ERC offers grants to early career researchers to conduct pioneering research projects

Why is the world so green? What can we eat to prevent dementia? Are our eyes really the windows to our personalities? 403 talented early career researchers have been awarded European Research Council grants to answer such questions. Scientists will benefit from EUR603 million in total and up to EUR1.5 million each, to create their own research teams and conduct pioneering projects. The grants are part of the 'excellent science' pillar of the EU's current Research and Innovation programme, Horizon 2020.

On this occasion, Carlos Moedas, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, said: "In addition to supporting early stage European researchers, the ERC Starting Grants also help enrich the European research field by attracting and retaining foreign scientists in Europe. More than one in ten grantees come from outside the EU or its associated countries. Europe is open to the world!"

The President of the ERC, Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, commented: "With 3170 applications, 2018 Starting Grants were in very high demand. In spite of the additional relaunch of the ERC Synergy Grants, we were still able to award over 400 Starting Grants in this round. For the second year in a row, nearly 40% of Starting grantees are women. Regarding geographic spread, we note the number of successful applicants who will be based in the Netherlands has grown considerably since last year. We are also pleased to see an improvement of the success rate of applicants whose research will be carried out in Central and Eastern Europe - while the number of these applicants remains low. Scientific talent and ambitious ideas are to be found all over Europe and the ERC aims to give them stimulus wherever they may be."

The new grantees' curiosity-led research covers a diverse range of topics. In Germany a grantee will shed light on what makes our cells uniquely human, as opposed to ape. A scientist based in Sweden will investigate ultrafast events, taking one quadrillionth of a second. Another scholar in France will challenge the current theories of how Japan became a global industrial power.

Once again, almost 13% of applications were funded. As also occurred in the last funding round, female researchers who applied had a slightly higher success rate (13.7%) than their male counterparts (12.4%).

In this round, slightly more German (73), Italian (42), French (33) and Dutch (33) researchers were successful than other nationalities. Grantees from 44 countries across the world received grants, from as far afield as Vietnam and Argentina. The competition therefore enabled some researcher mobility and the spread of scientific knowledge as 40 grantees will move country to take up their grant, and 16 will come from outside the EU and H2020 associated countries.

The research will be carried out in 22 different EU countries, with research institutions from Germany (76), the UK (67) and the Netherlands (46) hosting the most projects.

These Starting Grants will help the selected scientists build their own research teams, leading to job creation as an estimated 1,500 postdocs, PhD students and other staff could be employed to support them.

Source: https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/erc-2018-starting-grants-results