How to apply

Eligibility of applicants

• Applicants must be in possession of a doctoral degree at the date of MERIT’s call deadline. Researchers who have successfully defended their doctoral thesis but who have not yet formally been awarded the doctoral degree will also be considered as postdoctoral researchers and will be considered eligible to apply.
• A mobility rule will be applied to all categories of researchers. Fellows must relocate to the Czech Republic. Researchers must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in the Czech Republic for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately before the call deadline.
• The same rules apply to the 4 types of fellowships:
  • Standard: Researchers moving within Europe or coming in from other parts of the world.
  • Researchers at risk: Researchers with the status of refugees or researchers at all stages of their careers who are experiencing threats to their life, liberty or research career, and those who are forced to flee or have been displaced because of such threats.
  • Career restart: Researchers who wish to restart their research after a career break (e.g. after parental leave, working outside research, etc.). The researchers must not have been active in research for a continuous period of at least 12 months within the 18 months immediately prior to the deadline for submission of proposals.
  • Reintegration: Czech nationals or long-term residents who wish to return and reintegrate in a longer-term research position in the Czech Republic.
• Permanent employees (employees having a contract for an indefinite period) of one of the Hosting organisations are not eligible to apply for a MERIT fellowship to this Hosting organisation.

Eligibility of applications

• The applications must be complete and must consist of  the:
  • Research proposal (mandatory Technical proposal template to be downloaded in the Template section) written in English and uploaded to the MERIT online application system. Proposals that will not fulfil the eligibility criteria form (use of the Technical proposal template, font size, margins, spacing) will be ineligible. Excess pages (10-page limit for the research proposal) will be disregarded.
  • CV of the candidate written in English and uploaded to the MERIT online application system (5-page limit, extra pages will not be counted).
  • All the online forms filled in: Eligibility form, Ethics Issues Table and Ethics self-assesment, if applicable, and Secondment form.
• The applicants need to complete a compulsory online Ethics Issues Table in order to declare whether their proposed research activity deals with the research areas focusing on: human embryos/foetuses, humans, human cells/tissues, personal data, animals, third countries, environment & health and safety, artificial intelligence, other ethics issues. If the research proposal raises one or more of the issues listed in the ethics issues table, an Ethics self-assessment must be completed. This ethics self-assessment must include a description of the issue, the way the applicant intends to deal with them in order to ensure ethics compliance and any relevant documents (such as authorisation or necessary permissions) with the expected timing of obtaining them. All successful proposals, including those on the reserve list, will be subject to an Ethics screening or to an Ethics Review by the European Commission.
• The applicants must complete an online Secondment form. The secondment can be carried out in the non-academic or academic sectors (private or public) in the Czech Republic or abroad. A list of more than 30 secondment opportunities is available at the MERIT website. Applicants can also suggest their own secondment.

Applicants must make sure they comply with the mobility rule, be ready to commit for up to 30 months for the fellowship, and relocate to the Czech Republic.

Applicants need to identify a suitable Hosting organisation and research group for their research topic. Get familiarised with the knowledge areas covered by MERIT: 1) Biotechnologies and Biomedicine, 2) Laser technologies, 3) Space technologies, 4) Sustainable energy and materials, and 5) Digitalisation, including Artificial Intelligence. Go through the research organisations that will be hosting fellow, as well as the open research groups (available in the MERIT website and Annex 1, and select one host organisation and the appropriate research group. The supervisors corresponding to each research group are also listed on the MERIT website. Applicants are welcome to contact host organisation to know more about their research infrastructure, environment and supervisors.

Applicants need to identify a suitable secondment. When the choice of host organisation and research group is done, the applicants are encouraged to identify a suitable organisation for a secondment.

If you wish to apply, click on Apply in the top right corner of this page.

• Step 1. Register in MERIT Application System. In this step the applicants will provide their personal details.
• Step 2. Apply for a MERIT fellowship.  Through the application system, applicants will complete the application forms and upload the required attachements (CV and technical proposal). Failure to complete these forms by the call deadline will result in the application being deemed ineligible. Therefore, applicants are encouraged to submit their proposal as early as possible.

Phase 1 – written evaluation

For the written evaluation phase, specific selection committees corresponding to each research area will be formed of international and national peer-reviewers (pool of evaluators) who will be interconnected among themselves to ensure the principles of equal opportunities transparency, ethics, and intersectorality oriented on applied results. Three independent evaluators will be assigned to each admitted research proposal.

In order to better assess the relevance of the secondments in non-academic sector and the level of applicability of the research projects and to include the industrial point of view, the pool of evaluators will be composed not only by scientists from the academic sector, but also by experts from the industry, particularly from the R&D departments of high-tech companies.

The gender dimension and other intersectional categories such as age, race, nationality, sexual orientation or geographic location are carefully considered as part of the evaluation and selection process, despite the technical and life sciences focus of expected research projects.

Those candidates that reach at least 75% in the written stage, but a maximum of 30 candidates distributed among the fellowships, which means a maximum of two candidates per fellowship offered by each research group, will be invited for an interview.

Phase 2 – oral interviews

For the oral interview phase, an interview panel will be composed by international evaluators (including the evaluators of the proposal); an expert on gender/intersectional topics; the MERIT Programme Manager; an HR representative, or he director of the corresponding host organisation. Oral interviews will be held through one of the following online platforms ZOOM, Teams, Skype or a virtual showroom.