Over 400 young scientists have been awarded this year’s European Research Council Starting Grants. Four of them will be implemented in Poland, including one at the PAS institute.

ERC Grants for young researchers

The European Research Council (ERC) has just announced the results of a competition for researchers, who have 2 to 7 years’ experience after their PhD. The Starting Grant competition is attended by scientists who, despite their young age, demonstrate scientific excellence in their research. The Council has allocated €636 million for this purpose. The funds obtained will enable the winners to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas.

ERC Grants in Poland

Among the grant winners, who will conduct their research at Polish research units are four scientists.

One of them is a molecular biologist and geneticist – Adam Kłosin, PhD – from the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He heads the Spatial Epigenetics Laboratory there and as part of the OGRE project he will conduct research “The spatial organization of gene regulation in embryonic development”. In this project, he will try to explain how and why proteins regulating gene expression during embryonic development organize themselves into dense clusters.

In Poland, grants will also be carried out by:

• Katharina Boguslawski, PhD, Professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, member of the Polish Young Academy. She won grant for the DRESSED-pCCD project “Devising Reliable Electronic Structure Schemes through Eclectic Design”
• Rafał Kucharski, PhD, Jagiellonian University, who was awarded for the COeXISTENCE project “Playing urban mobility games with intelligent machines. Framework to discover and mitigate human-machine conflicts”
• Piotr Wcisło, PhD, Professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, who won ERC funding for the H2TRAP project “New experimental methods for trapping cold molecular hydrogen”

For more details, statistics and projects examples please visit the ERC website.

About ERC Starting Grants

Starting Grant is a funding awarded by the ERC to early-career scientists. Winners may obtain for their projects up to EUR 1.5 million for a period of 5 years.

In 2022 edition, 2932 applications were submitted, 408 were selected for funding. With 46 different nationalities this year’s ERC Starting Grants recipients will be working in 26 countries in Europe and beyond. The research will also be carried out by six Poles employed in foreign units.

So far, 37 ERC Starting Grants have been awarded to researchers based in Poland.

The Excellence in Science Department of the Polish Academy of Sciences assisted all the above-mentioned laureates in preparations for the competition.

Source of information: European Research Council