CONICET — the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council — is the country’s principal public science body, and it works differently from most national research funders a CASRAI reader will already know. Bodies like Germany’s DFG or Portugal’s FCT award grants and fellowships to researchers who remain employed by their own universities or institutes. CONICET does that too — but it also directly employs thousands of career researchers and technical staff as permanent, salaried public employees. Understanding CONICET means understanding both halves of that model: the funding programs, and the employment relationship that makes CONICET as much an employer as a funder.
What Makes CONICET’s Model Different
Most of the national funding bodies covered elsewhere in this cluster — Spain’s AEI, Austria’s FWF, Flanders’ FWO — operate as pure grant-making agencies: a researcher’s employer is a university or research institute, and the funder’s relationship to that researcher is limited to the life of a specific award. CONICET runs a parallel structure alongside its grant programs: the Carrera del Investigador Científico y Tecnológico (Scientific and Technological Researcher Career, CIC), through which CONICET itself is the employer of record for a large, permanent professional research workforce, plus a companion support-staff career and a large doctoral/postdoctoral fellowship system that feeds into it. A researcher can hold a CONICET staff position for an entire career, working the whole time inside a university-hosted institute, without ever being a direct employee of that university. That combination — direct employment plus competitive project funding, run by a single national body — is CONICET’s defining structural feature, and it’s the detail most likely to surprise a research administrator encountering the system for the first time.
Organizational Structure and Oversight
CONICET was created in 1958, with the physiologist and Nobel laureate Bernardo A. Houssay as its first president. It operates as a decentralized public agency with its own governing board (Directorio), rather than as a department embedded inside a single ministry. Administrative oversight of Argentina’s national science policy sits above CONICET at the executive-branch level; as of 2026 that function is carried out by the Secretaría de Innovación, Ciencia y Tecnología, housed within the Jefatura de Gabinete de Ministros (the Cabinet Chief’s office) — a secretariat-level position rather than the cabinet-level ministry (MINCyT) the portfolio held for roughly a decade before a 2024 restructuring. Research administrators working with Argentine partners should expect this administrative layer to be described differently depending on when a source was written, since the science-policy portfolio’s formal status has changed more than once in recent years; CONICET’s own institutional identity and career-track structure have been comparatively stable across those changes.
The Researcher Career Track: Carrera del Investigador Científico y Tecnológico (CIC)
The CIC is the mechanism by which CONICET directly employs career researchers. Entry is competitive: candidates apply through an annual open call (concurso de ingreso), typically holding a doctoral degree, and successful applicants are appointed to a permanent, salaried position — not a grant, not a fixed-term contract renewed year to year, but an ongoing employment relationship with CONICET itself. The career has five hierarchical categories, in ascending order:
- Investigador Asistente (Assistant) — entry-level category, typically for researchers early in their independent career.
- Investigador Adjunto (Associate)
- Investigador Independiente (Independent) — the category at which a researcher is generally considered to have an established, independent research line.
- Investigador Principal (Principal)
- Investigador Superior (Senior) — the most senior category, reserved for researchers with a long, distinguished record.
Promotion between categories is itself a periodic competitive evaluation, not automatic seniority-based advancement. Researchers in the CIC are not required to work at a CONICET-owned facility: the large majority are “radicados” (based) at a host institute — commonly a Unidad Ejecutora co-managed with a national university — where they teach, supervise students, and use university infrastructure, while CONICET remains their actual employer and pays their salary. This is the single most important structural fact for anyone drafting an MOU, a visiting-researcher agreement, or a co-authorship or affiliation line involving a CONICET-affiliated scientist: the university named on the letterhead and the researcher’s legal employer are frequently two different institutions.
The Fellowship System: Becas Internas Doctorales y Postdoctorales
Beneath the permanent CIC sits CONICET’s fellowship program, the primary pipeline into it. Becas Internas Doctorales (Internal Doctoral Fellowships) fund doctoral studies in Argentina with a monthly stipend for a fixed term (on the order of five years, aligned to the typical Argentine doctoral timeline); Becas Internas Postdoctorales (Internal Postdoctoral Fellowships) fund a further fixed term of research work after the doctoral degree is completed or formally submitted. Fellowship calls typically weight applications toward a set of nationally prioritized research topics or geographic regions, alongside a smaller open-topic allocation for proposals outside those priorities. A Beca is not an employment relationship in the way a CIC appointment is — it is a fixed-term training stipend, not a permanent staff position — but in practice, the great majority of researchers who eventually enter the permanent CIC did so after holding a CONICET doctoral and/or postdoctoral fellowship, making the fellowship system less a separate program than the first stage of the same career pipeline.
Support Staff: Carrera del Personal de Apoyo (CPA)
Alongside the researcher career, CONICET runs a parallel permanent career track for technical and professional support staff — the Carrera del Personal de Apoyo (CPA) — covering roles such as laboratory management, specialized technical operation, and instrumentation maintenance that keep CONICET-affiliated institutes running. Like the CIC, entry is competitive and appointments are permanent CONICET staff positions. This track is less visible in international discussion of CONICET than the researcher career, but it is directly relevant to any institution assessing the full staffing and cost structure of a CONICET-hosted institute, since CIC researchers and CPA support staff commonly work side by side within the same Unidad Ejecutora.
