Nine Cambridge academics have won Advanced Grants awarded by the European Research Council (ERC). This is the greatest number of grants won by a UK institution in the 2021 round of funding.
Advanced Grants are awarded to leading researchers who are established in their field and have a recognised track record of achievements. The ERC is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. The 2021 Advanced Grants competition will see funding worth €624 million going to 253 leading researchers across Europe. This year, the UK has received grants for 45 projects, Germany 61, the Netherlands 27 and France 26. The overall ERC budget from 2021 to 2027 is more than €16 billion, as part of the Horizon Europe programme.
The Cambridge grantees are:
Professor Erwin Reisner, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry
Project: Semi-biological Domino Catalysis for Solar Chemical Synthesis (domino4chem)
Professor Paul Dupree, Department of Biochemistry
Project: Function and evolution of plant cell wall architecture for sustainable technologies (EVOCATE)
Professor Anuj Dawar, Department of Computer Science and Technology
Project: Limits of Symmetric Computation (LimSymm)
Professor Vikram Deshpande, Department of Engineering
Project: Graph-based Learning and design of Advanced Mechanical Metamaterials (GLAMM)
Professor Matthew Gaunt, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry
Project: A Chemical Synthesis Approach towards Decoding the Epitranscriptome (ChemDecEpi)
Dr Florian Markowetz, Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute
Project: Targeting the roots of chromosomal instability in cancer (CliniCIN)
Professor Pierre Raphael, Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics
Project: Singularities for waves and turbulent flows (SWAT)
Professor Rodolphe Sepulchre, Department of Engineering
Project: Spiking Control Systems: an algorithmic theory for control design of physical event-based systems (SpikyControl)
Professor Ivan Smith. Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics
Project: Floer theory beyond Floer (FloerPlus35)