FNR ATTRACT 2027 Call: Up to €2 Million Over Five Years to Build Your Own Research Group in Luxembourg, With Pre-Proposals Closing 17 November 2026

FNR ATTRACT 2027 Call: Up to €2 Million Over Five Years to Build Your Own Research Group in Luxembourg, With Pre-Proposals Closing 17 November 2026

The Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) announced the launch of its 2027 ATTRACT call on 29 July 2026. ATTRACT is the FNR’s flagship instrument for recruiting outstanding junior researchers from abroad and giving them what most early-career scientists spend years chasing: a five-year budget, a team of their own, and an institutional commitment to a career track leading towards a tenured position.

The numbers are substantial. The FNR’s financial contribution can reach €1.5 million for a Starting Investigator or €2 million for a Consolidating Investigator, across a grant lifespan of five years. That places ATTRACT in the same funding bracket as an ERC Starting or Consolidator Grant, but with a structural difference that matters: ATTRACT is explicitly a recruitment instrument. You are not just being funded, you are being hired into a research ecosystem that has agreed in advance to host your research line.

This call runs on a two-stage timetable. Pre-proposals are due at 14:00 CET on 17 November 2026. Candidates who pass that stage are invited to submit full proposals by 14:00 CET on 16 February 2027. Both deadlines are shared with the FNR’s sister programme PEARL, which targets already-established senior researchers rather than junior group leaders.

Key Details

What ATTRACT Actually Funds

ATTRACT is designed for researchers who are not yet established in Luxembourg and who show the potential to become leaders in their field. The scheme gives promising junior researchers the opportunity to set up their own research team within one of the country’s research institutions, in line with the national research priorities.

Three features distinguish it from a conventional project grant:

A team, not a project. The grant is sized to let you recruit. Five years at up to €2 million is enough to build a group with doctoral candidates and postdocs rather than to run a single line of experiments yourself. Reviewers will read your proposal as a plan for a group, not for a study.

A tenure trajectory. The FNR states that ATTRACT fellows are offered individual coaching and a career track towards a tenured position. The host institution is signing up to more than five years of office space. This is why the host relationship is central to the application rather than administrative background.

Two investigator levels. The Starting Investigator level (up to €1.5 million) and the Consolidating Investigator level (up to €2 million) recognise that a researcher three years past the PhD and one seven years past it are building different things. Choosing the wrong level is a common self-inflicted wound: a Consolidating application from someone with a thin independent track record invites unfavourable comparison with genuinely consolidated peers.

The FNR’s overall capacity behind these commitments is public. In February 2026 the Government and the FNR signed a 2026–29 agreement worth €362 million in financial contribution to fund research, which is the pot that instruments such as ATTRACT, PEARL, CORE, PRIDE and BRIDGES draw from.

Who Is Eligible

The core eligibility rule is a window, not a threshold. The candidate must have 2 to 8 years of proven experience in the R&D context, following the successful completion of a doctoral degree. Fewer than two years and you are too early for a group leadership grant; more than eight and the FNR would direct you towards PEARL or CORE.

Beyond the career window, the programme expects:

• An outstanding track record in your field. ATTRACT is a competitive excellence instrument, judged against international standards rather than local ones.
• Strategic fit with the host. The FNR states that the track record has to fit strategically to the research agenda of the Luxembourg host institution. A brilliant proposal aimed at a host with no capacity or appetite for that line will not survive.
• Alignment with the National Research Priorities. All FNR excellence programmes — CORE, INTER, PEARL, ATTRACT, PRIDE — require proposals to align with Luxembourg’s National Research Priorities.
• An eligible host institution. For the research programmes including ATTRACT, eligible beneficiaries are Luxembourgish public institutions for which research is a legal mission, plus non-profit associations, societal impact companies (SIS) and foundations engaged in research that are accredited by the Ministry in charge of public sector research.

Nationality is not an eligibility criterion. Being new to Luxembourg is the point of the scheme.

The National Research Priorities You Must Fit

The Ministry of Research and Higher Education updated the National Research Priorities in 2026, replacing the December 2019 document. Topics that already fell within the remit remain eligible; the revision adapted sub-areas rather than the top-level structure. The four interdisciplinary priority areas are:

1. Industrial & Service Transformation — advanced materials, space components and technologies, automation and robotics, with AI, quantum technologies and advanced data analytics as enabling technologies, and software engineering named as a strategic focus.
2. Personalised Healthcare
3. Sustainable & Responsible Development
4. 21st Century Education

The 2026 revision explicitly reflects the national strategies for data, artificial intelligence and quantum technologies adopted in May 2025 under the Accelerating Digital Sovereignty 2030 initiative. Artificial intelligence is described as a key enabling technology across all four areas; quantum technologies as a pillar of the future digital transformation; and data excellence, reproducibility and reusability as a foundation for research and innovation.

Read that framing carefully before you write. The priorities are deliberately interdisciplinary, and the FNR states that it encourages researchers to link tools and approaches from various disciplines. A proposal that credibly sits across two priority areas is not penalised — it is the shape the strategy asks for.

The Application Process, Step by Step

Step 1 — Identify and approach a host institution, immediately. This is the step that decides whether you can apply at all. Proposals must be submitted jointly by the candidate and the host institution. Past ATTRACT fellows have been hosted by the University of Luxembourg (including the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine and the C²DH), the Luxembourg Institute of Health, and the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology.

Step 2 — Find out the host’s internal deadline. The FNR is unusually blunt about this: interested candidates must check well in advance whether the Luxembourg host institution has an internal deadline prior to the FNR deadline. Institutions run their own selection before endorsing candidates, and those internal cut-offs commonly fall weeks ahead of the FNR date. If you begin in late October for a 17 November FNR deadline, you may already have missed your host’s gate.

