Internationalization
and excellence
The Strategic Plan of the University of A Coruña for the period 2013-2020 defines among its objectives the creation of an international university environment and the achievement of scientific production based on quality. Within the strategic objective of internationalizing research, UDC has set the goal to expand its relationships with other universities and to encourage and support access to international funding for research.
The European Research Council (ERC) seeks, through specific calls under Pillar I for Excellent Science of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, to provide long-term finance to leading research projects from around the world to strengthen excellence, dynamism and creativity within research. ERC grants (http://erc.europa.eu) are open to researchers of any age from any country in the world who want to work in Europe.
The international prestige associated with ERC grants is increasing for both the recipient researchers and their host scientific institutions. The achievement of projects funded by the ERC is currently one of the priorities in the field of research for UDC.
In this context, UDC has decided to launch an Excellent Science Support Programme to encourage the presentation of successful proposals from researchers in one of the modalities of ERC: Starting Grants (StG), Consolidator Grants (CoG) and Advanced Grants (AdG).
This support programme, called berce (welcome, stabilization and return of excellent science, for its acronym in Galician), contains a series of concrete actions aimed at both researchers at UDC and scientists from all over the world who choose to develop their ERC project in UDC.
In addition to ERC grants there are other calls that enable international researchers to realize their projects in UDC. berce also aims to provide technical support to requests for the financing of individual projects that bet on quality research and represent a significant step in scientific development (More Excellent Science).
