ERC awards €761M to the next generation of scientists in Europe

The European Research Council (ERC) has selected 478 early-career researchers across Europe to receive this year’s Starting Grants. With a total funding of €761 million, these grants support excellent research across diverse fields, including physical

European Research Council

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Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation, said:

‘Among the winners in this new round of EU funding are researchers of 51 nationalities. They will be advancing knowledge across a wide range of scientific fields, including cancer, mental health and quantum science. We see leading scientists coming to Europe with these new grants, and many choosing to remain here thanks to this support. This demonstrates Europe’s potential to attract and keep top scientific talent.’

President of the European Research Council Prof. Maria Leptin said:

‘All these bright minds and the plethora of brilliant ideas that they will go after really inspire me, and so does their scientific creativity. It also gives hope that Europe empowers them and backs them. Yet, we could do more! Only 12% of all proposals in this competition are being funded, even if many more are excellent. More investment in this type of science is needed for Europe to reach its full potential.’

Projects selected for funding

As part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, these ERC grants will help researchers make discoveries across a wide range of fields. The grantees include a researcher in the Netherlands exploring new ways to make artificial touch feel more natural and realistic; an Austria-based scientist investigating how aging reshapes human tissues and triggers disease; a researcher in Estonia studying whether attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults mirrors childhood ADHD; and another scientist, based in Spain, examining how plants protect themselves from excessive sun exposure.

These are just some examples of the research that the new grantees will conduct.

Facts and figures

The successful candidates plan to carry out their projects at universities and research centres across 25 countries, including Germany (99 grants), the UK (60), the Netherlands (44), and France (41). They come from Europe and beyond, with 51 different nationalities amongst the grantees, notably Germans (87 researchers), Italians (55), French (33), and UK and Spanish researchers (32 each). This competition attracted 3,928 proposals, marking a 13% increase in demand from last year’s Starting Grant call. Just over 12% of the proposals will be funded.

The number of women grantees remain fairly stable with 42% female winners in this year’s Starting Grants, and 44% in 2024, and 43% in 2023. A Starting Grant amounts to €1.5 million for a period of up to five years. However, additional funds can be made available to cover costs related to moving from a country outside the EU or associated countries, purchasing major equipment or the access to large facilities, or major experimental and fieldwork-related costs.

This round of grants is estimated to create some 3,000 jobs within the teams of the new grantees.

See more statistics and the full list of winners.

Applicants based in Switzerland

The 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 not be eligible to receive funding. In that case, if the signature of the association agreement is not imminent, the applicants will be given the possibility to transfer their proposal to an eligible host institution in an EU Member State or in an associated country.  

About the 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 four 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 bridge the gap between their pioneering research and early phases of its commercialisation. The ERC is led by an independent governing body, the Scientific Council. Maria Leptin has been the President of the ERC since November 2021. The overall ERC budget from 2021 to 2027 is more than €16 billion, as part of the Horizon Europe programme, which is under the responsibility of Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation. 

 

U-M awarded $15 million NSF grant to transform the science of natural hazards

University of Michigan

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image: 

University of Michigan researchers and collaborators from across the U.S. are working to better understand the linked hazards that follow events like earthquakes and wildfires to build resilience to these downstream dangers.

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Credit: Image courtesy: CLaSH

ANN ARBOR—The University of Michigan, in collaboration with more than a dozen academic, governmental and community partners across the country, will launch the Center for Land Surface Hazards.

CLaSH is a new center aimed at advancing research on the fundamental science processes that cause landsliding, river erosion, debris flows and flooding.      

When hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes or other natural disasters tear through communities, the change they wreak upon the landscape can trigger other disastrous events such as landslides and flooding. But it has been difficult to predict how these events connect to one another, with what intensity and for how long the domino effect of related hazards, called cascading land surface hazards, will occur.

CLaSH will address this challenge in hazards research by developing new scientific frameworks and modeling tools to forecast and mitigate cascading hazards. The center, directed by Marin Clark, a professor in the U-M Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, also plans to focus on programs that broaden and grow a workforce of experts in land surface hazards as well as foster community engagement in the interest of national welfare, especially in communities most affected by land surface hazards.

