Horizon Europe - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships 2026
The MSCA scheme
The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) scheme aims to support researchers’ careers and foster excellence in research.
The Fellowships aim to enhance the potential of researchers holding a PhD and who wish to acquire new skills through advanced training, international, interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral mobility.
Fellowships will be offered to excellent researchers of any nationality undertaking international mobility either to or between the EU Member States or Horizon Europe Associated Countries, as well as to associated Third Countries.
The standard duration of these fellowships must be between 12 and 24 months (36 months for Global Fellowships).
Details about the scheme are available on the Funding and Tenders Portal.
Opening date:
9 April 2026, 0:00 CEST
Deadline:
9 September 2026, 17:00 CEST
MSCA at Bocconi
Bocconi welcomes expressions of interest by postdoctoral candidates who wish to apply for the MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship to be hosted at our university.
The application period will open on March 10th and close on April 15th at 12:00 PM.
Applications must be submitted by April 15th at 12:00 PM through the dedicated form.
Applications received via email will not be considered.
Applicants will be notified of the outcome of their application by April 20th via email.
The application of eligible candidates will be sent to the selected supervisors for their assessment. Supervisors will select one candidate per project.
In order to be eligible, please bear in mind that applicants must:
- have a PhD degree at the time of the deadline for applications (09.09.2026). Those who have successfully defended their doctoral thesis but who have not yet formally been awarded the doctoral degree will also be considered eligible to apply.
- Applicants must also have a maximum of 8 years’ experience in research, from the date of the award of their PhD degree, years of experience outside research and career breaks will not count towards the above maximum.
-
Applicants must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in the country of the beneficiary (for European Postdoctoral Fellowships), or the host organisation for the outgoing phase (for Global Postdoctoral Fellowships) for more than 12 months in the 36 months immediately before the call deadline.
What we offer
Selected applicants will receive support from the Bocconi Grants Office throughout the application process.
Selected applicants will be offered the opportunity to undertake a proposal writing training session that will be held online on the mornings of April 23rd and June 10th.
Additionally, Bocconi will also provide a limited number of travel grants to cover funding for travel and accommodation expenses to allow the researchers to spend a few days at Bocconi. This will allow the researchers to benefit from insights from previous MSCA grantees, meet with their supervisors, visit the Bocconi campus and get feedback on their proposals from the Bocconi Grants Office staff.
____________
You can contact grants.office@unibocconi.it for any questions on the program.
You can find the list of the available supervisors per Department below:
| Supervisor | Research Interests |
|---|---|
| Francesca Buffa | AI in Biomedicine, Computational Biology, Integration of multi-omics data, Virtual Cell Models |
| Andrea Celli | Algorithmic game theory, online learning |
| Debora Nozza | My research focuses on Natural Language Processing, examining how and why people use large language models (LLMs) in everyday contexts to improve data-collection practices and inform model design. |
| Chiara Plizzari | Computer Vision; Video Understanding |
| Alessandro Sanzeni | Theoretical neuroscience |
| Dovev Lavie | AI Agent Simulation of a Prosocial Market Digital Platform. This novel project proposes a solution to economic inequality by testing a design for a new economic system. Contrary to established remedies such as regulation, legislation, and antitrust enforcement, among other policies for reforming the current economic system, the project advocates a new economic system, namely the Prosocial Market System. This system, designed as a digital platform ecosystem, can overcome some caveats of the current system which facilitates and reinforces opportunistic behavior. The project relies on research in behavioral economics that uncovers heterogeneity in individuals’ inclinations for prosociality. The theory suggests pragmatic means to instigate and reinforce prosocial behavior while driving out opportunistic behavior in economic exchange. Accordingly, the platform prioritizes societal values over profit making and utility maximization, which can help cope with economic inequality. Novel design principles include community-centered exchange and differential pricing whereby high-income consumers subsidize low-income consumers. The system also imposes limits on consumption and vendors’ profit, with excess profit redistributed to consumers. The underlying logic is that prosocial behavior pays off emotionally despite its associated economic costs. The project involves design of software algorithms that emulate the economic system, computer simulation using AI agents, and a field experiment that tests the feasibility and stability of the system. The analysis can help optimize system parameters and facilitate future implementation of the prosocial market system. The project contributes to interdisciplinary research on societal grand challenges, prosociality, and digital platforms. The MSCA position is for a young researcher in computer science or related fields, with skills in systems analysis and design, programming (Python), and AI agent simulation. The researcher will be involved in tasks such as systems analysis, hardware and communication system design, programing of administrator, vendor, and consumer modules, interface with payment solutions, testing of the software, designing and running simulations in the course of product development, coordination with outside software companies that may be involved in the development, and technical support during the field experiment. The researcher will also be involved in the literature review, analysis of findings, and writeup of academic papers. The assignments can be adjusted based on the background and skills of the candidate. |
