Top early-career researchers receive € 485 million

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced a selection of 328 first class scientists to receive its prestigious Starting Grants, worth up to € 2 million each. The total funding of € 485 million contributes to supporting a new generation of top scientists in Europe developing so-called "blue sky research": ambitious high-risk, high-gain research projects in any field. This year, grants are awarded to researchers of 38 nationalities, hosted in 180 different institutions throughout Europe.

The projects selected cover a wide range of topics, including wearable electronic textiles powered by body heat, detection of bacteria by smell, 'toxic expertise' in the petrochemical industry, the origins of human rationality, combatting cancer related inflammation, as well as optimising user interface design.

In terms of host institutions, Germany (70 grants) and the UK (55 grants) are in the lead, followed by France (43) and The Netherlands (34). Researchers are also hosted in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain, Sweden and Turkey, along with one project in CERN in Switzerland.

This is the first Starting Grant competition under the EU's Horizon 2020 programme. The call attracted 3273 applications, 10% of which were successful. Among the grantees, 143 are in the domain 'Physical Sciences and Engineering', 124 in 'Life Sciences' and 61 in 'Social Sciences and Humanities'. This year, the share of female grantees rose to 33%, from last year's 30%.

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.