The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded €838 million in its latest Advanced Grants competition, supporting 319 leading researchers across Europe. These highly competitive grants enable senior researchers to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects with the potential to deliver major scientific breakthroughs.
Eight researchers from EUTOPIA partner universities are among this year’s awardees, further demonstrating the alliance’s strength in research excellence and innovation. EUTOPIA congratulates the awardees and their host institutions on this significant achievement.
- Gael LE MENS — Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Project Title: From Verifiable Success to Epistemic Abdication: How General-Purpose AI Transforms Belief Formation and Collective Intelligence - Ángel LOZANO — Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Project Title: Artificial Spatial Bandwidth - Pilar PRIETO — Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Project Title: Prosody across senses: Testing a reconceptualization of prosody as a modality-neutral component of language governing spoken, visual and tactile signals - Marko Žnidarič — University of Ljubljana Project Title: NUMBS – Effective Nonunitarity in Many-Particle Systems
- Daniele BAGLIONI — Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (UNIVE)
Project Title: Concurring Scripts. Allography in Italy (1000–1800) - Maria FALKENBERG — University of Gothenburg (GU)
Project Title: Regulatory Mechanisms of the Mitochondrial Control Region - Johannes LINDVALL — University of Gothenburg (GU)
Project Title: Dying Occupations and Political Change - Anca PÂRVULESCU — Babeș-Bolyai University (UBB)
Project Title: Romanian Orientalism: Inter-imperial Entanglements in World Literature - Gary BENDING — University of Warwick (UW)
Project Title: Rhizosphere Rhythms: Unravelling Diurnal Microbiome Dynamics and Their Role in Plant–Soil Interactions
The results also include two ERC Advanced Grant awardees affiliated with Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) through the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf and the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics.
- Anton WALLNER — Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (affiliated with TUD)
- Project Title: Supernova and r-process radionuclides engraved on million-years old archives from Earth and Moon
- Stephan GRILL — Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (affiliated with TUD)
- Project Title: DNA Sequence-Dependent Structure Formation in the Cell Nucleus
Established by the European Union in 2007, the ERC is Europe’s leading funding organisation for frontier research. Its Advanced Grants support established research leaders with a recognised track record of significant achievements, providing them with the resources to pursue bold and innovative research questions.
This year’s competition attracted a record 3,329 proposals, an increase of 31% compared to last year. Just 9.6% of applications were selected for funding, underlining the exceptional competitiveness of the scheme. The ERC estimates that the awarded projects will create more than 3,000 jobs within research teams across Europe.
The results also reflect the growing international appeal of European research. Through the EU’s Choose Europe for Science initiative, the ERC has seen a sharp rise in applications from researchers based outside Europe, with several successful grantees relocating from the United States, Canada and Australia to establish their projects in Europe.
Read the full ERC announcement and list of winners on the ERC website.
