Erc: good result for Italian research, but the big countries, and Spain, are still better than us

Telethon Foundation, National Research Council, national institute of astrophysics, University of Rome, Polytechnic university of Turin: this are are just some of the institutions chosen by the European Research Council (ERC), to support research. The Erc has selected 536 early-career top researchers across Europe in the latest “Starting Grant” competition, with a budget of almost €800 million. 24 of them are Italians and only 7 countries did better than us: UK with 131 researchers, Germany with 78, France with 73, The Netherlands with 51, Switzerland with 33 and Spain with 29. The Starting Grant will allow them to develop their best ideas at the frontiers of knowledge and to build their own research teams, engaging more than 3,000 postdocs and PhD students as ERC team members, thereby supporting a new generation of top scientists in Europe. Each project may not last more than five years.

The projects selected and supported, by what Brussels does not hesitate to describe as “the largest ever granted funding”, cover a wide range of topics, such as social impacts of trans-Mediterranean renewable energy cooperation, laser-based hearing aids, and optical remote sensing technology for civil engineering works.

The 44% of the selected proposal is within the domain of Physical Sciences & Engineering, the 37% within the domain of Life Sciences and the 19% within the domain of Social Sciences & Humanities.

In our country Europe rewards in particular the world of university research: 14 of the 24 researchers selected work in a university. The other work for Telethon foundation, Carlo Alberto college of Turin, National Research Council and national institute of astrophysics.

In this Starting Grant competition, 4741 applications were received, which is a 16% rise from last year. The ERC, which is the newest, pioneering component of the EU’s Seventh Research Framework Programme (‘Ideas’ Specific Programme), has a total budget of €7.5 billion from 2007 to 2013. The European Commission has proposed a significant boost of the ERC budget to over € 13 billion in the new framework programme “Horizon 2020” (2014-2020).

Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science Máire Geoghegan-Quinn commented: “In a global knowledge economy we need new ideas to compete. So investing in world-class frontier research and in the next generation of scientists is one of Europe’s top priorities. After just five years ERC grants are world-renowned, and help us retain and attract the best of the best.”