The European Research Council awarded its 2024 ‘Consolidator Grants’ to 328 researchers across Europe Tuesday, supporting outstanding scientists and scholars to the tune of EUR totalling EUR 678 million.
The ERC, the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research, funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe.
The funding is provided through the EU’s Horizon Europe programme for researchers to establish their independent research teams and develop their most promising scientific ideas.
The grants will support scientific projects spanning all disciplines of research from engineering to life sciences to humanities. For example, researchers will try to understand better what influences people’s responses to immigrants, or use the AI to improve firefighting strategies, or analyse how the voters of a losing party can come to accept their loss in democratic elections.
The laureates of this grant competition will carry out their projects at universities and research centres in 25 EU Member States and other countries associated with Horizon Europe. The highest numbers of grants will be located in Germany (67 projects), France (38), the UK (38) and the Netherlands (37). There are nationals of 43 countries among the winners of this call, notably Germans (60 researchers), French (34) and Italians (29).
The grants will likely create around 2 750 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students, and other staff at the host institutions.
Examples of the winning projects
