Dima Yankova has been awarded the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project FPrevision4cohesion.

In an effort to boost industrial competitiveness and address societal challenges through excellence research, the European Framework Programmes (FPs) have been concentrating resources in a core of top-performing research institutions. But pursuing excellence at the expense of cohesion is a risky endeavour, as it can exacerbate inter-regional economic disparities. FPrevision4cohesion aims to unravel the impact of competitive FP research funding and different policy designs on the structural and spatial dynamics of the European scientific network. Developing a comprehensive picture of FPs’ influence on knowledge distribution and inequality is critically needed if we are to avoid deepening existing innovation divides and guide cohesion efforts in a targeted way. If convergence is understood not as mere redistribution of funds from core to peripheral regions, but as sustained support for the periphery's research and innovation capacity, we need deeper insights into the FPs' role in consolidating or  fragmenting collaborative core-periphery ties.

The project will adopt a novel counterfactual analysis, comparing for the first time the impact of funded to non-funded FP projects using network science techniques. This approach offers significant  advancements over existing studies which rely almost exclusively on funded FP collaborations and are therefore limited in their capacity to isolate causal effects. The analysis is meant to not merely
quantify impact, but also highlight how the structural links between core and peripheral organisations could be strengthened, and how different policy instruments with a top-down vs bottom-up intervention logic influence the process. FPrevision4cohesion aspires to guide both research and policy in balancing competitive programmes with convergence efforts, and directly responds to recent calls for more research on synergies.

FPrevision4cohesion will be hosted by the ANETI Lab at HUN-REN CERS. The fellowship also includes a three-month secondment at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Seville.