ERC achievement report released
The annual report on the European Research Council’s activities and achievements in 2013 has been released.
Professor Helga Nowotny, the former ERC president, said that in 2013, “evaluation and granting procedures continued to run smoothly” and highlighted that the ERC ran four major calls in one year for the first time. Starting, Consolidator, Advanced, and Synergy Grant calls amounted to €1.7bn and the organisation awarded 900 grants to approximately 300 institutions across Europe. The Proof of Concept call ran twice.
Nowotny said: “Thanks to the successful public support from the European research community, Horizon 2020 is the only line in the overall EU budget that can claim real growth.”
In response to the 2013 calls for Starting, Consolidator and Advanced Grants, the ERC received a total of 9,410 proposals, representing an average 34% increase compared to 2012 (48% increase for Starting/Consolidator and 4% increase for Advanced Grant). Some 9,222 proposals were finally evaluated, divided as usual into 25 different evaluation panels per call, involving almost 1,000 panel reviewers and more than 5,000 external reviewers.
In response to the second Synergy Grant call, launched in October 2012, just under 450 applications were submitted in 2013. After a two-step evaluation procedure specifically designed for this purpose, 13 projects were selected for funding and share a total of €150m. The projects will receive funding of up to €15m each for the next six years. Each project brings together two to four outstanding researchers, which means that 45 scientists based in 11 countries are supported through these grants.
