ERC publications

Annual Report on the ERC activities and achievements in 2017

The European Research Council (ERC) is the first pan-European funding body designed to support investigator-driven frontier research and stimulate scientific excellence across Europe. Under the EU research programme 'Horizon 2020', the ERC has a total budget of over €13 billion for the period 2014-2020 available for individual researchers. The ERC aims to support the best and most creative scientists to identify and explore new opportunities and directions in any field of research (Physical Sciences and Engineering, Life Sciences and Social Sciences and Humanities), without thematic priorities. In particular, it encourages proposals which cross disciplinary boundaries; address new and emerging fields; and introduce unconventional and innovative approaches. The ERC awards long-term grants to researchers of any nationality and age from anywhere in the world who wish to carry out their research projects in a host organisation based in Europe. Scientific excellence is the sole evaluation criterion.

From Master degree to advanced stages of career, the European Union funds outstanding researchers from all over the world to develop their potential in Europe.

The contribution of frontier research to the understanding of human mobility across frontiers

Computational and systems biology are interdisciplinary sciences that have been greatly advancing in the last decades by harnessing the increased power of computation and mathematics. Their aim is to apply large-scale computational and numerical methods to the fields of molecular, cellular and structural biology, in order to answer emerging biological questions that were not possible to tackle with traditional approaches. The foundations of these disciplines lie in computer science, applied mathematics, statistics, biochemistry, chemistry, biophysics, molecular biology, genetics, genomics, ecology, evolution, anatomy, neuroscience, visualization, animation, etc. In this context, thousands of researchers around the world work on a wide range of computational, analytical and theoretical methods, to study amongst others gene regulation, structure prediction, protein design, analysis of cell signaling and metabolic networks. They focus on the design, prediction and discovery of emergent properties of cells, tissues and organisms, on studying and modelling complex interactions within biological systems, on developing algorithms and databases, and on the use of advanced computing. To date, the European Research Council (ERC) has supported close to 350 projects in computational biology, systems biology, bioinformatics and biostatistics, representing more than EUR 700 million invested in these research areas. This brochure has been published on the occasion of the 25th International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology / 16th European Conference on Computational Biology, taking place from 21 to 25 July 2017 in Prague (Czech Republic).

The Workshop is intended to showcase relevant research on Climate Change and Climate Action supported by the ERC under Horizon 2020 and FP7, to provide a forum of networking between Principal Investigators leading ERC-funded projects, and to position ERC as a contributor to ‘climate action’ through its ‘bottom up’ approach.

Annual Report on the ERC activities and achievements in 2016

The European Research Council has supported more than 200 research projects so far focused on the study of the human past - history and archaeology. In this brochure, we are presenting a small selection of ERC-funded research in this domain showing the depth and breadth of the grantees’ scholarships.

The ERC will again take part in the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF), this time with President Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, Vice President Klaus Bock, Scientific Council members Dame Athene Donald and Thomas Jungwirth, as well as over 40 ERC grantees, of which more than 20 take part in nine ERC sessions. Discover them below. ESOF, held once every two years, is a showcase for excellent European science. The forum brings together over 4 500 leading thinkers, innovators, policy makers, journalists and educators from more than 90 countries, to discuss current and future breakthroughs in contemporary science.

Anthropology is a dynamic discipline that is rooted in the social sciences with strong ties to the humanities and the natural sciences. With its focus on lived realities and fine-grained ethnographic and comparative methods, anthropology is poised to make a substantive contribution to crucial questions about society, counterbalancing the abstract and numerical knowledge of cultural, political and societal transformations. Initially, anthropology has essentially been about doing ‘field research’ in remote places to record the material practices, ecological adaptation, marriage patterns, religious beliefs, and legal habits of ‘exotic’ cultures. However, contemporary anthropology has become much more than the study of ‘traditional’ societies. Today, cultures are regarded as informed and shaped by all sorts of global influences. It is this interaction between cultures that captures the focus of contemporary anthropologists. To date, the European Research Council (ERC) has supported close to 200 projects in anthropology and its manifold branches such as palaeoanthropology and anthropological linguistics, and ethnographies of emerging fields of study such as powerful elites, social movements, and larger entities like transnational corporations and state bureaucracies. This brochure has been published on the occasion of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) Inter-Congress, taking place from 4 to 9 May 2016 in Dubrovnik (Croatia).