Navigating the EU academia landscape from the PhD to a career in academia with EU funding: opportunities and challenges

Abstract

EU programs for the support of PhD and Postdocs include the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), among others. These programs promote excellence and mobility in EU and abroad. By promoting all domains of research and innovation allow harmonisation. Moreover, the mobility contributes to encourage international cooperation to set-up strategic collaborations. These programs, aim to promote the development of attractive research careers to support excellence in research and innovation across Europe. Since 1996, the MSCA have provided grants to train excellent researchers at all stages of their careers while encouraging transnational, inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary mobility. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) program has supported approximately 39,000 PhD candidates. While focusing on the initial training networks, we can observe that the involvement of countries throughout the EU is quite uneven. In the field of animal production, it seems to clearly overlap with the distribution established animal production chains that include a link to research&development (R&D) infrastructures from the industry. If we look at animal health for example, countries like Portugal, Latvia and Lituania do not have centres for production or R&D just logistics. In regards to animal breeding and genetics, R&D is also located in a few countries. This lack of harmony throughout EU presents challenges that we have for the future that also represent opportunities. Animal production from EU is stronger with a country-wide higher level of production. But how can we achieve that? How can this be stimulated? In this talk these subjects will be approached in a data-driven manner and from the perspective of my personal experience as a researcher, with an EU-funded career in Portugal, a target-inclusiveness country.