EU announces first H2020-funded ERA chairs
13 universities, technical institutes and private organisations from EU member states with a high potential for research excellence are to receive up to €2.5m each in EU funding to boost their research capacity through the appointment of ‘ERA Chairs’.
The financing, provided from the European Commission under Horizon 2020, will enable the institutions to attract top academics so that they can compete with centres of excellence elsewhere in the European Research Area. The new chairs will be located in Estonia, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland, Portugal and Romania and 88 proposals were submitted for evaluation.
Commenting, Carlos Moedas, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, said: “To make European research the best in the world, we need to unlock the potential in all parts of Europe. With the new ERA chairs we are helping promising regions attract the best research talent and strengthen their standing as research excellence centres.”
The aim of the ERA Chairs scheme is to bridge Europe’s innovation divide between low and high-research performing countries. Once recruited, the ERA Chairs and their teams will perform research in a wide spectrum of scientific fields, including solar thermal energy, supramolecular chemistry, clinical genomics or educational innovation.
15 EU member states are eligible to host ERA Chairs, namely all countries joining the Union after 2004, plus Portugal and Luxembourg; eight of the non-EU countries associated to Horizon 2020 can also benefit from the scheme. Last year, the Commission announced the funding of 11 ERA Chairs as part of a pilot call under FP7.
