Research in Portugal receives three more ERC Consolidator Grants

The European Research Council (ERC, in English) announced today, 31 January, the projects selected in the Call for Consolidator Grants, 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 around €2 million, totalling €5.7 million. In this Call, a project led by a Portuguese researcher developing her research in France also received funding.

The three winners developing research in Portugal are: Susana Viegas, from NOVA Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA), leading a project in the area 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 Instituto de Telecomunicações, Técnico Lisboa, with a project in the area of exact sciences and engineering entitled "DEep COgnition Learning for LAnguage GEneration", which addresses an important challenge in the area of artificial intelligence, namely how to go beyond large language models, also called foundational models.; and Eugenia Chiappe, from the Champalimaud Foundation's Sensorimotor Integration Lab, who, with the project "Neural Circuits for Error Correction", in the area of life and health sciences, will explore how interconnected circuits such as vision, brain and spinal cord can play a crucial role in the control of locomotion, namely in the correction of errors associated with it.

The Portuguese researcher Liliana Mancio-Silva, developing research at the Institut Pasteur and INSERM in France, won a Consolidator Grant with the project "Mechanisms of dormancy, activation and sexual conversion in pre-erythrocytic malaria parasites" in the area 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, with a background at the João Lobo Antunes Institute of Molecular Medicine in Lisbon.

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

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