CELSA aims at promoting research collaboration between its members, to exchange practice at both policy and operational level, and together to find solutions for the major problems Europe is facing. The CELSA Research Fund supports collaborative research projects between researchers of at least two CELSA partners, of which one must be KU Leuven, with the purpose of leveraging their efforts towards future Horizon Europe applications.
To support and to encourage the development of new project ideas and applications, the Regional Committee Central and East Europe of KU Leuven is proposing a new initiative. With this invitation, we kindly invite all researchers within the CELSA partners to reflect on ideas for project proposal submissions for the next CELSA call and beyond, and to participate in a matchmaking exercise. To support these ideas, we are planning a workflow that will go as follows:
- Call for expressions of interest sent now during the summer months and repeated in early September. The expressions of interest can be submitted using a Google forms document, with a hard deadline for collecting all expressions of interest by September 21, 5pm. The Google Form is available here. The expressions of interest will be available upon submission here.
- By September 28 the latest, all Research Coordination Offices of each institution will match the expressions of interest with relevant researchers from the respective institutions.
- By October 5 the latest, institutions ask their respective researchers who have been matched to the expression of interest whether they are interested in connecting with other researchers on the specific topic.
- On October 6, researchers are informed about the group composition and invited to initiate an (online) conversation.
- We are planning a live event in Leuven on Thursday November 10 to allow interested partners to engage in the final preparatory steps for a CELSA (or other) project proposal submission. In this event, good practices of former CELSA projects will be presented, details of the CELSA application procedure will be highlighted and opportunities for follow-up projects in the Horizon Europe scheme will be shared with the audience. We will also facilitate live workshops between the applicants to take their project proposals forward. Any travel and accommodation costs are the expenses of the own researcher or institution.
- In order to give sufficient room for this initiative, the deadline of the CELSA call will be changed to December 15, 5pm (CET).
Further details will follow in due course, but please note down the timeline and the date of November 10 for a live event in Leuven.