ERC FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR RESEARCHERS AROUND THE WORLD
Wednesday, 21 October
13:05 – 13:55

MicroTAS 2026 attendees at all career stages who are interested in learning about the main funding opportunities provided by the European Research Council are welcome to attend this lunch session. The testimonies of grantees and panel members will be shared.

The ERC – European Research Council, established by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organization for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age to run projects based across Europe. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants. With its additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees bridge the gap between their pioneering research and the early phases of its commercialization. Most recently, a new scheme was introduced, the ERC Plus Grants scheme, which targets outstanding researchers of any nationality with bold ideas capable of opening entirely new avenues of research and generating transformative scientific advances.

The session will describe the features of the main funding schemes, their evaluation processes and provide some tips - but no tricks - to submit a winning proposal. The session will also include the participation of an ERC grantee and an ERC Panel Member, who will share their experiences of the journey leading to the submission of a successful proposal and the challenges of proposal peer-review assessment.

The session will be delivered in an informal and interactive manner, allowing attendees to address questions directly to an ERC grantee and an ERC Panel Member. In this lunch session, lunch boxes will be available.

Speakers

Roisin Owens, University of Cambridge, UK
Arken Merkoçi, Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, SPAIN
Telma Carvalho, European Research Council Executive Agency (ERC), BELGIUM