Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions individual fellowships. He received his Nobel Prize in Chemistry «for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy».
2014: Edvard I. Moser and May-Britt Moser (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim), former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project coordinators. The two Norwegians received a Nobel Prize in Medicine «for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain».
2015: Takaaki Kajita (University of Tokyo) was involved in a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project as a participant. The Japanese researcher has participated in several Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions projects promoting international collaboration. He received his Nobel Prize in Physics «for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass». Neutrinos are the second most abundant particle in the Universe, after photons of light.
2016: Bernard Feringa (University of Groningen), scientist in charge in a COFUND project. Jean-Pierre Sauvage, (Université de Strasbourg) supervised two individual fellowships. Ferringa and Sauvage received their Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Fraser Stoddart «for the design and synthesis of molecular machines».
2017: The EU funded project GraWIToN involved 9 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellows who contributed to the preparation of the data on gravitational waves that led to the Nobel Prize in Physics.
2017: Richard Henderson (Medical Research Council) was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project coordinator. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank for developing a technique called cryo-electron microscopy to improve images of biological molecules.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions in the future
Building on the success of the programme over more than twenty years, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actionswill continue to fund a new generation of outstanding, early-career researchers under Horizon Europe, the new European research and innovation programme for 2021-2027.The Commission has proposed a budget of EUR 6.8 billion for Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions under Horizon Europe which will now be the subject of negotiations with the European Parliament and Council.
Source: European Commission