They come from 12 countries, are affiliated to 12 different departments and involve 34 URV lecturers, including supervisors and co-supervisors of doctoral theses. They have been selected from 597 applicants

The ceremony to welcome the last promotion of doctoral candidates of the Martí i Franquès COFUND programme (MFP-COFUND) was attended by Carmen Gómez Buendia, vice-rector for Doctoral Studies and CRAI; Benjamí Martorell, coordinator of the Doctoral School; Oana Moldovan, project manager of the MFP-COFUND project; and Paloma Pontón, communications manager of the programme.

The new doctoral candidates are nine women and eleven men from 12 countries around the world: Bangladesh, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, India, Italy, Iran, Lebanon, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines and Venezuela. The researchers were selected for the 2021 call, from a total of 597 applicants.

As beneficiaries of the grant, the researchers will be given a contract of up to three years, during which they will work on their doctoral thesis, receive multidisciplinary and intersectoral training and make international research visits at universities, research centres, companies and institutions.

The 20 new researchers join the 75 from the three previous calls of the MFP-COFUND programme in 2017, 2018 and 2020, 37 of whom have already defended their doctoral theses. In total, the programme will have recruited 95 doctoral researchers over the course of its four editions.

The project is co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, which is contributing four million euros, and the URV, which is providing a further four million euros.