The mission of the European Research Council (ERC) is to support frontier research in all fields of science and scholarship in all EU Member States. Throughout the years, the European Research Council has implemented a number of measures to encourage quality applications from researchers in countries where the levels of participation and success rates in ERC calls has been so far modest. This year, the ERC initiated a new Mentoring initiative helping to identify international experts to provide coaching and advice to applicants. ERC will not compensate the mentors and any costs linked to this initiative. This will be done by national/regional offices in charge of the support programmes for ERC applicants, who put in place specific scope and compensation of the work done by external mentors.
The Estonian Research Council (ETAG) joined this initiative and created a new support measure under the Mobilitas Pluss programme. ETAG offers ERC applicants in Estonia the opportunity to get expert scientific feedback on their proposal (or mock interviews) before submission. Both ERC grantees and former panel members serve as external mentors in the initiative.
Researchers who wish to participate in the mentoring initiative should have their ERC applications almost ready at least one month before the ERC deadline. The advice and experience of the mentor will help the researcher to finalise their application.
The support for participating in the ERC Mentoring initiative is carried out via Mobilitas Pluss partner organisations and with the help of the Estonian Research Information System (ETIS).
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