Becoming an excellent researcher is no straight path. Aside from long hours, it usually includes working abroad – as did Marie Skłodowska-Curie herself. Intending to boost the careers of experienced postdoctoral researchers, the European Commission launched the Marie Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowships (European and Global Fellowships) that allow researchers to work abroad for a 12 to 36-month project in an international and intersectoral framework.

In the last call (H2020-MSCA-IF-2019), from the 193 Marie Sklodowska Curie – Individual Fellowship that Spain has received, six have been awarded to ICIQ postdoctoral researchers. The candidates and their projects are:

• Jacob Davies (Martín group) will work on the project “ALCO2-FUNC: A Remote-carboxylation Strategy for Alcohols via a Dual-catalytic System”
• Santosh Gadekar (Martín group) will work on the project “LEWIS-PYR: Electrophilic aromatic substitution of azines catalysed by Frustrated Lewis pairs”
• Bart Limburg (Kleij group) will work on the project “PHOTOCARBOX: Increasing the scope of CO2-utilising photoreactions: asymmetric photosynthesis of amino acids”
• Dengke Ma (Melchiorre group) will work on the project “PHOTO-CYCLE: Photocatalysis in Drug Discovery – Asymmetric Preparation of Bioactive Chiral Lactones and Cyclohexanols”
• Moreshwar Chaudhari (Pericàs group) will work on the project “AsymmFlow: Go with the continuous flow: Asymmetric Synthesis of Bioactive Alkaloids by Multistep Continuous-Flow Processes”
• Scott Folkman (Galán-Mascarós group) will work on the project “RENEW:Renewable Energy through New Electrolysis catalysts for Water splitting”

Scott Folkman, a postdoctoral researcher from the Galán-Mascarós group, applied to the MSCA fellowship because it is one of the premier EU postdoctoral fellowships. “I am honoured and grateful to have been awarded an MSCA fellowship and I plan to spend the next couple of years at ICIQ maturing as a researcher and working towards the Horizon 2020 goals of a sustainable future,” he explains.

Another ICIQ postdoc, Jacob Davies, applied to the MSCA fellowship two years ago on the advice of his supervisor, ICIQ group leader Rubén Martín. Although he wasn’t able to secure the fellowship at that time, he received very positive comments on the project and, encouraged by it, reapplied. He was successful the second time around. “I am very happy for the chance to prove myself as part of this prestigious fellowship,” he said while adding “I would like to say a big thank you to everyone in the Projects Department for their help: I would certainly not have been successful without them.”

All of the fellowships granted to the six ICIQ postdoctoral researchers are “European standard,” mode which allows researchers to move from any country in the world to Spain. These six fellowships represent 5% of all the projects obtained in Spain in the “European standard” modality. Thanks to the Marie Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowships calls (2014-2019) more than 7.830 research projects are currently being funded, 861 of them in Spanish institutions.