Research in Portugal receives three more Consolidator Grants from the ERC

The European Research Council (ERC) announced today, January 31, the projects selected in Call Consolidator Grants Call proposals, which provides funding for projects proposed by researchers with 7 to 12 years of postdoctoral experience, including three projects by researchers working in Portugal. Each will be funded with approximately €2 million, for a total of €5.7 million. In this Call, a project led by a Portuguese researcher conducting her research in France was also funded.

The three winners conducting research in Portugal are: Susana Viegas, from the Nova Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA), who is leading a project in the field of social sciences and humanities entitled "Film-Philosophy as a Meditation on Death, " which aims to study the ways in which death and time are connected in cinema, questioning the usual anthropocentric definitions of death; André Martins, from the Institute of Telecommunications, Técnico Lisboa, with a project in the field of exact sciences and engineering entitled "DEep COgnition Learning for LAnguage GEneration," which addresses an important challenge in the field of artificial intelligence, namely how to go beyond large language models, also called foundational models; and Eugenia Chiappe, from the Champalimaud Foundation's Sensory-Motor Integration Laboratory, who, with the project "Neural Circuits for Error Correction, " in the field of life and health sciences, will explore how interconnected circuits such as vision, the brain, and the spinal cord can play a crucial role in controlling locomotion, particularly in correcting errors associated with it.

Portuguese researcher Liliana Mancio-Silva, conducting research at the Institut Pasteur and INSERM in France, has won a Consolidator Grant for her project "Mechanisms of dormancy, activation, and sexual conversion in pre-erythrocytic malaria parasites,"in the field of life and health sciences, which focuses on understanding the biology of the parasite, ways to control the disease, and the transmission of malaria. This project reflects Liliana Mancio-Silva's long-standing interest in malaria research, having worked at the João Lobo Antunes Institute of Molecular Medicine in Lisbon.

At the end of December 2022, the ERC announced the final lists of all researchers who were funded under Calls 2021 Work Calls , including all those who had initially been placed on reserve lists and were subsequently selected for funding.

To date, research carried out at SNCT institutions has received around €49 million in funding from Calls European Research Calls since the start of Horizon Europe (2021-2027), the European framework program for research and innovation funding.