Two ERC Starting Grants at EPFL School of Basic Sciences

The ERC Starting Grants support talented early-career researchers who are ready to launch independent projects and build or grow their first research teams.. In 2025, the ERC awarded a total of €761 million in Starting Grants to researchers across Europe, supporting groundbreaking projects in fields ranging from cancer research to quantum science.

Two researchers from EPFL's School of Basic Sciences have been awarded prestigious Starting Grants this year: Guillermina Ramirez-San-Juan and Sascha Feldmann.

Professor Guillermina Ramirez-San-Juan leads EPFL’s Living Patterns Laboratory. Her ERC Starting Grant project, XtrmCells, investigates centrin, an understudied cytoskeletal protein that drives ultrafast cell shape changes in unicellular organisms. By uncovering how centrin networks assemble and generate mechanical forces, the project aims to reveal new principles of self-organization and cell mechanics. The impact of XtrmCells will be interdisciplinary advancing fundamental cell biology and active matter physics, uncovering design principles of novel materials capable of withstanding large strains and undergoing extreme elastic deformations.

Professor Sascha Feldmann, at EPFL’s Laboratory for Energy Materials, has received an ERC Starting Grant for his project MACHIRO. The project will pioneer a new ultrafast polarization microscope to study chiral semiconductors, which are materials that could dramatically enhance the efficiency of LED displays and enable room-temperature quantum technologies. Feldmann’s team will use this powerful tool to map how symmetry, dimensionality, and defects influence light emission and electron spin. The results could guide the design of next-generation materials for energy-efficient displays, solar cells, quantum networks, and advanced imaging technologies.