Step 3 — Submit the pre-proposal by 17 November 2026, 14:00 CET. All applications are submitted through the FNR Online Grant Management System. Institutions performing research in Luxembourg that do not yet have an account can request access from the FNR.

Step 4 — If invited, submit the full proposal by 16 February 2027, 14:00 CET. The gap between stages is roughly three months, which sounds generous and is not, given that the full proposal is where the detailed budget, team plan and institutional commitments are made concrete.

The FNR’s published call material for this cycle does not set out the panel composition, interview format or number of grants to be awarded, and this page does not assume any. Check the ATTRACT call documents in the FNR Download Center for the procedural detail specific to the 2027 call.

The Gender Parity Rule

As in previous ATTRACT calls, gender parity is the rule for institutions submitting more than one proposal. The 2026 call adds nuance: to give consideration to institutional strategies on gender equality, a possibility for derogation from the gender parity rule is outlined in the present call.

For candidates, the practical consequence is about internal competition rather than your own eligibility. If your intended host plans to submit several proposals, its internal selection is constrained by parity, and that shapes which candidates it can put forward. It is a fair question to ask a prospective host directly: how many proposals are you submitting, and how does parity affect your shortlist?

Preparing a Competitive Application

Write the host relationship into the science. The strongest ATTRACT cases are not “excellent researcher plus willing institution” but “this research line is what this institution needs next.” Name the local collaborators, the shared infrastructure you would use, the doctoral pipeline you would tap. Vague enthusiasm from a host reads as vague enthusiasm.

Budget for a group, and justify the shape. Five years and up to €2 million invites a specific question from reviewers: what will this money build that a project grant would not? Show the recruitment plan — how many PhDs, how many postdocs, when they start, and what each is responsible for.

Make the priority alignment substantive. Alignment with the National Research Priorities is mandatory, which means every competitive application claims it. Claiming is cheap. Demonstrating that your research question genuinely advances, say, personalised healthcare or trusted human–machine collaboration — with specific outputs and specific Luxembourg stakeholders — is what separates applications.

Prepare your track record narrative for the career window. With a 2–8 year window, you are compared against people at different points within it. Be explicit about independence: first- and last-author work, grants you led, students you supervised, invitations you received. The FNR maintains guidance on the Narrative CV format alongside its funding policies and financial regulations, all of which sit in the Download Center.

Check the AI guidance. The FNR has published Guidelines on Generative Artificial Intelligence covering the use of such tools in applications and evaluation. Read them before drafting rather than after.

Common Mistakes

• Starting too late for the host’s internal deadline. The single most avoidable failure mode in this call.
• Choosing Consolidating for the prestige. Level should follow evidence of independence, not ambition.
• Treating the priorities as a keyword exercise. Reviewers who work inside the Luxembourg system will recognise a proposal that has been retrofitted.
• Under-specifying the team. ATTRACT funds group formation; a proposal that reads as a solo research plan is answering a different call.
• Assuming no track record with the host matters. It is not a formal requirement, but candidates who have visited, collaborated with, or been co-authored by researchers at the host arrive with an advantage that shows in the strategic-fit assessment.
• Missing the 14:00 CET cut-off. Both deadlines close at 14:00 Central European Time, not at midnight. This trips up applicants working from other time zones every cycle.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to already be in Luxembourg? No — the opposite. ATTRACT is designed for researchers not yet established in Luxembourg.

Can I apply without a host institution? No. Proposals must be submitted jointly by the candidate and the host institution, so securing the host is a precondition, not a later step.

Which disciplines are eligible? ATTRACT is not restricted to a single field. Past fellows span quantum physics, cancer epidemiology, metabolic biology, environmental cheminformatics, active matter physics, public history, and housing policy. What is required is alignment with the National Research Priorities.

Is the grant renewable? The FNR states that ATTRACT grants have a lifespan of five years. Beyond that, the programme’s stated intent is a career track towards a tenured position at the host institution rather than grant renewal.

How many awards will be made? The FNR’s public call announcement for the 2027 cycle does not state a target number of awards, and no figure is assumed here.

What is the difference between ATTRACT and PEARL? Both are FNR advanced career grants sharing the same 17 November 2026 and 16 February 2027 deadlines. ATTRACT targets promising junior researchers building a first group; PEARL targets established senior researchers.

Timeline

Official Links and Contacts

• ATTRACT programme page: https://www.fnr.lu/funding-instruments/attract/
• 2027 ATTRACT call launch announcement: https://www.fnr.lu/launch-attract-call/
• Who the FNR funds (eligible beneficiaries): https://www.fnr.lu/fnr-beneficiaries/
• National Research Priorities: https://www.fnr.lu/national-research-priorities/
• FNR Download Center (call documents, financial regulations, reporting and Narrative CV guidelines): https://www.fnr.lu/download-center/
• PEARL, the companion senior-researcher instrument: https://www.fnr.lu/funding-instruments/pearl/

Programme coordination for ATTRACT sits with Marie-Claude Marx, PhD, with application support from Patricia Drimeyer; contact details are listed on the ATTRACT programme page. Sean Sapcariu, PhD, is listed as a programme manager on the joint ATTRACT/PEARL announcement.

Next Steps

If you are between two and eight years past your PhD and this is your cycle, the sequence is unambiguous. Shortlist two or three plausible Luxembourg hosts this week, based on where your research line would genuinely strengthen an existing group. Email the group leaders with a one-page summary of what you would build and what you would need. Ask, in the same message, what their internal deadline is and whether they are submitting more than one proposal. Then read the current call documents in the FNR Download Center before you write a word of the pre-proposal, because the 17 November 2026 cut-off is a hard 14:00 CET, and the host’s own gate will fall well before it.