The University of Birmingham has been awarded a Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Award of the European Union. Institute of European Law Director Professor Martin Trybus, who prepared the application for this award, will act as Network Coordinator and Director of Research of a project on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) managed from Birmingham Law School and the Institute of European Law.
Professor Fabian Amtenbrink from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam will act as Director of Training. The project will run from 2017-2021 with an overall budget of €3.9 million. At the heart of the project are 15 PhD projects on various aspects of TTIP supervised at 11 universities and think tanks in seven countries, forming an “Innovative Training Network”. The 15 postgraduate research students will attend a common training programme, participate in common public engagement, dissemination and impact activities, and benefit from a number of relevant placements in law firms, think tanks, lobbying, and international organisations. The aim is not only to produce important research results in law, economics, business studies and political science, make them openly available, and facilitate the utilization of that knowledge by policy makers, think tanks, business, and the legal and other professions, but also to train a uniquely qualified cohort with professional prospects inside but also beyond academia.
Apart from the University of Birmingham as lead, the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, the University of Speyer, the University of Nottingham, the University of Passau, the University of Turin, the City University London, the ETH Zurich, the CEPII Institute in Paris, the IFO Institute in Munich and the Egmont Institute in Brussels will supervise PhD students. These institutions are joined by over 20 partners, including the George Washington University, the law firm Baker and McKenzie, the think tank CEPS, or the lobbying organisation Business Europe, contributing to the training programme and providing placement opportunities.