How can researchers successfully engage with citizens to improve their scientific outputs? To find out, we talked to ERC grantee, Anna Davies of Trinity College Dublin, the winner of the first ERC Public Engagement Award in the online and social media category. Her project set out to map urban food-sharing practices and discovered early on that they would need the help of citizen scientists.
What if damaged brain cells could be replaced? ERC grantee Malin Parmar has developed innovative genetic reprogramming techniques that can produce new brain cells from other types of cells in the body, opening up new therapeutic pathways to combat disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Although human wellbeing has been a topic of discussion for centuries, assessments of the subject have often focused on narrow demographic groups and missed the bigger picture. With European Research Council (ERC) support, a leading demographer aims to change the way we think about happiness and wellbeing by seeing the future of humanity through the prism of global sustainable development.
There is a common belief that concentrating poor people in the same area and isolating them from wealthier neighbourhoods actually aggravates their situation. To investigate this assumption, the DEPRIVEDHOODS project used new approaches.
Every day thousands of people across Europe are working together to keep EU citizens safe from challenges to do with health, the environment, crime, terrorism, migration and the economy.
A project funded by the ERC developed an innovative and comprehensive framework to study energy poverty in Europe. It also produced evidence applicable beyond academia, laying ground for the EU’s Energy Poverty Observatory set up in 2018.
Cities and regions around the world are increasingly inter-connected. One clear factor for this connectivity is foreign investment: the flow of capital, skills and knowledge that can – under the right circumstances - "bless" an area, improving its economic and social standing. ERC grantee Riccardo Crescenzi studies where these flows are concentrated, how different actors choose where to invest and what are their impacts on both the home and host economies.
Teaching is certainly one of the most important professions in our society, yet its status and attractiveness have been systematically diminishing in the last decades. At the Université catholique de Louvain, Prof. Xavier Dumay is using his ERC Starting Grant to investigate the cultural and institutional transformations that have led to this "teaching profession crisis".
The human brain is a remarkable organ, but how did it evolve to give us such unprecedented cognitive abilities? ERC grantee Pierre Vanderhaeghen and his team from ULB, VIB-KU Leuven turned to the genome for answers: a specific set of genes, found only in humans, could play a determinant role on the size of our brain. Published today in Cell, Vanderhaeghen's EU-funded research helps to unlock the secrets of human evolution.
Peer pressure plays an important role in spreading new trends and habits. But what impact does social influence have in the diffusion of disruptive innovations that challenge prevailing transport technologies and mobility practices? Funded by the ERC, a team led by Dr Charlie Wilson is looking into this matter.
