The Romanian Institute of Science and Technology invites applications for research grants aimed at scientists having a PhD who wish to lead an independent project within the institute. The research projects will be funded by UEFISCDI, a Romanian research funding agency. The call is open to all scientists, regardless of current place of work, citizenship or nationality. If successful, the applicants will work full time in Romania, implementing the funded projects within the institute.
There are two types of grants:
- Grants for young research teams (TE): provide up to 450K RON (about 90K euros) for up to 24 months. The project director and all team members must be less than 46 years old. The project director must have got the PhD no more than 12 years ago (plus parental leave).
- Grants for exploratory research (PCE), for experienced researchers: provide up to 1.2M RON (about 240K euros) for up to 33 months.
Project directors must have a track record of relevant publications.
The funding is suitable for scientists working in fields that do not require complex laboratory setups, for which any required equipment and supplies can be purchased using the project’s budget. The institute provides administrative support, office space in downtown Cluj, office furniture, printers, and utilities corresponding to normal office use. The institute may also provide laptops and computing hardware, subject to availability.
Eligible direct expenses include personnel, purchases, and travel. Personnel expenses include salaries for the applicant as well as for any other team members, who may be recruited later by the applicant. Projects on machine learning research or that apply machine learning to another field of science may involve some of the machine learning scientists currently working in the institute. Indirect expenses are 20% of the direct expenses (less large equipment), for TE projects, and 25% of the direct expenses (less large equipment), for PCE projects.
The expected start date of the projects is January 2022.
Scientists are invited to send us an expression of interest to apply to the calls (in English or Romanian) at grants@rist.ro, including:
- a preliminary abstract of the project, indicating the project’s topic (this may be updated later);
- the CV of the applicant;
- the list of publications of the applicant with citation information, as a link to a profile on Google Scholar (preferrably) or Publons (formerly ResearcherID).
Please send these expression of interests as soon as possible, but no later than June 25, 2021.
Following the approval of the expression of interest, scientists will finalize the full applications with the administrative assistance of our staff and will submit the applications for assessment to UEFISCDI. The applications should be written in English. The final applications should be submitted online, through uefiscdi-direct.ro. The deadline for submitting the final applications is July 7, 2021.
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