Funding news digest ·
Research Funding News for Doctoral and Early-Career Researchers
This digest gathers a selection of notable announcements from European research bodies that bear on the careers, funding prospects and professional horizons of doctoral candidates and early-career researchers. Each entry gives a brief account of what was announced and why it may matter to those at the start of a research career.
European Research Council · 23 October 2026
Starting Grants 2027 applications: Facts and figures
Preliminary figures for the ERC Starting Grants 2027 call, which closed in autumn 2026, show 7 710 submissions, a rise of 60.4% on the previous round and the third consecutive year of growth. Physical Sciences and Engineering drew the largest share (43%), ahead of Social Sciences and Humanities (29%) and Life Sciences (28%), and women submitted nearly 39% of proposals. For early-career researchers planning a Starting Grant bid, these numbers point to a markedly more crowded field and underline the value of careful preparation.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions · 21 October 2026
Interactive publication featuring over 100 success stories and testimonials
The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions have released an interactive publication collecting more than 100 success stories and testimonials from the programme. Readers can browse by country or by former university to find researchers and projects close to their own background. For doctoral candidates weighing a fellowship application, it offers concrete examples of the career paths the programme has supported.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions · 20 October 2026
Science without borders: the lasting legacy of Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Marking 30 years of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions in 2026, this piece notes that more than 150,000 researchers, including 25 Nobel laureates, have taken part since 1996, with annual support growing from roughly 800 to about 8,000 researchers. It also reports that companies make up almost half of participating organisations, with over 4,000 firms involved in the last five years, many of them small and medium-sized enterprises. For early-career researchers, this highlights the programme's scale and its role in opening routes between academia and industry.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions · 6 October 2026
Nobel Prizes in Medicine and Physics awarded to former MSCA fellow and supervisor
Two of the 2026 Nobel Prizes went to scientists with ties to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions: Georg Nagel, a former fellow at the University of Naples Federico II between 1999 and 2000, shared the Medicine prize for work on light-gated ion channels and optogenetics, and Francis Halzen, a supervisor in the ASTRONU neutrino astronomy project, received the Physics prize for his role in IceCube and the detection of astrophysical high-energy neutrinos. The announcement shows how mobility fellowships and training networks can sit within careers that later reach the highest levels of recognition.
European Research Council · 5 October 2026
ERC grantee Peter Hegemann shares Nobel Prize in Medicine
The ERC reports that Peter Hegemann, whose discovery of Channelrhodopsin-1 in 2002 helped found optogenetics, shares the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl Deisseroth and Georg Nagel. The Council has funded his work since 2016 through an individual Advanced Grant and a jointly held grant with two other researchers, and he joins fifteen earlier ERC grantees who have become Nobel laureates. Statements from the Commissioner and the ERC President stress the importance of investigator-driven, curiosity-led research, a theme relevant to anyone considering where to pursue fundamental questions.
European Research Council · 2 October 2026
Five ERC grantees win 2026 Wolf Prizes
The ERC highlights ERC-funded winners of the 2026 Wolf Prizes. David Kazhdan and Joseph Bernstein received the Mathematics prize for foundational work in representation theory, automorphic forms and algebraic geometry, while David Klenerman and Shankar Balasubramanian shared the Chemistry prize with Pascal Mayer for large-scale, low-cost DNA sequencing methods. The item outlines the Advanced Grant projects behind each laureate, giving early-career researchers a sense of how sustained ERC funding has accompanied long-term programmes of work.