ERC relaunches Synergy Grant in 2018

The ERC Scientific Council decided to take the preliminary steps to reinstate the Synergy Grant funding scheme in 2018. The objective of the Synergy Grant is to enable a small group of principal investigators and their teams to bring together complementary skills, knowledge and resources in new ways, in order to jointly address research problems. The demand for Synergy Grants in the previous two competitions exceeded by far the resources allocated to the scheme (€150 million per year). The future Synergy Grant call for proposals, including its budget, dates and eligibility criteria, should be published in the 2018 ERC Work Programme to be adopted by the European Commission in 2017.
 
The European Research Council supports frontier research, cross disciplinary proposals and pioneering ideas in new and emerging fields which introduce unconventional and innovative approaches. The ERC's mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields of research, on the basis of scientific excellence. ERC funds the following type of grants:

ERC Starting Grant for young, early-career top researchers (2-7 years after PhD);
ERC Consolidator Grant for already independent excellent researchers 7-12 years after PhD);
ERC Advanced Grant for senior research leaders with significant research achievements in the last 10 years;
ERC Proof of Concept Grants for ERC grant holders who want to check the market and/or innovation potential of research results from ERC-projects;
ERC Synergy Grants for small groups of individual researchers.