European Research Council announces projects selected in Call Synergy Grant 2024 Call

On November 5, the European Research Council (ERC) announced the projects selected in Call ERC Synergy Grant 2024 Call , which aims to fund projects addressing highly complex and interdisciplinary scientific challenges.

Synergy Grants aim to foster collaboration between researchers, enabling them to set more ambitious goals that they would not be able to tackle individually. Fifty-seven projects were selected, totaling €571 million.

This group includes a project involving a principal investigator working in Portugal and a project involving a Portuguese researcher working abroad:

• Maria Helena Godinho, CENIMAT/NOVA , as part of a consortium with two principal investigators from institutions in the United Kingdom and Luxembourg, with the ALCEMIST project – “Atypical Liquid Crystal Elastomers: from Materials Innovation to Scalable processing and Transformative applications.”
• Cristina Pina, Brunel University of London and graduate in Medicine from the University of Lisbon, is part of a consortium with three researchers in Spain, the Netherlands, and Finland, working on the MakingBlood project – “Engineering an integrated platform for generation of human blood stem cells from pluripotent sources.”

With these results, research carried out at institutions belonging to the National Science and Technology System (SNCT) has exceeded €100 million in funding and reached 75 projects coordinated in Calls since the start of Horizon Europe (2021), the European framework program for research and innovation funding for the period 2021-2027.

The FCT coordinates national representation and participation in the European Research Council and, as announced at the Science 2024 Meeting, has been developing a set of new programs covering the various cycles of national participation in Calls . Of particular note are ERC-PT and ERC-PT .