European Research Council (ERC)

The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe.

The ERC offers 4 core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants. With its additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees to explore the innovation potential of their ideas or research results.

The ERC is led by an independent governing body, the Scientific Council. Since 1 November 2021, Maria Leptin is the President of the ERC.
The overall ERC budget from 2021 to 2027 is more than €16 billion, as part of the Horizon Europe programme, under the responsibility of the European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation, Ekaterina Zaharieva.

The ERC's mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields, based on scientific excellence.

Key Figures

• Budget: € 16 billion (2021-2027) - 17% of the overall Horizon Europe budget
   
• Since 2007, ERC funded more than 16 000 projects and over 10 000 researchers. It evaluated more than 130 000 research proposals.
   
• Each ERC grantee employs on average 7 team members. Currently over 75 000 postdocs, PhD students and other staff are working in their research teams.
   
• ERC projects have so far led to over 2 200 patents and other IPR applications and ERC grantees founded or co-founded over 400 start-ups
   
• More than 200 000 articles published in scientific journals
   
• 14 Nobel Prizes, 7 Fields Medals, 11 Wolf Prizes and dozens of important prizes awarded to ERC grantees
   
• Over 850 research institutions are hosting ERC grantees who hold more than 97 nationalities