I care about the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions more than almost anything else in my professional life, and I am still grateful that I was given the chance to be one of its fellows. The fellowship and my time at Stanford University changed me. I came back a different researcher and a different person, and everything I do in Cyber-physical Systems Lab at Uppsala University today is built on that change.
It is not easy for a woman to belong in academia. In many places, we are not even given the chance to try. Funding schemes call it excellence, but too often what they reward is privilege and bias. Perhaps that is why the MSCA matters so much to me. Perhaps it is also why I keep coming back to my fellowship, why I write about it more than anything else, and why I want to embrace it, protect it and help make it better.
But the world is completely different place then a few years ago. Funding agencies are facing serious challenges. The pie is getting smaller, the resources are shrinking year by year. MSCA Fellowship program is not immune to this greater challenges. The number of applications has doubled in the last two years, and the funding has not grown with it. Success rates will fall even further this year again to record. Many people will be heartbroken, and many will never have the experience I was given. As someone who has always fought for equal opportunities, I feel responsible for that. When we fund a proposal that scores 97 out of 100 but not one that scores 94, none of us can fully trust the system. And this is not only about the MSCA. The same is true for many other calls in the EU, in Sweden in particular, and beyond. I applied to ERC Starting Grant this year, the expected success rate is less than 5%. Imagine the heartbreak that waits 95% of us.
I don’t have the answers. But I believe we have to ask the questions.
So when I was invited to join a panel at the MSCA 30th anniversary conference in Dublin, I was excited and said yes straight away. On Thursday I will be part of the panel An Exploration of Fellowship, together with other fellows and alumni from We Are Fellowship, the podcast series marking 30 years of the MSCA, which I was also part of.
There are many rooms where I am not given the chance to belong or to be accepted. Maybe you are sitting in some of those rooms. If so, will you do the same? Will you talk about how far the idea of excellence has been stretched? I don’t think academia has ever asked people to compete with each other this much, for this long, and this ruthlessly. I am worried that people will give up on science, that they will grow tired and burn out on the way to excellence. And I know that real excellence is the opposite of that.
My fellowship gave me different ways of learning, of thinking and of living. It allowed me to be a mother, to start again but also bigger, and to become better. It was as far from burnout as anything I have known.
That is the fellowship I want to protect, and that is what I will be carrying with me on stage this week. The fellowship is not about individual excellence, it is about us coming together and building that excellence, defining that excellence.
