European Research Council (ERC)

The European Research Council (ERC), set up by the EU in 2007, is the premiere European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. 

It provides attractive and flexible funding to enable talented and creative individual researchers, with an emphasis on early stage researchers, and their teams to pursue the most promising avenues at the frontier of science.

The ERC operates on a “bottom-up” basis without predetermined priorities and its grants are open to individual researchers of any age, gender or nationality, and from any country in the world, who are working or moving to work in Europe.

The ERC grants are awarded through open competition to projects headed by starting and established researchers, irrespective of their origins, who are working or moving to work in Europe. The sole criterion for selection is scientific excellence. The aim here is to recognise the best ideas and confer status and visibility on the best brains in Europe, while also attracting talent from abroad.

The ERC represents 17% of the overall Horizon Europe budget, i.e € 16 billion (2021-2027). In 2021 €1.9 billion will be made available to allow some 1,000 top researchers to pursue frontier research. Since 2007, more than 12,000 projects and over 10,000 researchers have been selected for funding.

Read more about the different funding opportunities at the ERC website!