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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MFP (MartÃ i FranquÃ¨s COFUND)

Teaser

Summary

The MFP was born in 2012 as a natural evolution of the doctoral fellowships programme offered for the last decade by the Departments of the University. It was designed to unify and boost the attraction of the most talented doctoral candidates that would work on ground-breaking research projects, in any of the 5 research areas of URV (Arts and Humanities, Legal and Social Sciences, Engineering and Architecture, Sciences, Health Sciences). However, it still had some inherent problems due to the regulatory frameworks that governed the programme at its inception, namely salary, working conditions, mobility for researchers and recruitment processes. For 2017, with the COFUND funding, the URV goes a step forward, and proposes a revamped fellowship management programme (MFP) for 50 PhD fellowships, offered in 2 calls â€“ 25 positions per call - (2017 and 2018), that aligns the existing fellowship programme to the requirements of the European Charter and Code, and provide much improved employment and working conditions to the best doctoral candidates around the world.
The MFP starts by offering the best salary for early stage researchers, second only to the EC\'s own MSCA actions, and provides the same recruiting conditions as the latter: the selection process is transparent, open, merit-based, impartial and equitable, and provides equal opportunities for all candidates. In fact, the participation of the latter is encouraged by reserving 2 positions (out of a total of 50), for candidates with disabilities. All candidates will be evaluated by external experts, in order to avoid conflicts of interest, and all lists of candidates, at any selection process stage,are publicly available.

The URV has set very high goals for the MFP. First and foremost, the main goal of the MFP is to train 50 doctors, and for this, will provide the most innovative training programme, which combines all the necessary skills training (both transferrable and research specific) such that at the end of the project, the fellow will be fully prepared to continue either in academia, or in the industry. Part of this successful strategy is the mandatory secondment to another international institution, for a longer duration (between 3 and 6 months), which will add a new international and interdisciplinary dimension to the training programme, a dimension only contemplated in the EC\'s own MSCA actions thus far, but not in regional/national programmes. A statement to our commitment to offer the best and most complete training programme is the fact that the MFP is supported by 33 partner organizations (4 industrial partners and 27 academic organizations, as well as 2 banks that contribute financially to the programme).

Our strategy for the MFP will have a great impact on the region, as it will take a largely regional/national programme and convert it to an internationally recognized programme, open for all researchers, where all the principles of excellence and innovative doctoral training are applied, together with best practices in working conditions. As such, we expect that the MFP will improve the participation of international students in our doctoral programmes by 20% in the first 2 years, which combined with the employment and working conditions offered, will make our university a highly desirable employer in the region. The quality of the training programme will guarantee the generation of 50 very high skilled professionals at the end of the programme, which will make them very appealing for local/regional industry, as well as internationally. This will generate a lot of visibility for our university, which, on one side, will lead to a higher interest for international fellows to join our university\'s training programmes, and on the other side, will strengthen our relationships with local and international partners, which will be the catalyst of new and important collaborations for future research opportunities.

Work performed

The main objective of the MFP project is to greatly contribute to the internationalization of URV, by attracting 50 talented researchers, to our research groups, and at the same time, abiding by the principles of the Charter & Code, which, at the call date, were quite recently translated into the HR logo. As such, there was a great responsibility for our project to deliver on the principles of transparency, equal opportunity and fair selection processes.

To this end, the MFP management team has created new software applications that allowed equitable selection and evaluation of candidates and has run a comprehensive dissemination campaign to all important jobs portals at European level. In particular, the MFP management team has done the following:
1. publication of the calls and dissemination of the projects, in order to attract a large number of candidates, to Euraxess, Nature Jobs, FindAPhd, LinkedIn, social networks, embassies around the world, etc
2. development of a brand new application software, where the entire process is completed online (the previous system needed registration on a physical paper, which was sent via mail/courier/etc).
3. development of a brand new evaluation process, based on the European Commission expert revieweres web app, using the same scoring as the EC, and using evaluators that were recruited via Euraxess (all of them outside of the URV, with no conflicts of interest, and paid for their work)
4. development of a new recruitment process at institution level, where we involved the MFP management team, the Human Resources service, the Economic service, the Doctoral School and the Research Support Service
5. the MFP programme itself is a structural change of the previous MartÃ FranquÃ¨s programme, where for each candidate, we reserve a certain amount of research costs each year (previously only the salary and enrolment was contemplated).
6. after the selection of the candidates, they received institutional support for their travel documentation, including residence permits and VISAs, as well as accomodation and local support for paperwork documentation
7. after the start of their contracts, a comprehensive dissemination campaing was started, for the research done by each of them, with the objective of promoting their work, and them as researchers. This dissemination is done through the official MFP webpage (www.urv.cat/cofund), a Twitter channel dedicated to the MFP COFUND fellows, a news section in the main university webpage, where we publish annoucements related to their work, TV and radio interviews, etc. To this purpose, we have employed a communications manager, who is in charge of the dissmination & communication planning for all 50 fellows
8. a pilot for transversal skills training courses has been started and paid by the MFP project, where specific courses were developed for the MFP fellows. after the pilot ends, the courses will be offered as permanent training to all the PhD students at URV.

Final results

Several projects that were proposed (and selected for funding) have great societal implications. Some of them deal with nutrition and health, some deal with smart cities, some with circular economy, all these topics being focus areas in the H2020 programme. There are several projects that are linked to the FEDER programme for territory development (in the area of nutrition, economy, health). As work progresses on these projects, we will be updating this section.