Direção de Projectos (DP)

The European Research Council (ERC, in English) announced today, January 31, the projects selected in the Call awarding of Consolidator Grants, funding for projects proposed by researchers with 7 to 12 years of postdoctoral experience, among which there are three projects of researchers to develop their activity in Portugal. Each one will be financed with around 2 million Euros, for a total of 5.7 million Euros. At Call, a project led by a Portuguese researcher developing her research in France was also funded.

The three winners developing research in Portugal are: Susana Viegas, from the Philosophy Institute of Nova (IFILNOVA), leading a project in the area of social sciences and humanities entitled “Film-Philosophy as a Meditation on Death”, which aims to study the ways in which death and time are connected in cinema, questioning the usual anthropocentric definitions of death; André Martins, from the Instituto de Telecomunicações, Técnico Lisboa, with a project in the area of exact sciences and engineering entitled “DEep COgnition Learning for LAnguage GEneration”, which addresses an important challenge in the area of artificial intelligence, namely how to go beyond large language models, also called foundational models.; and Eugenia Chiappe, from the Champalimaud Foundation’s Laboratory for Sensorimotor Integration, who, with the project “Neural Circuits for Error Correction”, in the area of life and health sciences, will explore how interconnected circuits such as vision, brain and spinal cord can play a crucial role in the control of locomotion, namely in the correction of errors associated with it.

The Portuguese researcher Liliana Mancio-Silva, developing research at the Institut Pasteur and INSERM in France, won a Consolidator Grant with the project “Mechanisms of dormancy, activation and sexual conversion in pre-erythrocytic malaria parasites“, in the area of life and health sciences, which focuses on understanding the parasite’s biology, ways to control the disease and malaria transmission. This project reflects Liliana Mancio-Silva’s long-standing interest in malaria research, with a background at the João Lobo Antunes Institute of Molecular Medicine in Lisbon.

In late December 2022, the ERC announced the final lists of all researchers who were funded under the Calls of the 2021 Work Program, including all those who had initially been placed on reserve lists and were subsequently selected for funding.

So far, research carried out in SNCT institutions has about 49 million euros raised at Calls of the European Research Council since the start of Horizon Europe (2021-2027), the European funding framework program for research and innovation.