EUCOR - THE EUROPEAN CAMPUS

Their core work

EUCOR - The European Campus is the legal alliance of five universities along the Upper Rhine — Basel (CH), Freiburg (DE), Haute-Alsace and Strasbourg (FR), and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE). Its own contribution to H2020 is not laboratory research but the design and coordination of structured trinational doctoral programmes that move PhD candidates and supervision across the three countries. In practice, EUCOR builds joint doctoral schools on behalf of its member universities, pools their scientific capacity, and administers the funding, mobility rules, and joint training. For an outside partner, EUCOR is the single contact point that unlocks access to five universities at once.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

EUCOR's first H2020 engagement (QUSTEC, 2019) was rooted in the physical sciences — quantum computing, quantum nano-devices and quantum electronics. By 2021 their second programme (EURIdoc) had shifted entirely to life sciences, immunology and cancer biomedicine. This suggests EUCOR is not building thematic depth in one field but instead using MSCA-COFUND as a repeatable template to launch trinational doctoral schools across whichever scientific strengths its member universities want to combine next.

EUCOR is positioning itself as a repeatable launchpad for trinational doctoral schools, so future collaboration will likely appear in whichever discipline its member universities decide to jointly promote next.

How they like to work

EUCOR acts exclusively as coordinator, not as a research performer itself — it coordinates doctoral training on behalf of its five member universities (Basel, Freiburg, Strasbourg, Haute-Alsace, KIT). Both H2020 projects are large, multi-institution, multi-country MSCA-COFUND programmes, which signals strong administrative and academic coordination capacity across the German-French-Swiss border. They are a hub by design: their entire purpose is orchestrating collaboration between their partner universities.

The consortium partner field reads zero because partners are its own member universities — Basel, Freiburg, Strasbourg, Haute-Alsace and KIT — rather than external organisations. The reach is therefore intensely regional: a single trinational Upper Rhine cluster spanning Germany, France and Switzerland.

What sets them apart

EUCOR is not a research performer — it is the legal and coordinating umbrella of five universities (Basel, Freiburg, Haute-Alsace, Strasbourg, KIT) spanning three countries. Almost no other H2020 beneficiary is a formal cross-border university alliance that can absorb MSCA-COFUND funding on behalf of a whole region. If you need a single counterpart that already unlocks access to the combined research capacity of the Upper Rhine, EUCOR is effectively the only such gateway.

Highlights from their portfolio

• QUSTEC
  Their largest project (EUR 4.23M) and first MSCA-COFUND doctoral school, training quantum scientists across the trinational Upper Rhine campus.
• EURIdoc
  A thematic pivot into immunology and cancer biomedicine, proving EUCOR can replicate the COFUND model across completely different scientific domains.