Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) is a programme for doctoral education and postdoctoral training. MSCA equips researchers with new knowledge and skills, including transferable ones and providing them with an international as well as inter-sectoral exposure (including through academia-business collaboration). MSCA also contribute to the development of excellent doctoral programmes, postdoctoral training programmes and collaborative research projects.

Main principles applying to MSCA

• Excellence in various aspects: supported individual fellows, fostering collaborations, knowledge transfer, R&I methodologies, research conducted, training, supervision and career guidance
• Mobility of funded researchers across borders, sectors and disciplines
• Bottum-up and open to the world: open to all domains of research and innovation, chosen freely by the applicants in a fully bottom-up manner and international cooperation encouraged
• Recruitment, working/employment conditions and inclusiveness: MSCA funded organisatons must put effort into applying the principles of the European Charter for Researchers
• Supervision: MSCA funded projects are encouraged to follow the recommendations outlined in the Guidelines for MSCA supervision
• Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation
• European Green Deal: MSCA-funded projects are encouraged to address the principles of the MSCA Green Charter
• Synergies: MSCA promote the creation of strong links with the cohesion policy funds and the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) and also encourage complementarities with other parts of Horizon Europe, such as EIT (note), EIC, and synergies with other Union programmes, notably Erasmus+ (note), including its European Universities Initiative.  

There are five Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions:

• Postdoctoral Fellowships (PF)
• Doctoral Networks (DN) including RAISE DN 2026
• Staff Exchanges (SE)
• Co-funding of regional, national and international doctoral and postdoctoral programmes (COFUND) including MSCA Choose Europe for Science 2027
• MSCA and Citizens - European Researchers’ Night