The results of the 2025 European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept (PoC) Grant call  (second deadline date 18 September 2025) were published. Principal Investigators (PIs) with a main ERC Grant that is ongoing or ended after 1 January 2024 are eligible to participate in an ERC 2025 PoC Grant. The ERC PoC Grants aim at facilitating exploration of the commercial and social innovation potential of ERC funded research and are therefore available only to PIs whose proposals draw substantially on their ERC funded research.

For this second call in total 136 ERC PoC Grants were awarded to PIs working in 23 different countries across Europe. In the ERCEA news article more background on the evaluation results, the full list of winning projects (deadline 1 plus 2) and several project examples are highlighted. Among the 136 selected researchers are five based at Flemish host institutions. The projects of several PIs are presented in the news articles of Universiteit Gent (web article), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Linkedin post) and Universiteit Antwerpen (web article). This brings the total of grants for Flanders to 11 for the 2025 PoC call (deadline 1 plus 2).

Sara BALS, Universiteit Antwerpen, “SEEBIC - Secondary-Electron Imaging through Electron-Beam-Induced Current: a Fast and Easy Approach for 3-Dimensional Characterisation of Nanoparticles” which builds on research funded by the 2018 Consolidator Grant “REALNANO - 3D Structure of Nanomaterials under Realistic Conditions” and is the fifth ERC Grant awarded to her (1 Starting, 1 Consolidator, 1 Synergy and 2 Proof of Concept Grant).

Kristof COOLS, Universiteit Gent, “TDBEAST - Time-Domain Boundary Element Analysis and Simulation Toolkit” which builds on research funded by the 2020 Consolidator Grant “BET3D -March-on-in-Time: Boundary Element Time-Domain Domain Decomposition Methods”.

Michiel DUSSELIER, KU Leuven, “R-U-ZEALOUS - Reactor for Upscaling ZEolite Assembly Leveraged On Unique Stirrers” which builds on research funded by the 2020 Starting Grant “Z-EURECA - ZEolite synthesis in Unusual Reactors for Enhanced Catalysts”.

Kiavash MOVAHEDI, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, “PERTURB-Flow - In vivo PERTURB-Flow: high-throughput single-cell perturbation screening for macrophage target discovery” which builds on research funded by the 2022 Consolidator Grant “ReplaceMi - Microglia engineering and replacement to treat brain disease”.

Marian VERHELST, KU Leuven, “AigenTech - A Hardware-Aware AI Execution Framework for Edge AI Accelerators” which builds on research funded by the 2022 Consolidator Grant BINGO - Outplaying the hardware lottery for embedded AI and is the third ERC Grant awarded to her (1 Starting, 1 Consolidator and 1 Proof of Concept Grant).