Departing European Research Council head says inadequate budget is his one ‘major regret’
Countries that underperform in the EU’s R&D programme are improving at winning funding from the bloc’s flagship European Research Council, the ERC’s outgoing president Jean-Pierre Bourguignon has said.
Researchers based in the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal and Slovenia have all seen above-average rises in their success rates since Bourguignon took office in 2014, he told the European Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy on 12 November.
Lithuania, Malta, Romania and Serbia all won their first ERC grants in the same period, he said, although he admitted: “We know there is still a long way to go with this.”
Bourguignon said that raising underperforming countries’ participation in the ERC was one of three goals he set himself when he became president, along with improving global links and the balance of male and female grantees.
Success rates for women had risen to equal those for men since 2014, he said, having previously languished at 8 per cent versus 11 per cent for men. He credited this success to a revamped gender equality plan, and said that the improvement in countries’ participation was due to tailored events and the creation of a focused working group.
“One major regret” ahead of his departure at the end of 2019 is “the large number of truly excellent proposals the ERC cannot fund every year” due to insufficient funds, Bourguignon said, putting the number at 350-630 each year.
He said he is leaving office “confident that the ERC has important allies” in the Parliament who will provide the “strong advocacy” needed to ensure that the EU’s 2021-27 R&D programme gets the €120 billion budget in 2018 prices the Parliament has called for, as opposed to the €83.5bn proposed by the European Commission.
But he warned: “We all know that getting it to the right level will be a tough fight.”