Research Project Funding: PIP and the Broader Argentine Landscape
CONICET also runs its own internal competitive project-grant line for its own researchers, generally known as PIP (Proyecto de Investigación Plurianual, or multi-year research project), which funds a specific research plan over several years independently of the researcher’s ongoing salary. It is important to distinguish this from Argentina’s principal external, cross-institutional competitive research-grant funder: the Agencia Nacional de Promoción de la Investigación, el Desarrollo Tecnológico y la Innovación (Agencia I+D+i), a separate national agency that administers the PICT grant line (historically run through the Fondo para la Investigación Científica y Tecnológica, FONCyT) open to researchers across universities, CONICET institutes, and other public research bodies alike. A CONICET-employed researcher routinely holds both a PIP and a PICT at different points, or simultaneously — they are not competing programs from the same agency, but complementary funding lines from two distinct organizations with two distinct governance structures. Confusing “CONICET the employer” with “the agency that funds Argentine research projects generally” is a common error international collaborators make, since in most other countries a single national council does both.
The Institutional Network: Co-Managed Institutes
CONICET does not, for the most part, operate free-standing laboratories of its own. Its research is carried out through a network of several hundred Unidades Ejecutoras — institutes and research centers — the majority of which are formally co-managed (“cogestionados”) jointly by CONICET and a host institution: typically a national university, sometimes a provincial government or another public science body. A co-managed institute physically sits on or near university grounds, often carries the university’s name in its own title, and is staffed by a mix of CONICET-employed CIC researchers, CPA support staff, CONICET fellows, and university-employed academic staff and students working alongside them. For an outside institution negotiating a formal agreement, this means identifying which party actually holds signing authority — CONICET, the host university, or both jointly — is a necessary first step, not a formality.
What This Means for International Collaborators and Research Administrators
A few practical consequences follow directly from CONICET’s dual funder/employer role:
- Affiliation lines are frequently dual. A publication or CV may correctly list both a CONICET institute and a partner university, reflecting two real institutional relationships rather than one primary affiliation with a secondary courtesy listing.
- Institutional agreements need the right counterparty. An MOU, material transfer agreement, or visiting-researcher arrangement involving a CONICET-affiliated scientist may need CONICET’s own signature, the host university’s, or both, depending on what is being agreed to and who employs the researcher in question.
- Researcher headcount is a budget line, not just a grant portfolio. Because CIC researchers are permanent salaried staff rather than grant-funded positions, the annual size of the incoming fellowship and CIC entry classes is directly tied to CONICET’s federal budget allocation in a given year, in a way that is less true of a purely grant-disbursing funder. Public reporting on Argentine science policy in recent years has repeatedly described tighter federal science budgets constraining the size of new fellowship and entry-level researcher cohorts; administrators planning multi-year partnerships involving early-career CONICET researchers should treat that funding environment as subject to change year to year rather than assuming stable growth.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CONICET a university?
No. CONICET is a national public research council and employer; it does not grant degrees. Doctoral and postdoctoral CONICET fellows and CIC researchers are typically affiliated with a partner university for degree-granting purposes and teaching, even when CONICET is their employer or funder.
What’s the difference between a CONICET Becario and a CONICET Investigador?
A Becario holds a Beca (fellowship) — a fixed-term training stipend, most commonly for doctoral or postdoctoral work. An Investigador holds a permanent, salaried staff position in the Carrera del Investigador Científico y Tecnológico. Most Investigadores previously held a CONICET fellowship, but the two are structurally different relationships: one is a time-limited training award, the other is ongoing employment.
How does someone become a CONICET staff researcher?
Through the CIC’s competitive annual entry call (concurso de ingreso), generally requiring a completed doctoral degree and a research track record; a prior CONICET doctoral and/or postdoctoral fellowship is common among successful applicants, though not a formal prerequisite. Entry is evaluated by discipline-specific committees and is genuinely competitive, not automatic for former fellows.
Does CONICET only fund its own employees?
No. Its internal PIP grant line is available to CONICET researchers, but CONICET-affiliated scientists (and Argentine researchers generally) also compete for project funding from Argentina’s separate national project-grant agency, the Agencia Nacional de Promoción de la Investigación, el Desarrollo Tecnológico y la Innovación (Agencia I+D+i), through its PICT line. These are two distinct agencies with two distinct application processes.
Who oversees CONICET within the Argentine government?
CONICET reports, at the executive-branch level, to Argentina’s national science-policy authority — as of 2026 organized as the Secretaría de Innovación, Ciencia y Tecnología within the Jefatura de Gabinete de Ministros. This administrative placement has changed more than once in recent years and is worth reconfirming for any time-sensitive institutional correspondence.
Related Reading
For comparison with funders that operate purely as grant-making bodies without a direct-employment component, see the CASRAI guides to FCT (Portugal), DFG (Germany), and AEI (Spain). For the broader landscape this guide sits within, see the Grants Management pillar page.
