European Research Council announces projects selected Call ERC Synergy Grant 2025

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

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

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

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

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, it will represent a significant volume of funding of 6.8 million euros, to the direct benefit of national institutions. With the CenAGE project, which will be funded to the tune of 3.3 million euros, I3S will become the first institution in the National Science and Technology System (SNCT) to host two projects of this type. Until now, national researchers were part of four Synergy Grant projects, and now there are a total of six.

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

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