Horizon 2020 is divided into: 

                     3 Pillars

Pillar 1 - Excellent Science: aiming at reinforcing and extending the excellence of the Union’s science base and at consolidating the European Research Area in order to make the Union’s research and innovation system more competitive on a global scale.
Actions: individual grants to excellent researchers (ERC), grants for training and researchers’ career development through mobility (Marie Slodowska-Curie), grants to initiate radically new lines of technology (FET). 

Pillar 2 - Industrial Leadership: aiming at speeding up development of the technologies and innovations that will underpin tomorrow's businesses and help innovative European SMEs to grow into world-leading companies. 
Actions: Research and Innovation Actions, Innovation Actions, Coordination and Support Actions, SME Instruments.   

Pillar 3 - Societal Challenges: reflecting the policy priorities of the Europe 2020 strategy and addressing major concerns shared by citizens in Europe and elsewhere. 
Actions: Research and Innovation Actions, Innovation Actions, Coordination and Support Actions, SME Instruments.  

5 Transversal programmes

Spreading Excellence and Widening Participation: aiming at enabling the European Research Area to function in a more streamlined and homogeneous way, allowing the individual strengths of each Member State to be optimised.
Science with and for Society: aiming at building effective cooperation between science and society, to recruit new talent for science and to pair scientific excellence with social awareness and responsibility. 
Actions: Research and Innovation Actions, Innovation Actions, Coordination and Support Actions, SME Instruments.  
European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT): aiming at creating new environments where higher education, research, public administrations and business work together to produce disruptive innovation.. 
Euratom: for nuclear research and training. 
Fast Track to Innovation Pilot (2015-2016): fully-bottom-up measure aiming at promoting close-to-the-market innovation activities, and open to all types of participants. 

Funding & tender opportunities database is the single gateway to funding-related information.
The Work Programme is the key-document describing funding opportunities available under Horizon 2020; the EC releases a Work Programme every two years for each section and includes the overall objectives, the respective Calls for proposals and the topics within each call. 
The H2020 Online Manual provides a step by step procedure for call search, proposal preparation and submission and updated versions of all the Reference documents. 

The European Commission appoints independent  Experts to assist in:

1.  funding programmes implelentation activities including:  

   • evaluation of proposals; 
   • monitoring of actions.

2. preparation, implementation or evaluation of programmes and design of policies. This includes the activities of Horizon 2020 Advisory Groups which provide high quality and timely advice to the Commission services during the preparation of the Horizon 2020 work programmes.
   To date 18 Advisory Groups have been appointed (with a mandate for a period of 2 years with the possibility of renewal for a further maximum 2 years). The renewal of groups at the end of each mandate will be made appointing new registered experts in the Experts database.  

Registering as an expert:  experts may join the database for the lifetime of the Horizon 2020 programme. In order to access the expert registration form, it is required to login with a valid Participant Portal ECAS account. 
Independent experts shall be chosen on the basis of skills, experience and knowledge (including language skills) appropriate to carry out the tasks assigned to them.
The registration form includes the following sections: 

• selection of funding programmes of interest (H2020, COSME, Third Health Programme, EACEA, CEF, RFCS); 
• personal details; 
• curruculum vitae; 
• H2020 relevant thematic sections; 
• work experience. 

Experts previously registered for FP7 need to declare their interest in working as an expert for the Horizon 2020 programme (by selecting Horizon 2020 in the programme selection page, which is the first page of the online registration platform) and to update their profile with the thematic domains of the Horizon 2020 programme.
Further information are available at  Faq for Experts.  

In order to better identify the most suitable calls fo proposal and to plan participation strategies, professors and researchers may schedule individual meetings with UniTrento research support units (Città, Collina, Rovereto) at the following email addresses:

• Città research: citta.research [at] unitn.it
  

• Collina research: collina.research [at] unitn.it
  

• Rovereto reserach: rovereto.research [at] unitn.it