Introduction

In 2011, I attended the annual conference of the European Hematology Association (EHA) in London. The EHA meetings belong to the largest scientific conferences in Europe with more than 9,000-10,000 participants from all over the World. The high internationality was a very pleasent experience for me but more importantly, I could take the opportunity to visit Professor Mel Greaves' lab at the Sutton site of the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR). All people from his working group was very kind to me and after my short presentation, Prof Greaves agreed in serving as my host supervisor during a postdoctoral training period. One month later was the time when the EU's largest fellowship-providing programme, the Marie Curie Actions, came into our focus. 

The Intra-European Fellowship (IEF) is a career development grant within the 'People' Specific Programme of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). It aims to help experienced  researchers enhance their career by providing financial support for an individual project. The funded period is 12 to 24 months and the mobility is mandatory. The goal of the programme is to support researchers in attaining a leading independent position, thus the training and outreach activities are as important as the scientific content of the research proposal. 

The Marie Curie IEF call was officially posted on 16th March, 2011. I met the host group on 9th June for the first time and we started to figure out the proposal from scratch on 8th July. The deadline was very tight (11th August) and I have never worked as hard as I did during the subsequent four weeks. Fortunately, some very kind people from the host institute helped me with writing the proposal and I also received invaluable advice from experienced experts at my home institute. Last but no least, I'm really grateful to my family for their tolerance and emotional support. After a thorough discussion and change of some 100 e-mails, the application pack was uploaded and there was nothing to do except of waiting for some months. 


The post-application period in a nutshell:
20th October: Great news! The scientific peer-review process was completed and my proposal was selected as the best one in the category of 'Life Science'. Furthernore, there was a bigger difference in the scores between our application pack and the 2nd one than between the 2nd and 32nd proposals. (These results came to my knowledge because the three best projects were announced immediately after the review process.) 

28th November: The Research Executive Agency (REA) e-mailed the Evaluation Summary Report (ESR). 98% :-)

13th December: Invitation to negotiation. 

11th January, 2012: The negotiation process was successfully finished.

6th March: After an ethical screening and refinement of the proposal, further ethical approvals were requested by the REA.

20th March: By that time, all the ethical issues had been cleared and the preparation of the Grant Agreement began.

30th April: The Grant Agreement signed by the EC was sent to the host institute.

15th May: I had to refuse a Fulbright Research Grant that was unharmonizable with the MC IEF grant because of the overlapping time periods.

20th June: The ICR sent the signed host-fellow contract to me.

13th and 24th July: I got very nice gifts from my close colleagues and they also organized a leaving party for me. We really liked working together. Thank you for all!

   

              

28th July: My flight to the UK.