3rd ITC Conference Grant

Open application until 30th September 2025. APPLY NOW!

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

Call for applications for ITC Conference Grants in the framework of the COST Action CA21146 (PURPLEGAIN).
Deadline for applications: 30th September 2025
ITC conference grants reporting must be completed by 30th September 2025.
The report and supporting information must be submitted within 30 days after the completion of the conference, and in any case no later than 15th September 2025.

COST Action

ITC Conference Grants

ITC Conference Grants financially support an oral presentation of the own work within the scope of the Action by an Action Participant affiliated to a legal entity located in an Inclusiveness Target Country / Near Neighbour Country for their participation in high-level conferences fully organized by a third party, i.e. not organized nor co-organized by the COST Action.

ITC Conference Grants:

Serve COST Excellence and Inclusiveness Policy
Supports Action Participant affiliated to a legal entity located in an Inclusiveness Target Countries/ Near Neighbour Countries to establish a strong network and increase their visibility in the research community through sharing their work and to gain knowledge
Can contribute to increasing the visibility of the Action

ITC Conference Grantee will receive support for attending and presenting their own work within the scope of the Action (oral presentation) in a conference and can establish new contacts for future collaborations.

COST Action CA21146

COST Action CA21146 is a four-year networking action that aims at creating a European network to share information, facilitating technology and knowledge transfer between the academic and industrial sectors, related to Purple Photosynthetic Bacteria (PPB) applications for resource recovery from organic waste sources. Resource recovery includes wastewater or organic waste, open or closed environments, in single or chain processes.

The network associates fundamental-focused and applied research groups, improving lab-scale technology optimization through mechanistic modeling. It benefits the technology transfer from applied-research groups to industry, considerably improving process design. PURPLEGAIN also aims to create a database for techno-economic, social and environmental impacts studies, which facilitates the marketability of both the PPB-based technologies and the products to extract. Some focused products are polyhydroxyalkanoates, single-cell proteins, biomass for energy, biomass as fertilizer, biohydrogen, carotenoids, terpenoids, organic acids, coenzyme Q10, and 5-aminolevulinic acid.

COST

COST is an intergovernmental framework for European Cooperation in Science and Technology established to initiate networking and coordination of nationally funded research activities on a European level. It facilitates bringing good scientists together under light strategic guidance based on networks, called COST Actions, centred around research projects in fields that are of interest to COST countries and cooperating countries.

Documents

Online application form

Annotated Rules for COST actions and Grant Awarding User Guide

Applicants

The ITC Conference Grant Applicant(s) are Researchers and Innovators affiliated in an Inclusiveness Target Country (ITC) or Near Neighbour Country.

COST Inclusiveness Target Countries are countries or outermost regions of the COST Full Members defined under ‘widening participation and spreading excellence’ strand of the Widening Participation and Strengthening ERA’ part of Horizon Europe and associated countries as defined by the EC based on an indicator and published in the Horizon Europe Work Programme.

COST Inclusiveness Target Countries are as follows:

COST Near Neighbour Countries

COST Near Neighbour Countries are: Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Jordan, Kosovo [This designation is without prejudice to positions on status and is in line with UNSCR 1244/1999 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo declaration of independence], Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine [This designation shall not be construed as recognition of a State of Palestine and is without prejudice to the individual positions of the Member States on this issue], Syria, and Tunisia.

Financial Support

ITC conference Grants provide contribution for travelling, accommodation and subsistence expenses, registration fees, the printing of scientific posters and overall effort.

The grants will amount to up to:

1800 € for minimum two grants for face-to-face conferences.

Application procedure

It is essential that the Conference relates to PurpleGain’s objectives.
The applicant encodes a grant application by logging into e-COST and clicking on the Grant Applications tab. Any already existing applications are available for consultation in the Grant Applications Monitoring. To encode a new application, the applicant clicks on ‘Apply for grant’. The application page contains:
1. Applicant details
2. Title of the presentation
3. Conference title, date (within the active Grant Period) and country
4. Budget requested
5. Attendance Type (face-to-face or virtual)
6. Bank details

After encoding the Grant application form by filling in all the above-mentioned sections, the applicant also needs to upload the actual application template completed, which shall be previously downloaded from the following link: https://www.cost.eu/ITCConference_GrantApplication

Supporting documents

Supporting documents:

ITC Conference grant application (based on e-COST template)
Copy of the abstract/proceeding of the accepted keynote, oral or poster presentation
Acceptance letter from the conference organisers
Other documents required by the Action:
1. Description of the quality and excellence of the conference, highlighting the relevance of the conference to the objectives of PurpleGain Action (0.5 page maximum). 1_Lastname_Conference.pdf
2. A letter of motivation by the applicant with a detailed explanation about how the attendance to this conference will contribute to the Grantee’s career (0.5 page maximum). In addition, please indicate the working group of the COST Action to which the work presented belongs. 2_Lastname_ Letter_of_motivation.pdf
3. Requested budget and its justification on half a page (total expected cost for travel, accommodation and daily allowance, additional financial support). 3_Lastname__Budget.pdf
4. Short Bio of the applicant (1 page maximum). 4_Lastname_ CV applicant.pdf
5. Scanned copy of passport (if the applicant does not have a passport, a scanned copy of the national ID card) 5_Lastname_ passport/ID card.pdf

After adding the supporting document(s), the applicant can submit the grant application.

The application status will change from draft to submitted. Prior to approval of the application, if need be, the applicant will be able to revise the application.

