The European Research Council

The European Research Council (ERC) was set up in 2007 to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields, on the basis of scientific excellence. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants, and Synergy Grants and additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme helping to bridge the gap between their pioneering research and early phases of its commercialization. ERC is also interested in promoting gender equality. During the years of its functioning, over 10,000 researchers have been selected for funding. It is worth noting that ERC grantees have won very prestigious prizes: nine Nobel Prizes, four Fields Medals, and 11 Wolf Prizes. ERC evaluation is conducted by means of a structure of high-level peer review panels covering three basic domains: Physical Sciences & Engineering (PE), Life Sciences, and Social Sciences & Humanities (SH). The disciplines of High Energy Physics (including Nuclear Physics), and Atomic, Molecular Physics, and Optics (AMO) are evaluated by Panel PE2—Fundamental Constituents of Matter. During Horizon H2020 (2014– 2020), where ERC was the flagship component of funding, 326 grants were funded in the panel PE2. In the pool of funded projects in the PE2 panel, the majority (about 58%) represent the topics “Fundamental Interactions and Fields,” “Particle Physics,” and “Relativity.” About 6% represent Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics. The remaining projects cover the topics of AMO. In 2021, 8,329 applications were evaluated and 963 were selected for funding. From those, about 45% were from the PE domain. Although the percentage of submitted projects by women is lower in the PE domain than in other two, it is now around 13% and the success rate for projects submitted by women and men is approximately the same. An example of a successful application submitted to the PE2 panel in 2021 is the ERC grant XPACE studying astrophysical shocks that are the most powerful particle accelerators in the Universe. The investigator aims to develop multiscale models that bridge the gap between the microphysics and the global dynamics. Another successful project (ELDAR) aims to study synthesis of new elements in stars, investigating reactions in two world-leading European laboratories—the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research and Gran Sasso. Several projects are oriented to study physics using data from experiments of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Council for Nuclear Research. To mention some examples, project KstarKstar plans to make the world’s most precise measurements of decay of neutral B-mesons in experiment LHCb, and the project FFHiggsTop is focused on development of new revolutionary methods for scattering amplitudes to study multileg massive Higgs processes. Some of the projects funded by the ERC in the past have now become especially relevant. The ERC 2017 grantee in the project NUCLEAR in panel SH2 explored the challenges of imagining the possibility of nuclear war and unwanted nuclear explosions, both in international policy and in people’s minds. That way, the ERC aims to make the European research base more prepared to respond to the needs of a knowledge-based society.