Second Meeting of the Bulgarian Chapter of MCAA (Day 2)

UNITé Sofia - April 2025

Viktor Senderov

Writing a successful MSCA-IF proposal

I did a two year postdoc with Marie Curie fellowship at Swedish Musuem of Natural History.

Objective

Source: Facebook page of the band

My task was to develop a compiler for a universal probabilistic programming language for phylogenetics.

Turns out there is a music band by the same name :)

Before you start, you…

• Need to find a lab to host you
• The reputation of the lab matters a lot

Lab reputation

My PI has lots of citations, this makes things easier.

It is also part of the criteria, we will look at them later.

How did I find my lab? Internship

I was also a Marie Curie PhD student and during that time I did lots of scientific interneships.

This is how I was introduced to my future PI, Fredrik Roqnuist.

Told me he was working on a probabilistic programming language.

Sounded interesting, so I asked him if he wants to write a proposal.

First proposal (2018)

I wrote for about two weeks uninterrupted.

Lots of help and patience from my wife.

Rejected on administrative grounds

The proposal does not show that the Researcher is, at the date of the call deadline, in possession of a doctoral degree or has at least four years of full-time equivalent research experience.

I did not have my PhD at the time.

However, I believed had four years of research experience.

There is a formal procedure called request to redress.

Spent weeks trying to follow that procedure, however, the decision was not reversed.

My take-home message:

• EU decisions are very hard to reverse and it is probably a waste of time to fight.

Second proposal (2019)

Do I fit the eligibility criteria this time?

• Yes, according to H2020 Programme Guide for Applicants.

• Diploma, research experience, career research break, residency, mobility.

My suggestion is to find the current Guide for applicants if you will apply.

Evaluation criteria

• Excellence

• Impact

• Implementation

The proposal is roughly structured in those three parts, however, this does not mean that the evaluator cannot gauge each of them from any section.

A lot of detailed information can be found in MSCA-IF EVALUATION STEP BY STEP MANUAL FOR EVALUATORS 2018.

Excellence

Sub-criteria:

• Research quality (1.1)

• Quality of training (1.2)

• Quality of supervision and research institution (1.3)

• Potential of researcher to reach professional maturity (1.4)

High-risk high-reward, but achievable:

• State of the art

• Completeness of the proposed methodology

• Originality

Impact

Sub-criteria:

• Enhancing the future potential of researcher (2.1)
• Quality of proposed measures to disseminate (2.2)
• Quality of proposed measures to communicate (2.3)

Implementation

Sub-criteria:

• Coherence of the work-plan (3.1)

• Appropriateness of the management structure (3.2)

• Appropriateness of the institutional environment (3.3)

My proposal

First use of probabilistic programming for hard problems in statistical phylogenetics

We proposed to develop TreePPL, which a programming language based on a concept that had just recently been done in computer science.

Therefore, very innovative for biology, but achievable.

We described in detail how we will create the language.

And what will be its applications.

Proposed courses at Stockholm Unviersity, which high reputation, and together with the excellent lab, it made a difference.

Technical advice

Available upon request. Sample:

• Use appropriate font that is legible but allows you to fit lots of stuff

• Use bold to emphasize certain important passages

• The tone should also be bold: we are doing excellent science

• Use graphs to make to it pretty

• Use your imagination: this is speculation after all, not about results that you have

Good, luck!