Eligibility conditions
Eligibility of applicants
- Applicants must be in possession of a doctoral degree as of 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 to be 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.).
- 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 following:
- Research proposal (mandatory Technical proposal template to be downloaded in the Template section) written in English, complete and uploaded to the MERIT online application system. Proposals that do not fulfil the eligibility criteria form (use of the Technical proposal template, font size, margins, spacing) will be ineligible. Excess pages (a 10-page limit for the research proposal) will be disregarded.
- Endorsement for the feasibility of the applicant´s research project (see Guide for applicants, section 5.2).
- 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-assessment, 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 some 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.
- The applicants must complete an online Secondment form and the name(s) of the secondment organisation must be indicated. 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 on the MERIT website. Applicants can also suggest their own secondment.