European Research Council announces projects selected in Call Synergy Grant 2025 Call

On November 6, the European Research Council (ERC) announced the projects selected in Call ERC Synergy Grant 2025 Call , which aims to fund highly complex and interdisciplinary collaborative frontier research.

Synergy Grants aim to foster collaboration between teams of two to four researchers, enabling them to set more ambitious goals that they would not be able to tackle individually. Sixty-six projects were selected, totaling €684 million in funding.

Two of the selected projects, worth a total of €20 million, involve researchers working in Portugal, representing a direct benefit of €10.1 million for their teams:

• João Mano (CICECO/UAveiro) and Nuno Araújo (CFTC/FCUL) are part of a consortium that also includes a researcher in the United Kingdom, with the RODIN project – “Cell-mediated sculptable living platforms as highly efficient hybrid units to bioengineer human microtissues, ” combining the fields of bioengineering, physics, and personalized medicine.
• Elsa Logarinho (I3S/UPorto) is part of a consortium with two researchers in France, working on the CenAGE project – “CenAGE, a ‘Centromeric’ view on AGEing: unveiling centromere instability in aging,” which focuses on the link between chromosomal instability and biological aging processes.

The RODIN project is the first consortium with two Portuguese teams to be funded by the ERC-Synergy Grant and, given the specific nature of this Call, will represent a significant amount of funding, €6.8 million, directly benefiting national institutions. With the CenAGE project, which has a funding volume of €3.3 million, I3S becomes the first institution in the National Science and Technology System (SNCT) to host two projects of this type. To date, Portuguese researchers have been involved in four Synergy Grant projects, and this number has now risen to six.

With these results, research carried out at SNCT institutions has reached the milestone of €140 million raised in Calls since the start of Horizon Europe, the European framework program for research and innovation funding for the period 2021-2027. As a reference, Portugal has already raised €150 million from the ERC between 2014 and 2020.

 The FCT has been developing a set of innovative programs covering all stages of national participation Calls , from the preparation of applications to the stabilization of permanent positions for researchers conducting research abroad (ERC-PT Careers – Attract) and researchers conducting research in Portugal (ERC-PT Careers – Retain). The ERC-Portugal Program includes the following core programs: Pre-Assessment, to support the national scientific community in preparing proposals; ERC A-Projects, to fund top-ranked national applications not selected for ERC funding; and ERC-PT , to attract and retain researchers with ERC projects.