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Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) – is a programme under EU Horizon Europe that offers funding for postdocs in the form of 2 or 3-year fellowships in the framework of its Postdoctoral Fellowship Action. MSCA PF provides universal support to young researchers’ scientific and professional growth. Each year, researchers from all over the world apply to the MSCA PF call, thus making it very competitive with only the top excellent proposals getting funded.  There were 8356 applications to the MSCA PF call of 2021 and only 1156 experienced post-doctoral researchers will get funding, €242 million in total, to work at top universities, research centers, private organizations and small and medium-sized enterprises in Europe and the rest of the world. Two researchers from Armenia are among those lucky ones, Hripsime Mkrtchyan and Anahit Hovhannisyan.

Anahit Hovhannisyan is a population geneticist at the Institute of Molecular Biology of NAS RA. Her research focuses on applying evolutionary genetics and genomics to study human populations. Anahit’s MSCA PF project FeverTime (Selection Versus Drift in The Rise of Deleterious Mutations) was successful and she will be hosted by Trinity College Dublin for 2 years to study the demographic history, selection, and origins of the disease-causing variants in Armenia, using a powerful ancient genomics approach. FeverTime will decipher the relative roles of drift and selection in driving local gene mutation load. At the end of the project, the international scientific conference on disease evolution and ancient genomics will be organized in Armenia.

Hripsime Mkrtchyan is an engineer-physicist at Cosmic Ray Division of Alikhanyan National Science Laboratory, her research is devoted to the investigation of thundercloud electric structure.  Her project AtmosEleC (Atmospheric Electricity for Climate) was successful and she will be hosted by the University of Reading in the UK. Hripsime will investigate the usefulness of the Global Electric Circuit (GEC) variables for climate monitoring by combining novel technological advances and new analysis techniques to improve observations of the GEC. Outcomes will include։ the development of a framework for regular monitoring of the GEC ionospheric potential from balloon measurements using a new sensor; improvement of fair-weather determination for GEC electric field measurements using reanalysis data; analysis of historical GEC datasets to study changes in climate-related ocean circulation patterns. New analysis techniques will also be developed to examine existing datasets to understand how the GEC and thus global lightning may link to global climate change.

MSCA-PF Call of 2022 MSCA-PF is designed to support career development of excellent researchers in their postdoctoral phase.  MSCA PF call of 2022 will be launched on May 12, 2022.

In order to apply you must meet the following conditions:

  • Have your PhD degree before the call deadline
  • Your PhD degree must not be more than 8 years old at the call deadline (exceptions apply: career breaks, maternity leaves etc.)
  • You must not have spent more than 12 months in the country of host organization in the last 3 years prior to the call deadline (short-term stays such as family visits do not count)

More information on MSCA PF call can be found here.

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