Nako Nakatsuka and Zhengmao Lu win ERC Starting Grants
Nako Nakatsuka and Zhengmao Lu. 2025 EPFL CC BY SA
The European Research Council (ERC) has selected 478 early-career researchers across Europe to receive this year’s Starting Grants, including EPFL School of Engineering professors Nako Nakatsuka and Zhengmao Lu.
The ERC announced on Thursday that the 2025 Starting Grants amount to a total funding of €761 million. Seven EPFL researchers were selected, including Nako Nakatsuka and Zhengmao Lu in the School of Engineering.
Starting Grants amount to €1.5 million for a period of up to five years, and support excellent research across diverse fields, including physical sciences and engineering, life sciences, and social sciences and humanities. The backing will help researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch their own projects, build research teams and pursue their most promising ideas.
See the full list of winners and statistics.
Nako Nakatsuka of the Laboratory of Chemical Nanotechnology for the project, Approaching Synapses with Nanoscale Aptamer-Based Biosensors.
Zhengmao Lu of the Energy Transport Advances Lab for the project, Demystifying interface accommodation coefficients in liquid-vapor phase change devices: role of surface charge, contaminant, and confinement.
The ERC noted its press release that statistics and list of successful candidates are provisional. The European Commission and the Swiss Government have successfully concluded negotiations on the association of Switzerland to Horizon Europe and the signature of the agreement is expected to take place in 2025. If the association agreement has not yet come into force by the date of the signature of the grant agreement, applicants with Swiss host institutions will be given the possibility to transfer their proposal to an eligible host institution in an EU Member State or in an associated country.