Portugal Secures 2.4 Million Euros in the ERC Synergy Grant 2026 Call for Proposals

The European Research Council (ERC) announced on November 12 the list of projects selected in the 2026 ERC Synergy Grant call. One of the selected projects, with a total budget of 8.8 million euros, includes a researcher conducting work in the field of linguistics in Portugal, representing a direct benefit of 2.4 million euros for her team:

• Cristina Flores (CEHUM/UMinho) is part of a consortium with researchers in Germany and Poland working on the NAVAR project—“Navigating the Pathways of Nativeness: Attrition and Reinforcement of Childhood Languages in Contexts of Return Migration.”This project will investigate the loss and reinforcement of childhood-acquired languages among bilinguals who grew up in Germany and whose heritage language—Portuguese or Polish—became the dominant language in their environment following migration.

The ERC Synergy Grant call for proposals aims to fund collaborative, highly interdisciplinary cutting-edge research by fostering collaboration among teams of two to four researchers, enabling them to set more ambitious goals that they would not be able to address individually. In the 2026 call, 48 projects were selected, totaling 500 million euros in funding.

To date, Portuguese researchers have been involved in six Synergy Grant projects; that number has now risen to seven, five of which were secured under the current European funding framework program, Horizon Europe. The NAVAR project also received special recognition from the ERC.

FCT has been developing a series of innovative programs covering all stages of national participation in the ERC’s Calls under the ERC-Portugal Program, from the preparation of applications (ERC-PT Pre-Assessment) to the placement of researchers in permanent positions to conduct research abroad (ERC-PT Careers – Attract) and researchers conducting research in Portugal (ERC-PT Careers – Retain).