Top early-career researchers receive € 603 million

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced a selection of 403 first class scientists to receive its prestigious Starting Grants, worth up to € 1.5 million each. The total funding of € 603 million contributes to supporting a new generation of top scientists in Europe, enabling them set up their own research teams and pursue ground-breaking ideas. This year, grants are awarded to researchers of 44 nationalities, hosted in 22 countries across Europe.

In this round, slightly more German (73), Italian (42), French (33) and Dutch (33) researchers were successful than other nationalities. Almost 13% of applications were funded. Female researchers who applied had a slightly higher success rate (13.7%) than their male counterparts (12.4%). 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. For more statistics please click here. 

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.