Two life sciences ERC Starting Grants at EPFL
Milena Schuhmacher and Gioele La Manno. Credit: EPFL
Milena Schuhmacher and Gioele La Manno at EPFL’s School of Life Sciences have received European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants. Former EPFL researcher Can Aztekin (now at Max Planck), is also among the winners.
The ERC Starting Grants support talented early-career researchers who are ready to launch independent projects and build their first research teams. Each grant provides up to €1.5 million over five years. 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 Life Sciences have been awarded Starting Grants: Milena Schuhmacher and Gioele La Manno.
Milena Schuhmacher, an ELISR fellow, leads the Laboratory of Chemical and Membrane Biology. Her ERC Starting Grant project, Subcellular Lipid Atlas: Decoding Organelle Identity with Targeted Lipid Profiling (LipID), focuses on lipids as key markers of organelle identity. While vital for cellular function, the precise composition and dynamics of lipids remain poorly understood. Schuhmacher’s team will design innovative lipid probes to chart organelle-specific lipidomes with unprecedented resolution. These maps promise fresh insights into basic cell biology and could shed light on diseases tied to organelle dysfunction, including fatty liver disease, cardiovascular disorders, and lipid storage syndromes.
Gioele La Manno directs the Laboratory of Brain Development and Biological Data Science at EPFL. His ERC Starting Grant project, Cell decision capture and control via joint Raman live and omics profiling (MOVIOLA), will explore how neural progenitors make fate decisions in the developing nervous system. The project combines live-cell Raman spectrometry, omics profiling, and inducible degrons to capture and even steer moments of decision-making—like a film-editing machine that can rewind a cell to its choice point, profile the determinants, and alter the outcome. With MOVIOLA, La Manno’s team aims to uncover deterministic mechanisms of neural specification, improving in vitro models and informing future therapies for neurodegenerative and blinding diseases.
An ERC Starting Grant has also been awarded to former EPFL researcher Can Aztekin, previously an ELISR fellow and now head of the Aztekin Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen and the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory. His project, Signal to Regeneration (SigReg), will investigate how regenerative signaling center cell types function and interact in mammals.