ERC allocates an additional €6.9 million to Portuguese research

The European Research Council (ERC) announced today, April 26, the results of the Call for the award of Advanced Grants, with three being awarded Studentships to researchers from Portuguese institutions and two to Portuguese researchers working abroad. The three projects to be developed in national institutions raised a total of 6.9 million euros in European funding, which represents 1.1% of the total Call .

ERC Advanced Grants are intended for active Principal Investigators (PIs) who, over the last 10 years, have a track record of conducting original research and producing relevant results. For Portugal this is an excellent result, considering that in the last 8 Calls In Advanced Grants, Portuguese research had only managed to have 8 projects approved in total, that is, an average of 1 project per Call annual.

The selected projects come from scientific areas as diverse as astrophysics, gravitation, archaeology and economics. The projects that will be developed in Portuguese institutions are “Dispersals, resilience, and innovation in Late Pleistocene SE Africa”, led by Nuno Bicho (University of Algarve); “Finding ExoeaRths: tackling the ChallengEs of stellar activity”, led by Nuno Santos (Research Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics of the University of Porto); and “Black holes: gravitational mechanisms of discovery”, led by Vítor Cardoso (Association of the Instituto Superior Técnico for Research and Development). The Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and Evolution of Human Behavior at the University of Algarve, where Nuno Bicho is based, thus records 3 Studentships from the ERC under Horizon Europe; in turn, both Nuno Santos and Vítor Cardoso had already received, in previous editions and in other modalities of Call , Studentships of the ERC.

Among the projects of Portuguese researchers working abroad are a project in the area of economics, “The distributional consequences of inflation”, led by Ricardo Reis (London School of Economics and Political Science), and another in the area of astrophysics, “The 3D motion of the interstellar Medium with ESO and ESA telescopes”, led by João Alves (University of Vienna).

With these Studentships , Portuguese research already has around 30 million euros raised in ERC funding, within the scope of Horizon Europe (2021-2027). In addition to the projects selected for Advanced Grants, the awarding of 5 Starting Grants , 4 Proof of Concept Grants and 5 Consolidator Grants to researchers from Portuguese institutions had already been announced.