3797 Applicants to the FCT Call Doctoral Studentships

This year, the Foundation for Science and Technology's (FCT) Call for PhD Research Studentships received a total of 3797 applications, which represents an increase of 400 compared to last year.

Of the total number of applications, 83% are for Studentships in Portugal, 14% are for mixed Studentships at national and foreign host institutions and 3% are for Studentships abroad.

Foreign candidates account for 28% of applications and come from 78 countries. The countries with the most Call candidates are Brazil (512), Italy (100), Iran (78), Spain (37), Mozambique (27) and India (26).

By gender, the candidates are divided into 57% women and 43% men.

The distribution of candidates by major scientific area is as follows: Engineering and Technology Sciences (23.5% of the total), Social Sciences (22.4%), Humanities (16.9%), Natural Sciences (12.5%), Exact Sciences (7.1%) and Agricultural Sciences (4.7%) (see Table 1).

The applications will be assessed by 36 Evaluation Panels. The panels with the highest number of applications are: Clinical Medicine and Health Sciences (229), Bioengineering and Biotechnology (187) and Biomedicine (174).

The FCT's Doctoral Research Studentships are competitively awarded grants to support advanced training in all areas of knowledge to obtain the academic degree of Doctor. These Studentships allow doctoral students to devote themselves exclusively to their research, thus contributing to the country's scientific and technological development. FCT currently supports around 5,000 doctoral Studentships and this year's Call will award a further 1,350 Studentships.