European Research Council president “especially pleased” about increasing share won by women
Researchers wanting to work at institutions in Germany, the UK and France have topped the table in the latest round of the European Research Council’s grants for senior researchers.
ERC Advanced Grants offer “exceptional leaders” up to €3.5 million over five years, with grants awarded annually.
In the 2022 round, announced on 30 March, 218 grants were awarded, totalling €544m. This is down from €625m awarded to 253 researchers in the 2021 round. The success rate has also dropped slightly, from 14.6 per cent in 2021 to 13.2 per cent in 2022.
National success
Researchers proposing to carry out projects at universities and research centres in 20 countries were awarded grants in the latest round, with the highest number in Germany (37), the UK (35) and France (32).
With plenty of researchers working outside their home country, the most successful nationalities were German (36 researchers), French (32) and Italian (21), followed by British (19).
Institutions in the Netherlands fared much worse in 2022 than the previous year, dropping from third to seventh place.
With the UK still in limbo over its membership of the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, which the ERC is a part of, researchers at British institutions will not be able to take up their ERC funding unless UK association is finalised by the time the grant agreement is due to be signed.
Women winning
Female researchers continue to win a growing share of ERC Advanced Grants. In the 2022 round, 27.5 per cent of winners were women, up from 25 per cent in 2021.
ERC president Maria Leptin said she was “especially pleased to see such a high number of female researchers in this competition and that they are increasingly successful in securing funding”.
The grants are expected to create more than 2,000 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and other staff at the host institutions, the ERC said.
Research commissioner Mariya Gabriel said the funding “puts our 218 research leaders, together with their teams of postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and research staff, in pole position to push back the boundaries of our knowledge, break new ground and build foundations for future growth and prosperity in Europe”.