2525 proposals in ERC Consolidator Grants competition 2014

A total of 2525 proposals were submitted in the 2014 Consolidator Grant competition of the European Research Council (ERC), the second call under the new EU Framework Programme Horizon 2020. After last year's sharp rise (48%) in number of applications, which totalled 3679, the demand in the 2014 call represents a 31% decrease. The 2014 figures are comparable to the equivalent group in 2012.

The distribution by the three ERC domains was as follows: 1201 proposals were submitted in 'Physical Sciences and Engineering', 797 in 'Life Sciences' and 527 in 'Social Sciences and Humanities'. In this year's call, the overall call budget is € 713 Million, which means a success rate of around 15%, allowing funding of approximately 400 grants. In 2013, 312 top researchers were awarded grants of nearly € 575 Million in total, with a success rate of 8.5%.

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.