Congratulations to our ERC grants awardees
© 2012 EPFL
This year, among the eleven EPFL “Starting Grants,” four of the prestigious grants were awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) to some SV promising young scientists.
Eleven young EPFL professors have just been awarded European Research Council (ERC) grants. This is the ninth year that these “Starting Grants,” specifically awarded to researchers who have earned their PhDs within the past 12 years, have been given out. “Advanced Grants” for more senior researchers will be the subject of a separate call for proposals later in the year.
This new crop of awards cements EPFL’s reputation as successful in obtaining this important source of funding. The School leads Switzerland, ahead of ETH Zurich with eight grants, and in third place in Europe behind Cambridge and Oxford Universities in the UK.
“Twenty four projects were submitted form EPFL in this round, representing a nearly 50% success rate; the average for a good university, however, is more on the order of 15%,” says Luciana Vaccaro, head of EPFL’s Grants Office. “Ever since these grants were first awarded in 2007, we have always been well represented; but this is our best year yet.”
Four winning women
In particular, women have never been better represented, with four women professors winning grants. In addition, among the projects, four are from the life sciences, demonstrating that EPFL is firmly ensconced in the current ascendancy in this area of research, only ten years after the creation of its School of Life Sciences. And for the first time, an ERC grant has been awarded to a researcher from EPFL’s College of Management of Technology (CDM).
The ERC grants are the foundation of the “Ideas” programme, part of the EU’s seventh framework programme, with the goal of not only encouraging research of exceptional quality, but also novel and innovative ideas. In practical terms, they provide funding up to €2 million over five years. “For young scientists, winning an ERC grant is a guarantee that they will be able to conduct their research uninterrupted, over a long period of time,” says Vaccaro. “These grants are also increasingly considered as a career advancement, like a prestigious prize.”
Four of the 2012 ERC awardees are homed at the EPFL Schol of Life Sciences
- Melanie Blokesch, School of Life Sciences (Global Health Institute), assistant professor in the Laboratory of Molecular Microbiology, will investigate the associations between V. cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera, and marine invertebrates, to show that virulence determinants of the disease in humans are also critical for colonization of these environmental hosts.
- Nicola Harris, School of Life Sciences (Global Health Institute), assistant professor in the Laboratory of Intestinal Immunology, will study the interactions between intestinal helminth (a class of parasitic worms) infection and intestinal bacterial communities, and the implications this has for human health.
- Jeffrey Jensen, School of Life Sciences (Interfaculty Institute of Bioengineering), will develop the theory and methodology to identify adaptively evolving regions on the genome as well as estimate whole-genome rates of adaptive evolution.
- Matthias Lutolf,School of Life Sciences (Interfaculty Institute of Bioengineering), assistant professor in the Laboratory of Stem Cell Bioengineering, will develop a new in vitro bone marrow model to recreate how bone marrow regulates the functionality and fate of hematopoietic stem cells (the precursors of all blood cell types).