The University of Deusto has recently been awarded highly competitive funding for a new doctoral programme via the European Commission´s Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND Action. DEUSTO is the only university in Spain, and one of the four institutions in Europe, that will be running two COFUND Projects within the European Horizon 2020 programme.

The European Commission’s COFUND action offers additional funding for new or existing regional, national and international programmes to provide an international and intersectoral dimension to research training and career development. This new project, named 6i-DIRS, aims at recruiting outstanding early stage researchers for high doctoral training to generate interdisciplinary, international and intersectoral projects and dissertations, support and broaden their career prospects, and promote their social contributions. The 6i-DIRS project, that will start in October and run for five years, will offer 19 highly competitive fellowships of 36 month duration.

This is the second COFUND project granted to the University of Deusto. The first COFUND project awarded to Deusto is the DIRS-COFUND project, currently running from January 2016 to December 2020. Overall through these two projects, DEUSTO will provide up to 35 fellowships between 2016 and 2024, attracting excellent doctoral candidates from all over the world to the Deusto International Research School. The next call for applications will be launched in the beginning of 2020.

The 6i-DIRS and the DIRS-COFUND projects reflect the university’s commitment to excellence, openness, flexibility, pan-European focus, ethical awareness and human values. Through its strategy for talent attraction, and grounded on its robust, dynamic and attractive research ecosystem, the University of Deusto is creating an innovative, integrated research and training ecosystem. Research areas, PhD programmes and research teams merge and interact, providing junior scholars with international, intersectoral and interdisciplinary research training and with transnational, cross-sectoral mobility opportunities.

For more information on the COFUND programmes run by the University of Deusto and Deusto International Research School, please consult this page.

DIRS project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skolodwska-Curie grant agreement Nº665959.

6i-DIRS project receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skolodwska-Curie grant agreement Nº847624.