Evaluation process and result announcement

Evaluation process

When the Grant application is submitted, the Grant Awarding Coordinator is notified. The applicant, Action Chair and Vice Chair also receive a copy of the notification. The Grant Awarding Coordinator will be able to review and approve/reject the Grant application on behalf of the Management Committee (MC).

The Grant Awarding coordinator will then propose a ranked list of applications to the management committee: chair and vice-chair, WG leaders, Grant Awarding coordinator, Science Communication Coordinator, Training Schools Coordinator, and Stakeholder Coordinator. In case of rejection, a justification needs to be encoded. The justification will be included in the e-notification to the applicant. The decision by the Action MC on proposal of the Grant Awarding coordinator should reflect the duration and location of the Conference and the actual conference fee.

Evaluation will be based on the quality and scientific excellence of the conference, the relevance of the conference for the achievement of PURPLEGAIN objectives, the impact on the career of the grantee, applicant CV and the type of contribution. There should be special considerations with respect to supporting COST policies on promoting gender balance, while broadening geographical inclusiveness.

More information

The selection committee, composed of the Action Chair, the Grant Awarding coordinator and a representative of each WG, will evaluate the ITC Conference Grants applications within a month after the call deadline and will inform the grant holder of the successfully evaluated proposals. The successful applicants will then receive an e-mail from the grant holder (Grant Letter Notification), stating the official approval of the ITC Conference Grant application, the granted budget and a payment request form which has to be completed after the completion of the Conference for the grant to be transferred. The Grant Letter outlines the rights and duties of the grantee and the Grant Holder.

If the amount of funding by all applications within a call does not exceed the available budget, the applications are handled by the Grant Awarding coordinator only. The Grant Awarding coordinator then presents the list to the selection committee, which must accept the funding of every application.

If there are more applications than funding is available, the following procedure takes place.

A list of all applications is distributed to all members of the selection committee in the form of a table, in which every evaluator can mark which applications he or she can evaluate according to their field of expertise.
To guarantee a fair and objective evaluation, an evaluator should have no affiliation with the home institution of the ITC Conference Grant proposal.
All applications are evaluated by two members of the selection committee. The Grant Awarding coordinator distributes the proposals to the individual evaluators.
The criteria given in the table below shall be applied for evaluation. The first criterion (a) is assessed by the Grant Awarding coordinator prior to the evaluation process.

Criterion	max. points
a) Before any further criteria are considered
Application is complete and fulfils all formal requirements	pass/no pass
The application will be ranked last if the applicant was granted in previous ITC Conference Grant calls	pass/no pass
b) Evaluation of the grant application
Quality and Scientific Excellence of the Conference	40
Keynote presentation	25
Oral presentation	20
Impact on the career of the application	10
CV of the applicant	20
Relevance of the Conference to the objectives of PurpleGain Action	5

5. The evaluators report their evaluations to the Grant Awarding coordinator.

6. The Grant Awarding coordinator ranks all evaluations and then reports the final result to the selection committee to be discussed and accepted. The coordinator will approve the applications selected in the e-cost platform.

7. The applicants are informed about the decision reached.

After the Conference

1 day and 10 days after the end of the grant, the grantee receives a reminder to upload the report.

The deadline to submit the report is 30 days from the end of the activity, within 15 days from the end date of the Grant Period or within a shorter timeframe as per Grant Holder/ Grant Awarding Coordinator’s request to meet reporting deadlines. The grantee receives an e-notification to submit the report and other supporting documents on e-COST, the GH manager and the Grant Awarding Coordinator will be in a copy of the notification.

The supporting information requested after the conference is:

Report template (downloaded from https://www.cost.eu/ITCConference_Report)
Certificate of attendance
Programme of the conference or book of abstracts/proceedings indicating the presentation(oral or poster)
Copy of the given presentation (oral or poster)

The status of the application changes from the Grant letter sent to the Report submitted

The Grant Awarding Coordinator, Action Chair and Vice Chair are notified when the grantee submitted the report and must verify the validity and content of the report by clicking the link in the notification. After review of the report by the procedures agreed by the MC, the Grant Awarding Coordinator needs to encode its approval or rejection on behalf of the MC. Upon the recording of the payment, an e-notification is sent to the grantee, with a copy to the Grant Holder manager.

Acknowledgement of CA21146 in proceedings and presentations

All applicants must include one slide with all the required acknowledgment elements at the end of their presentations.

All presentations and proceedings of conferences supported by the CA21146 ITC conference grant program must contain the following acknowledgement: The attendance to this conference was supported by the COST Action “Fundamentals and applications of purple bacteria biotechnology for resource recovery from waste (PURPLEGAIN)- CA21146, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology)”.

The COST and Action CA21146 logos, EU emblem+text and COST website (www.cost.eu) do not need to be embedded throughout the entire multimedia content, but only at the beginning or end.

All presentations should also include the boilerplate: COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding agency for research and innovation network. Our Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and enable scientists to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. This boosts their research, career and innovation.

All details available at https://www.cost.eu/uploads/2024/11/COST-094-21-V2.0-Annotated-Rules-for-COST-Actions-Level-C.pdf, page 107-108.

More information

For further information, you may contact the ITC Coordinator Nataša Nastić (natasa.nastic@uns.ac.rs).

Nataša Nastić (ITC Coordinator of COST Action CA21146)

PurpleGAIN

IMPACT TO SCIENCE, SOCIETY AND COMPETITIVENESS

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