Direção de Projectos (DP)

Projects in the areas of optics and photonics, diagnostics and therapeutics, archaeology, culture and political history have received eight million euros from the European Research Council (ERC) for national institutions. The ERC will support five more national projects to be developed by researchers from the Champalimaud Foundation, INESC Microsistemas e Nanotecnologias, the University of Algarve and NOVA University.

With these results, research carried out in institutions of the National Science and Technology System (SNCT) has reached around 95 million euros and 73 projects coordinated at the ERC’s Calls since the start of Horizon Europe, the European funding framework program for research and innovation for the period 2021-2027.

Today, September 5, the projects selected for the Call ERC Starting Grant 2024, which aims to fund projects in all scientific fields and led by researchers at the beginning of their careers, enabling them to form their teams and develop their most promising ideas, were announced. In total, 494 projects were selected, totaling 780 million euros. Within this group, there are five projects by researchers working in Portugal, which have raised around 8 million euros. Also noteworthy is the recent approval of a national project in the context of the ERC Proof of Concept.

FCT coordinates national representation and participation in the European Research Council and, as reported at the Science 2024 Meeting, has been developing a series of new programs funded by the PRR covering the various cycles of national participation in the ERC’s Calls . The ERC-PT program stands out in its three aspects: Pre-Assessment, to support the national scientific community in preparing proposals (of which researcher Arturo Zoffmann, now selected by the ERC, was a beneficiary); ERC A-Projects, to fund national applications with top classifications not selected for funding by the ERC; and the new ERC-PT Careers, a new strand launched in July 2024, to attract and retain researchers with ERC projects.

Compared to the previous Call ERC Starting Grant, this Call has seen a 50% increase in national applications, the highest at European level in this edition. The ERC-PT Pre-assessment for the Call ERC Starting Grant 2025 is currently underway, with a total of 18 potential ERC applications being supported.

The five projects selected, three of them in the field of social sciences and humanities, for funding from Call ERC Starting Grant 2024 are:

• Andrada Savickas, from the Champalimaud Foundation, with the MicroMetSCAN project – “Revealing liver micrometastases in vivo using ultra-high definition MRI” (2 million euros), which aims to develop an ultra-high resolution magnetic resonance imaging method for the non-invasive detection and characterization of liver micrometastases, which could have a significant clinical impact on therapeutic planning and patient prognosis;
• Marco Piccardo, from INESC Microsistemas e Nanotecnologias, with the MetaPOWER project – “Space-Time and Vectorial Meta-Optics for High-Power Structured Laser-Matter Interactions” (1.5 million euros), which will enable the development of research in the field of photonics, with unique approaches to manipulating light in its various electromagnetic modes, with an impact on technological development in this area;
• Elisa Bandini, from the University of Algarve, with the PRIMERS project – “The cognitive primers of human culture: a comparative approach to the emergence of innovations” (1.5 million euros), which aims to address what makes human culture so different from that of other animals. The central idea of the project is to go beyond a view of culture that is based exclusively on human culture;
• Jonathan Reeves, from the University of Algarve, with the OLAF project – “Technologically mediated landscapes: Examining the adaptive benefit of the early Oldowan” (1.5 million euros), which will investigate the motivations of the first hominids to use sharp primitive tools, and their evolutionary benefits, around 2.6 million years ago;
• Arturo Zoffmann, from NOVA University, with the STEXEU project – “The Constitutional Road to Dictatorship: States of Exception and Authoritarianism in Europe, 1900-39″ (1.5 million euros), which aims to investigate the crisis of liberal states and the rise of authoritarianism in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, through the perspective of states of exception.

The project selected for funding at Call ERC Proof of Concept 2024 is led by Cláudia Santos (NOVA University), with the NEUROSHIELD project, “Novel small molecule activator of TGFβ-SMAD as attenuator of neuroinflammation in Parkinson’s Disease” (150,000 euros), and will develop a new therapy aimed at combating neuroinflammation in Parkinson’s disease, which is expected to lead to an improvement in patients’ quality of life.

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