Veronika Šlakaitytė
Doctoral Research in Energy Resilience
Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD Fellowship
Originally from Lithuania, she spent nearly a decade in Copenhagen completing her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees before deciding to pursue a PhD. Her journey was anything but linear. After graduating during the COVID-19 pandemic, she struggled to enter academia, worked full-time, and still persisted in seeking research roles. A cold email to a principal investigator at the Danish Institute for International Studies opened an unexpected door, eventually leading to a four-year research trajectory that shaped her academic identity. After 44 PhD applications over three years, she secured a Marie Skłodowska-Curie–funded PhD position at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, where she now studies energy systems within a fully salaried doctoral position that covers research, training, and international mobility.
Read her story to discover how she secured this fully funded scholarship.