Petition to remove academic age limits on ERC grants
Posted by yanlan.mao, on 7 February 2023
Motion to ask ERC council to remove ‘academic age limits’ on ERC Starting and Consolidator grants.
https://www.change.org/p/remove-academic-age-limits-on-erc-grants
We would like to ask the ERC council to consider removing the ‘academic age limits’ as an eligibility criterion for applying for ERC Starting and Consolidator grants. The current “post 7 years” and “post 12 years” after PhD limits are extremely limiting and not in line with current timelines of research, especially in the Life Sciences. There are multiple reasons to ask for this (see examples below), but the main consensus is that such age limits select against social, economic, gender, ethnic and scientific diversity as it promotes people from privileged backgrounds, with straight forward and fast career paths, who are not necessarily the best scientists and mentors of future scientists. Scientific career paths are diverse, so putting one set of absolute time frames on different fields and different personal circumstances does not make sense. Experiments in animal models take much longer than theory. There may be delays due to different caring duties (of which child-birth is only one), illness, moving countries, changing fields, etc. With the current ‘age limits’, especially in countries where the ERC grants are the main source of large funding, once you ‘miss the boat’, you will never catch up, and your scientific career is severely impacted or prematurely ended. Should we be selecting scientific excellence based on speed, or quality?
We understand that to try to limit proposals submitted, and to have categories /cut offs to reflect career stage, there should be some ‘time-based’ criteria. Many countries, such as the UK, have removed these ‘absolute post PhD academic age limits’ on grants, and has thrived on new systems based on ‘new’, ‘mid’, or ‘senior’ investigators. If the ERC insists on having some time limits, we propose that a system such as this will be more inclusive:
– Starting Grant: up to 5 years since independence (defined as starting own group, faculty position, able to supervise PhD students independently, etc).
– Consolidator Grant: up to 12 years since independence.
– Advanced Grant: more than 12 years since independence.
(the current extensions to the above due to child birth, illness, etc, should still be applied).
(6 votes)
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