| Supervisor | Research interests |
|---|---|
| Antonio De Rosa | Several problems in the calculus of variations can be tackled by means of geometric measure theory. Solutions to geometric variational problems can be often easily found in appropriate weak measure theoretic classes. However, these measure theoretic relaxations of the original geometric problems pose the question of whether weak solutions are (almost) classical solutions. The project aims to study structural properties of measure theoretic solutions of several geometric variational problems, including (but not limited to) the classical Plateau problem, the isoperimetric problem, the min-max theory and the optimal branched transport. |
| Tangren Feng | Research interests: Mechanism Design, Information Economics, Game Theory, Social Choice. Project: Designing Simple Mechanisms in Complex Environments; This project investigates dominant-strategy mechanisms across a wide range of interdependent-value environments—including voting, auctions, bilateral trade, and public goods provision. What does “dominant-strategy mechanism” mean in these contexts? Do any nontrivial dominant-strategy mechanisms exist? If so, what are their defining characteristics, and what implications do they have for mechanism design? |
| Hugo Lavenant | From Transport to Sampling, and Back: A Geometric Approach Sampling — the task of generating representative samples from a probability distribution in high dimension — is a cornerstone of modern mathematics and data science. Optimal Transport (OT) on the other hand provides a theoretical framework, concerned with transferring mass in the most efficient way and equips the space of probability measures with a rich geometric structure. This geometry has proved to be connected with sampling, offering new ways to analyze convergence, robustness, and efficiency of algorithms. The aim of this project is to pursue on the rigorous mathematical analysis of modern sampling methods, with the goal of providing both rigorous theoretical guarantees and practical guidelines for their use. This includes studying variational inference, continuous-time sampling approaches but also the emerging discrete diffusion models, which play a central role in generative text. The main tool would be the geometry of OT, as well as the one of Sinkhorn divergences that I recently investigated. In turn, as suggested by recent works, this perspective is expected to inform new strategies for computing OT maps themselves via sampling methods, highlighting the reciprocity between the two fields. By investigating the interplay between sampling and optimal transport, and between continuous and discrete models, the project aims to simplify existing frameworks, clarify their theoretical underpinnings, and suggest new algorithms. Specific research directions would include: Variational Inference and Convex Optimization; analysis of Gibbs sampling beyond the log-concave setting; link between diffusion models and optimal transport: parallel between continuous and discrete diffusion models For further references: https://hugolav.github.io/ |
| Supervisor | Research interests |
| Valentina Bosetti | Climate change economics, biodiversity economics |
| Michele Fioretti | My research examines how firms generate—and respond to—environmental and social responsibilities, focusing on the microeconomic mechanisms that determine when corporate objectives align (or conflict) with social welfare. I recently received an ERC Starting Grant for BALANCE (Firms’ Social Impact—Balancing Profits and Externalities, 2026–2030), a project developing new empirical and theoretical tools to measure firms’ social impact and to study how forces such as competition, information frictions, and regulation shape firms’ incentives to invest in sustainability and stakeholder outcomes. I welcome expressions of interest from postdoctoral researchers working on corporate social responsibility, environmental economics, industrial organization, or related applied micro fields. |
| Massimiliano Marcellino | Time Series Analysis, Forecasting, Machine Learning, Bayesian econometrics, Empirical Macro |
| Nicola Pavoni | Mis-specification in Macroeconomics, Limited Information and Unawareness and Macroeconomics, Metacognition and Artificial Intelligence, Public Finance |
| Mara Squicciarini | Empirical research on the relationship between religion, human capital, and innovation. Historical focus on 19th-century France and US. |
| Supervisor | Research interests |
| Matthias Rodemeier | Projects on Environmental & Public Policy, as well as Financial Markets. Most of my projects involve large-scale field experiments (e.g. in the market for carbon offsets), but I also use observational data (e.g. scraped data from the web, transaction data from service providers, stock market data, data provided by governments, etc.). |
| Hannes Wagner | My research focuses on corporate governance, shareholder activism, and ESG investing, combining large-scale financial datasets with computational methods including LLM-based text analysis. I welcome fellows interested in any of these areas, particularly those applying machine learning or natural language processing to questions in empirical corporate finance. |
