Equal Opportunities

The NCCR Flexibility support grants provide financial support for female and male young researchers with family care duties. The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the NCCR RNA & Disease awards time-limited support grants to female and male postdocs and doctoral students employed in NCCR-funded research projects. The NCCR Flexibility support grants young researchers greater flexibility in pursuing their careers. Researchers are supported in achieving a balance between their academic career and family care duties by allowing for or extending part-time employment, so that there is no delay, or only a minimal delay, in the research work. The Flexibility grant contributes towards the costs of hiring a support person and towards child care costs to junior researchers with child care duties and employed in an NCCR. Please note that doctoral students are only eligible to receive child care grants but not grants towards the costs of hiring a support person.

"Combining young children with scientific research results in stringent time restrictions on one's research, especially on labwork, which cannot be performed remotely. The 120% support grant directly addresses this issue. Employing a technician two days per week to perform important but time intensive sample preparations has allowed me to spend my limited time in the lab on the critical experiments keeping the project progressing whilst also spending one fulfilling weekday purely devoted to my son."
Fionna Loughlin, former postdoc in the group of Prof. F. Allain at ETH Zürich and recipient of the at that time called 120% support grant

If you are interested in applying to the NCCR Flexibility support grant, please contact the management at office[at]nccr-rna-and-disease.ch.

The delays due to lack of project progress during maternity leave have been suggested as one of the causes of mother's loss of competiveness in science. The NCCR RNA & Disease has reserved funds to cover the salary of one research assistant (hereafter support person) during the last 3 months of pregnancy to ensure appropriate training of the research assistant that will continue the project of the pregnant researcher during the duration of her maternity leave. This scheme will run until funds run out.

For more information please download the Guidelines and the Annex:

Guidelines pregnancy and maternity leave compensation
Annex pregnancy and maternity leave compensation

The NCCR RNA & Disease has reserved funds to reimburse emergency childcare costs for parents that are employed in a NCCR RNA & Disease or associated laboratory.

For more information and a list of emergency childcare providers please download the guidelines:
Emergency childcare reimbursement