The European Research Council has received 710 applications for its first round of Synergy Grants.
The grants will fund projects involving two to four researchers from different disciplines. The ERC plans to fund 10 to 15 such projects in 2012, meaning the success rate will be around 2 per cent.
Each project will receive between €10 million and €15m for research projects lasting up to six years.
“The scheme is launched on an experimental basis, meaning we will closely monitor the response and we are therefore also devoting only a relatively small budget to it for now,” Helga Nowotny, the president of the ERC, told Research Europe when the grants were launched in June last year.
The call was published in October 2011 and the results are expected to be published at the end of the year.