The "la Caixa" Foundation attracts and retains talent with a hundred grants for young researchers
The "la Caixa" Foundation has awarded 105 new doctoral and post-doctoral grants to excellent researchers to carry out their projects at universities and research centres in Spain and Portugal. The "la Caixa" Foundation's INPhINIT PhD and Junior Leader postdoctoral scholarships have the dual objective of supporting young talent to carry out their research in Spain or Portugal and of attracting foreign researchers to these countries.
These calls offer them competitive salaries and transversal training. In the case of doctoral fellowships, issues such as scientific communication, the emotional well-being of the researcher, leadership and funding opportunities are reinforced. On the other hand, in the case of postdoctoral fellowships, such training enhances independent scientific careers as a future career option and fosters innovation and leadership.
"Funding for science and technology is essential to ensure that human knowledge does not remain stagnant, to be able to go further and propose new solutions to old problems or new challenges. The future is in the hands of people like these scholarship holders, with great potential as agents of change, as co-creators of a future in which the long list of global challenges that exist is becoming shorter and shorter", said the Deputy Director General of the "la Caixa" Foundation, Elisa Durán, during the award ceremony for the scholarships at the CosmoCaixa Science Museum.
The "la Caixa" Foundation's scholarship programme is the most important of those promoted by private entities in Spain and Europe, both in terms of the number of scholarships awarded and the variety of disciplines. In total, the entity will allocate 20.2 million euros to this promotion of doctoral and post-doctoral scholarship holders. Both programmes have been co-funded by the European Commission through the Marie Sklodowska-Curie COFUND Action, in the context of the Horizon 2020 framework programme.
Of the 105 fellows selected in this edition, 52 are Spanish, from 19 different provinces, and 53 are foreigners, from 21 countries. Among the foreigners, Italy is the country with the highest number of grantees, 17. It is followed by Portugal, with 5, and Germany, Brazil, the United States, Mexico and the United Kingdom, with 3 each.
The grants awarded were distributed among 68 research centres and universities in Spain and Portugal. In terms of specialities, molecular biology tops the list with 11 fellows, followed by physical chemistry, biomedical engineering and mathematical and computational biology, with 5 fellows, and theoretical and mathematical physics, astronomy and astrophysics and neuroscience, with 4 fellows each.
