The European Research Council (ERC) has today announced the winners of its latest Starting Grant competition. The funding, worth €705 million in total, will go to 421 early-career researchers across Europe. A record of 4,807 proposals were submitted to this round of the competition.
Two University College Dublin (UCD) researchers are among the new awardees announced. Dr Alan Seltzer, UCD School of Earth Sciences , and Dr Seungkuk Ahn, UCD Charles Institute of Dermatology , UCD School of Medicine , have received a total of almost €4 million in funding to help build their own teams and develop their ambitious research ideas.
The 421 new ERC grantees will be based at universities and research centres in 25 EU Member States and associated countries. Several European researchers who applied from outside the EU and Horizon Europe associated countries will now move to Europe to pursue their research.
Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation, said, “Congratulations to all the successful applicants. I am particularly pleased to see that 21 researchers currently based in the United States and Canada plan to relocate to Europe to pursue their work. Their decision reflects Europe's growing appeal for frontier research and is an encouraging sign that the EU's Choose Europe initiative is helping to attract the next generation of scientific talent while reinforcing Europe's position as a destination of choice for excellent research.”
President of the European Research Council, Professor Maria Leptin, said, “The creativity and ambition of this new generation of grantees is inspiring. Over 50 nationalities are represented amongst these researchers who will carry out their work across Europe. ERC Starting Grants will give them independence and support early on in their careers, needed for them to push scientific boundaries. This is the best investment we can make to further strengthen our research base and Europe’s future.”
UCD Vice President for Research, Innovation and Impact, Professor Kate Robson Brown said, “Congratulations to Dr Alan Seltzer and Dr Seungkuk Ahn on receiving highly competitive ERC Starting Grants. Their research promises to break new ground and solve pressing challenges in their respective fields. We look forward to following the work of these exceptional researchers as their projects unfold.”
The UCD Projects
Tracing Anthropogenic Biogeochemical and Physical Influences on Subsurface Hydrogeology (TabPhish)
PI: Dr Alan Seltzer
Funding: €2,432,500
Groundwater provides drinking water to billions of people around the world - including around a quarter of Ireland’s drinking water - while also supporting agriculture and industry. Yet groundwater resources face growing pressures from human activity, including pollution, over-extraction and the effects of climate change. Our understanding of how groundwater systems are changing is limited by the relatively short duration of direct water-level observations and by the incomplete picture of the nitrogen cycle provided by measurements of nitrate alone.
The TabPhish project will use naturally occurring gases dissolved in groundwater as chemical fingerprints to reconstruct past changes in groundwater levels and nitrate contamination, extending our view from the past several centuries through to the present day. By revealing how groundwater systems have responded to environmental change over much longer timescales than direct observations allow, the research aims to improve our fundamental understanding of how these systems work and, ultimately, our ability to predict and protect critical groundwater resources in the future.
An Ad Astra Fellow and Assistant Professor at UCD School of Earth Sciences , Dr Alan Seltzer will lead the TabPhish project, he said, "Groundwater is an exceptionally important natural resource, but much of its history is effectively hidden from us. This project will use naturally occurring signals dissolved in groundwater to open a new window into how water levels and nitrate pollution have changed over centuries. This award is transformative for my work, it will allow me to build a research team and laboratory at UCD, develop entirely new tools for studying groundwater, and establish a programme of research aimed at helping us to better understand, predict and ultimately protect this critical resource."
DEciphering Species-specific dImorphism in inteGriN-ExtraCellular matrix Mechanobiology (DESIGN-ECM)
PI: Dr Seungkuk Ahn
Funding: €1,500,000
Human mimetic preclinical models imitate human organs, tissues, and diseases to enable safer, more accurate testing for new drugs and therapies. Such models are created by employing core biomaterials and cells existing in our tissues. These models have significant potential to enhance our understanding of human disease and the development of treatments. However, the majority of human preclinical models to date have neglected the species and sex of the extra cellular matrix and cells as biological variables, while species- and sex-dependent biomaterial and cell properties have been well acknowledged in animal and clinical studies.
Led by Dr Seungkuk Ahn, Associate Professor at UCD School of Medicine , DESIGN-ECM will address this gap by investigating species-driven dimorphism in biomaterials and cell biology across various disciplines such as materials science, bioengineering, organoids, mechanobiology, nanobiotechnology. Success in this project will reshape the design of future preclinical models to seriously reckon with species and sex of biomaterials and cells, moving towards personalised tissue models in the long term.
Dr Ahn is a Fellow at UCD Conway Institute and leads the Extracellular Matrix / Cell / Mechanobiology (ECM²) Lab at UCD, he said, “This ERC Starting Grant will lay the foundation for my group at UCD, following my recent appointment as Associate Professor in the School of Medicine in July 2024. The scale of the ERC Starting Grant will enable me to deepen a comprehensive understanding of genuine human pathophysiology and in vitro human tissue model, facilitating work with my UCD and international collaborators and progress to beyond the state-of-the-art. I believe that this project will provide a greatly-needed and versatile platform for drug discovery and therapeutic innovation, relevant to both academia and industry.”
For further information on the ERC grantees announced in this round of the competition, visit the ERC website .