| Supervisor | Research interests |
| Davide Paris | Comparative constitutional adjudication, Fundamental rights’ protection in Europe, Democratic institutions and political rights, Bioethics and fundamental rights Federalism |
| Graziella Romeo | Comparative constitutional law |
| Giovanni Tuzet | Legal Epistemology, AI-generated and AI-enhanced Evidence, Evidence and Standards of Proof, Legal Argumentation |
| Supervisor | Research interests |
| Nilanjana Dutt | Environmental strategy & corporate lobbying |
| Dovev Lavie | AI Agent Simulation of a Prosocial Market Digital Platform. This novel project proposes a solution to economic inequality by testing a design for a new economic system. Contrary to established remedies such as regulation, legislation, and antitrust enforcement, among other policies for reforming the current economic system, the project advocates a new economic system, namely the Prosocial Market System. This system, designed as a digital platform ecosystem, can overcome some caveats of the current system which facilitates and reinforces opportunistic behavior. The project relies on research in behavioral economics that uncovers heterogeneity in individuals’ inclinations for prosociality. The theory suggests pragmatic means to instigate and reinforce prosocial behavior while driving out opportunistic behavior in economic exchange. Accordingly, the platform prioritizes societal values over profit making and utility maximization, which can help cope with economic inequality. Novel design principles include community-centered exchange and differential pricing whereby high-income consumers subsidize low-income consumers. The system also imposes limits on consumption and vendors’ profit, with excess profit redistributed to consumers. The underlying logic is that prosocial behavior pays off emotionally despite its associated economic costs. The project involves design of software algorithms that emulate the economic system, computer simulation using AI agents, and a field experiment that tests the feasibility and stability of the system. The analysis can help optimize system parameters and facilitate future implementation of the prosocial market system. The project contributes to interdisciplinary research on societal grand challenges, prosociality, and digital platforms. The MSCA position is for a young researcher in computer science or related fields, with skills in systems analysis and design, programming (Python), and AI agent simulation. The researcher will be involved in tasks such as systems analysis, hardware and communication system design, programing of administrator, vendor, and consumer modules, interface with payment solutions, testing of the software, designing and running simulations in the course of product development, coordination with outside software companies that may be involved in the development, and technical support during the field experiment. The researcher will also be involved in the literature review, analysis of findings, and writeup of academic papers. The assignments can be adjusted based on the background and skills of the candidate. |
| Felix Poege | From Science to Innovation: The prospective research projects cover the interactions between science and corporate innovation. Of specific interest is research into understanding the impact of corporate decisions on the trajectories of scientific research and the transition of individuals from a purely scientific orientation towards applied engineering and commercialization-oriented innovation within companies. For this purpose, a large-scale dataset covering the labor market biographies of scientists and engineers in universities and in industry has been developed. These topics are highly relevant to answer questions in strategic management, as the importance of effectively absorbing and commercializing scientific knowledge has increased with the declining contribution of the corporate sector itself to basic research. Firms’ engagement with science appears to shape their competitive advantage in strategic sectors such as biotechnology and computer science—especially within the field of artificial intelligence. The persistent weakness of European industry in successfully capitalizing on strong European research (often referred to as the European Paradox) in these areas further underscores the importance of these topics in Italy and, more broadly, across Europe. |
| Supervisor | Research interests |
| Maximilian Beichert | Creator Economy / Influencer Marketing |
| Adam Eric Greenberg | Consumer financial decision making, end-of-life preferences and decision making, household finance, judgment and decision making, consumer behavior |
| Supervisor | Research interests |
| Grace Ballor | Economic history, international history, contemporary history, environmental history, business history, history of capitalism, history of economic thought, political economy, European integration, European Union, climate change |
| Marco Bonetti | Survival analysis. The project will focus on the development of theoretical results and will require familiarity with the technical aspects of survival analysis and asymptotic theory. |
| Italo Colantone | Green Transition; Globalization; Artificial Intelligence; Political Implications of Structural Economic Changes |
| Giovanna Invernizzi | Political Parties and Candidate Selection |
| Raya Muttarak | Population, climate change, conflict and migration |
| Paola Profeta | Gender economics and politics |
| Piero Stanig | Technological change and political behavior; winners of structural economic change and support for technocratic approach to government |