European Research Council (ERC)

About this programme

The European Research Council (ERC) awards grants, through a challenging European competition, for excellent scientific research across all fields, initiated/driven by investigators. It thus supports  ‘bottom-up’ research without predetermined priorities of a ground-breaking nature.

There are three types of grants which each support another phase in a researcher’s career, going from two years after the award of the PhD to an established research leader (Starting, Consolidator and Advanced grants). The Synergy grants address ambitious research problems with a group of two to four Principal Investigators (PIs) and their teams. The Proof of Concept grant is short-term complementary funding for recipients of the previous four main types of grants.

The 2024 work programme includes a call for each main frontier research grant, i.e. Starting, Consolidator, Advanced and Synergy Grant plus a call for complementary funding for ERC Principal Investigators, i.e. Proof of Concept Grant with two submission deadlines and a prize contest for the Public Engagement with Research award.

The 2025 work programme includes a call for each main frontier research grant, i.e. StartingConsolidatorAdvanced and Synergy Grant, plus a call for complementary funding for ERC Principal Investigators, i.e. the Proof of Concept Grant with two submission deadlines. The work programme contains also several other actions including public procurement, e.g. support to programme monitoring and evaluation, support to the Europe PMC initiative and assessment of the scientific impact of ERC-funded research.

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Your NCP contact for this programme

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Margot Beereboom

margot.beereboom@fwo.be

+32 2 550 15 76

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Testimonial

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ATHENA - Cybersecurity for the water sector

The ATHENA project addresses emerging risks for the water sector in operational technology created by digitalisation. The project responds to Digital Europe call DIGITAL-ECCC-2022-CYBER-03-UPTAKE-CYBERSOLUTIONS – Uptake op Innovative Cybersecurity Solutions. The project started in September 2023 and will run until November 2026. De Vlaamse Waterweg - The Flemish Waterway participates in the project to enhance the resilience of the organisation by co-developing targeted training modules for operational technology environments.