European Research Council to support five more Portuguese projects

Projects in the fields of optics and photonics, diagnostics and therapeutics, archaeology, culture, and political history have secured €8 million from the European Research Council (ERC) for national institutions. The ERC will support five more national projects to be developed by researchers from the Champalimaud Foundation, INESC Microsystems and Nanotechnologies, the University of Algarve, and NOVA University.

With these results, research carried out at institutions belonging to the National Science and Technology System (SNCT) has raised around €95 million and coordinated 73 projects in Calls since the start of Horizon Europe, the European framework program for research and innovation funding for the period 2021-2027.

Today, September 5, the projects selected for Call ERC Starting Grant 2024 were announced. This grant aims to fund projects in all scientific fields led by researchers at the beginning of their careers, allowing them to form their teams and develop their most promising ideas. A total of 494 projects were selected, totaling €780 million. Among these, there are five projects by researchers working in Portugal, which received around €8 million. Also noteworthy is the recent approval of a national project in the context of the ERC Proof of Concept.

Also noteworthy are two Portuguese researchers working abroad who have also been awarded grants by the ERC. Dora Sampaio, from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, will develop the RETIREWEL project project – “Retirement in countries: A tripartite analysis of the welfare state, family care networks, and the retirement industry” and Rafael Galupa, from the National Center for Scientific Research and the Center for Integrative Biology (in France), who will develop the REGULADOSIX project – “Regulation of genetic dosage on the X chromosome of the mouse.”

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 funded by the PRR covering the various cycles of national participation in Calls . Of particular note is the ERC-PT program ERC-PT its three strands: Pre-Assessment, to support the national scientific community in preparing proposals (of which researcher Arturo Zoffmann, now selected by the ERC, was a beneficiary); ERC A-Projects, to fund top-ranked national applications not selected for ERC funding; and the new ERC-PT , a new strand launched in July 2024 to attract and retain researchers with ERC projects.

Compared to Call previous Call Starting Grant Call , this Call a 50% increase in national applications, the highest at European level in this edition. The ERC-PT edition for Call Starting Grant 2025 Call is currently underway, with a total of 18 potential ERC applications being supported.

The five projects selected, three of them in the field of social sciences and humanities, for funding under Call Starting Grant 2024 Call are:

• Andrada Savickas, from the Champalimaud Foundation, with the MicroMetSCAN project –“Revealing liver micrometastases in vivo using ultra-high definition MRI”(€2 million), which aims to develop an ultra-high resolution magnetic resonance imaging method for the non-invasive detection and characterization of liver micrometastases, which could have a significant clinical impact on therapeutic planning and patient prognosis;
• Marco Piccardo, from INESC Microsystems and Nanotechnologies, with the MetaPOWER project –“Space-Time and Vectorial Meta-Optics for High-Power Structured Laser-Matter Interactions”(€1.5 million), which will enable research in the field of photonics, with unique approaches to manipulating light in its various electromagnetic modes, with an impact on technological development in this area;
• Elisa Bandini, from the University of Algarve, with the PRIMERS project –“The cognitive primers of human culture: a comparative approach to the emergence of innovations”(€1.5 million), which aims to address what makes human culture so distinct from that of other animals. The central idea of the project is to go beyond a view of culture that is based exclusively on human culture;
• Jonathan Reeves, from the University of Algarve, with the OLAF project –“Technologically mediated landscapes: Examining the adaptive benefit of the early Oldowan” (€1.5 million), which will investigate the motivations of early hominids to use sharp primitive tools, and their evolutionary benefits, around 2.6 million years ago;
• Arturo Zoffmann, from NOVA University, with the STEXEU project –“The Constitutional Road to Dictatorship: States of Exception and Authoritarianism in Europe, 1900-39” (€1.5 million), which aims to investigate the crisis of liberal states and the rise of authoritarianism in early 20th-century Europe from the perspective of states of exception.

The project selected for funding in Call Proof of Concept 2024 Call is led by Cláudia Santos (NOVA University), with the NEUROSHIELD project,“Novel small molecule activator of TGFβ-SMAD as attenuator of neuroinflammation in Parkinson’s Disease”(€150,000), and will develop a new therapy aimed at combating neuroinflammation in Parkinson's disease, which is expected to lead to an improvement in patients' quality of life.

2024 marks the 40th anniversary of the European Union Framework Program, the largest instrument for promoting European research, development, and innovation, and a beacon for international scientific cooperation.