Dear EUIMWP participants,

On behalf of our ITC CG Coordinator, Prof. José Capmany, we are pleased to announce that the period for applying for an ITC Conference Grant is now open.

In the following guides you will find the general rules for ITC CG and indications for preparing applications. All of them can be downloaded from https://www.cost.eu/funding/how-to-get-funding/documents-and-guidelines/:

  • COST Vademecum (there’s a new version, May 19)
  • Guidelines for Action management, monitoring and assessment
  • Inclusiveness target countries (ITC) conference grants user guide

According to the COST Vademecum, Conference Grants are aimed at supporting  ECI and PhD students from Participating ITC to attend international science and technology related conferences on the topic of the Action that are not organised by the COST Action.

The following eligibility criteria apply:

  1. Conference Grants are exclusively reserved for PhD students and ECI’s with a primary affiliation in an institution located in an ITC.
  2. The applicant must make an oral/poster presentation at the conference in question and must be listed in the official event/conference programme. The main subject of the oral presentation / poster presentation / speech at the approved conference must be on the topic of the Action and must acknowledge COST (see Section 10).
  3. The participation of each applicant must be pre-approved by the Action MC. Attendance at European conferences is preferred. However, conferences held elsewhere can also be considered.

Please note that the ITC are: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, the North Republic of Macedonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Montenegro, Moldova, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey.

The call will have the following characteristics:

  1. Applications can be submitted from now until further notice (when allocated budget is finished).
  2. They will be treated in a first come, first served basis, after checking the suitability of the applicant and the suitability of the conference.
  3. The selected conference will have to take place before March 31st, 2019, one month before the end of the Grant Period (April 30th, 2020). In the case the conference takes place during the second half of March, grantees are kindly requested to submit their scientific report in 2 weeks (instead of the usual 30 days). Otherwise we would not have enough time to process the payment of their grant and our commitment to submit our Financial Report to COST when requested will be endangered.
  4. Please send also 2-4 pictures of you during the conference, so we can publish them in the webpage of the Action (https://www.sarcos.eng.cam.ac.uk/), together with the summary of your proposal. The scientific report will be published in the members area.
  5. The conference program and the book of abstracts including the applicant’s name and contribution should be provided.
  6. Grantees who have never been reimbursed by the UPV should send Pepa (ghmanager.upv@gmail.com) the form “Dates_address_bank” attached filled in and signed, together with a copy of their passport, in order to be included in the UPV database as a third party for making the payment. In the case the grantee requests the grant in a Spanish bank account, please fill in the form “Datos_Tercero”. Moreover, those with a Spanish DNI, should provide this instead of their passport. The transfer of the grant should be done, preferably, to the grantee’s personal bank account. If this is totally impossible, please let Pepa know and she will inform you about how to proceed.
  7. Submitting an application implies the acceptation of all the above mentioned conditions and characteristics of the call.

If after reading the guides you still have any question, please contact Pepa.

Thank you and kind regards,

José Capmany (Chair, Grant Holder and ITC CG Coordinator)
Pepa Bayarri (Grant Holder Manager)