LERU welcomes Bourguignon as new ERC President
The League of European Research Universities (LERU) has congratulated Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon on his appointment as the new president of the European Research Council (ERC), Europe’s premiere funding agency for frontier research.
After an extensive search process, the European Commission appointed the French mathematician to succeed Professor Helga Nowotny, who has served as ERC President since 2010. Bourguignon has been the head of the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies in France for 19 years.
LERU said that the professor’s career in science and international leadership experience makes him well placed to take the helm at the ERC. The league said his international experience in particular will serve him well as ERC President since the agency has recently embarked on a mission to attract more grantees from outside the EU.
A key challenge for the new president will be to maintain the ERC’s track record of funding investigator-driven research with excellence as the over-riding criterion in the face of changing research conditions and in transitioning to the new Horizon 2020 programme and a new European Commission and Parliament.
Bourguignon’s term of office will begin on 1 January 2014.
