The European Commission has awarded four million euros to the Universitat Rovira i Virgili’s Martí Franquès COFUND project, which will allow it to contract 50 predoctoral researchers. The recruitment process will take place in 2017 and 2018 and the successful candidates will have be awarded three-year contracts. The University will contribute a further four million euros to the project which will conclude in 2021

The recruitment process to contract the first 25 predoctoral researchers onto the Martí Franquès programme will begin on 1 February 2017. The programme is jointly funded by the European Union as part of the COFUND programme. The remaining 25 will be contracted in 2018. The University will dedicate eight million euros to the programme, four million from the European Commission through the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme and four million euros from its own budget. The programme aims to recruit talented and experienced young researchers from across Europe and give them an opportunity to develop their research careers at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili.

Candidates who wish to apply may not have spent more than 12 months during the last three years living in Spain. The reason for this is to promote mobility by encouraging applications from foreign students with master’s degrees or Spanish researchers who have lived abroad for more than two out of the last three years. The contracts will be in line with the standards set by the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme, thus improving the researcher’s contractual conditions. They will join the URV where they will receive multidisciplinary and cross-sector training thanks to the collaboration of more than 30 organisations who support the programme.

A committee comprising URV staff and external evaluators will assess the candidates’ education, research accomplishments, professional experience, motivation and references. The candidates will be able to apply for one of the projects connected to the University’s official doctoral programmes.

The URV is the first public university in Spain and the only Catalan one to receive such funding and is one of only four Spanish institutions to receive this distinction since the COFUND predoctoral programme was started.

The URV currently holds an annual recruitment process for the Martí Franquès research programme to attract talent to the URV along with other research institutions in the region, which this year will contract 47 doctoral students and two postdoctoral students.