Commission to provide €617m for 141 doctoral programmes under Marie Skłodowska-Curie scheme

The European Commission will fund a total of 141 doctoral programmes with €617.18 million under the 2025 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Doctoral Networks call, it announced on 25/03/2026.

This will make it possible to train around 2,115 doctoral candidates in and outside academia, which will also benefit from joint industry-academia supervision. For example, €19.7m of this budget is dedicated to five industrial doctoral programmes to train PhD candidates in industry and business. The Commission said it would allocate an additional €34.6m to eight Joint Doctoral programmes.

The doctoral programmes are carried out through international partnerships, bringing together 2,701 organisations across 61 countries, including 759 private for-profit entities. The selected projects are coordinated by organisations based in 23 countries. Italy and France lead in coordination, with 15 coordinating institutions each.

The institution received 1,616 applications for the call. The next call for MSCA Doctoral Networks will open on 28 May 2026.