Having worked in research support and development for nearly a decade now I have had the opportunity to deal with a large range of funders both within the UK and internationally. However, there is nothing like working with European funding.
Horizon Europe is the world’s largest research framework. With an overall budget of €95.5bn spread over seven years, and with its three main pillars (main components), it is a big beast to tackle.
The three pillars have different approaches: Pillar one, the Excellent Science pillar, supports mainly bottom-up, frontier research. Pillar two, tackling Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness, has a top-down approach, where the European Commission comes up with the problem to be solved by the consortium it funds, whilst Pillar three, the innovation pillar, has a mix of both.
Different parts of the programme have different objectives and support different aspects of research. At the University of Liverpool through the Excellent Science pillar we support high risk-high gain research for talented investigators with the European Research Council (ERC). This pillar also supports the training of the next generation of scientists and innovators thanks to the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA).
