Humboldt Foundation to implement EU programme for at-risk researchers from Ukraine

Starting this autumn, a new fellowship programme will help researchers from Ukraine who are at risk or have fled their country continue their work in an EU Member State or Horizon Europe Associated Country. The European Commission has tapped the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, together with its partners Scholars at Risk Europe hosted at Maynooth University, Ireland and the European University Association (EUA) to conduct the new programme for which the EU is providing €25 million in funding.

MSCA4Ukraine, as the programme is called, is one of the European Union’s responses to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Through this programme, Ukrainian researchers are to be put in a position to continue working on their doctorate or as a postdoc at a European host institution. A permanent brain drain is to be avoided. For this reason, these individuals’ reintegration in Ukraine is to be fostered as soon as it is again possible and collaboration between the Ukrainian university sector and the international research community is to be strengthened.

“This programme is extremely important. We thank the European Commission for their trust and our partners Scholars at Risk Europe and EUA for enabling us to do pioneering work at European level with this programme. Between us, we have an enormous amount of know-how at our disposal regarding how to support threatened researchers”, said the President of the Humboldt Foundation, Hans-Christian Pape. “With the establishment of our Philipp Schwartz Initiative in 2016, we became the first research funding organisation in Germany to establish a programme to protect at-risk researchers. We continue to work to ensure academic and scientific freedom and, together with the Ukrainian research system, are endeavouring to also support civil society there.”

MSCA4Ukraine is funded by Horizon Europe under the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) programme. A first call for applications is planned for September. Individual funding periods will have a duration of between six months and two years. Interested potential hosts and at-risk researchers can register via a mailing list at EUA and will then receive timely further news and information about applying.

(Press release 22/2022)

Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation enables more than 2,000 researchers from all over the world to spend time conducting research in Germany. The Foundation maintains an interdisciplinary network of well over 30,000 Humboldtians in more than 140 countries around the world – including 61 Nobel Prize winners.