ERC awards two more Studentships ERC Proof of Concept to research in Portugal

The European Research Council(ERC) announced this week the research projects selected in Proof of Concept Grants Call, the Studentships for projects previously funded by the ERC that aim to explore the commercial and social potential of research beyond research.

Of the 90 applications now selected for funding, two are led by researchers developing their research in Portugal. The project led by Luís Pereira, from AlmaScience, CENIMAT/I3N, NOVA, entitled "CELLulose nanocomposite separators for the nEXt generation of smart batteries", will be funded with €150,000 to use a combination of nanofibrillar cellulose and cellulose nanocrystals for batteries, opening up possibilities to explore a wide range of bio-based products and recyclable/biodegradable materials in an application with growing market demand. The project led by Edgar Gomes, from the João Lobo Antunes Institute of Molecular Medicine Institute, entitled "Human skeletal muscle platform for disease modelling and high-throughput drug screening", will also receive €150,000 in funding but to develop skeletal muscle analogues (devices) to mimic human anatomy and with potential to develop treatments and therapies for neuro-muscular diseases (NMD).

So far, Portuguese research has already received around 43 million euros from the European Research Council (ERC) since the start of the Horizon Europe (2021-2027), the European funding framework programme for research and innovation.