CLaSH will be funded by a five-year, $15 million grant from the Centers for Innovation and Community Engagement in Solid Earth Geohazards program at the U.S. National Science Foundation, and will be housed in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, part of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at U-M. 

"What's new about our center is that we're not just looking at a single hazard phenomenon. We're really looking at a series of processes that create land surface hazards and how they link together," said Clark, principal investigator of the center. 

"Hazards are increasing and they're increasing at an alarming rate. But unlike earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, which happen only in certain areas, land surface hazards happen everywhere, in all 50 states, and they have happened here in Michigan. They can also continue for years to decades, so it's important for the health of society to be more prepared for these types of common hazards."

For example, Hurricane Helene's landfall in 2024 generated widespread landsliding and mudflows throughout North Carolina. That caused sediment to move into river channels, which may change the flood risk in 2025 and following years. The CLaSH scientists want to be able to forecast where new flooding might occur and how long those hazards persist.

Additionally, Clark says, human populations are growing, causing urban areas to expand, pushing people into more rural locations where they may be more exposed to these cascading hazards. Relying on the various expertise of partner geoscientists, climate scientists, engineers, technicians, graduate students and undergraduate students will amplify the center's ability to understand when and where these events might occur, how they impact communities and how communities can recover after experiencing a catastrophe.

"By bringing together a team of scientists and engineers across disciplines, we can link fundamental Earth-surface processes to hazards in ways that no single investigator could accomplish alone," said co-principal investigator Brian Yanites, associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Indiana University, who studies river systems and their associated hazards, including how floods, sediment movement and channel change interact with landslides and other land surface processes.

Dimitrios Zekkos, geotechnical engineer with expertise in soil and rock mechanics as well as infrastructure resiliency against natural disasters, is a co-principal investigator and a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. 

"Recent technological advances in remote sensing, robots and sensors provide an unprecedented opportunity to monitor the geologic processes in a way that was completely impossible only a few years ago," Zekkos said. "These advances paired with new computational tools such as artificial intelligence and regional geologic process simulations provide a truly unprecedented opportunity to advance our scientific understanding of how geologic processes are coupled and lead to geohazard cascades."

CLaSH will also provide workforce programs to help educate the next generation of scientists, including outreach into communities most impacted by land surface hazards. Within these communities, the center hopes to implement programs that set the foundation for future hazard research as well as translating that knowledge into action to improve disaster preparation and response. To do this, the center will provide training for instructors at two-year community colleges and undergraduate institutions as well as concentrating on public outreach.

"CLaSH offers us an opportunity to build a research community that crosses disciplinary silos and confronts the complexity of interconnected hazards, while raising public awareness at the same time," said Josh West, co-principal investigator and professor of earth sciences and environmental studies at the University of Southern California. 

"Additional advances in technology, such as the increased availability of satellite imagery, drones and sensors, put us in a really exciting position to make headway in understanding these hazard cascades."

Josh Roering, professor of earth sciences at the University of Oregon, studies processes that shape hillslopes, including weathering, erosion, soil formation and landslide processes.

"This new center is so exciting because it recognizes how surface hazards are increasing in frequency and impact," he said. "By bringing together a community of scholars to study these surface hazards, we will improve our knowledge and more importantly help translate that knowledge to reduce risk and improve public safety."

The proposal for the new fully fledged center was developed as a part of a previously funded two-year award from the NSF for a Center Catalyst in 2022 and was supported by Jill Jividen and Adrianna Trusiak in the Research Development and Proposal Services unit of the U-M Office for Vice President of Research.

The center includes 17 funded partner organizations, including universities, government organizations and tribal partners as well as dozens of other U.S. and international collaborations with a variety of academic, government, nonprofit and business organizations.

Giving food waste fermentation a ‘jolt’ increases chemical production

Electricity, bioreactor, 2-bacteria system also yields hydrogen gas

Ohio State University

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COLUMBUS, Ohio – Adding an electrical jolt to fermentation of industrial food waste speeds up the process and increases the yield of platform chemicals that are valuable components in a wide range of products, new research shows.

In developing the new system, researchers at The Ohio State University also discovered that combining two bacterial species in the electro-fermentation mix not only helped accelerate the process, but allowed for more targeted chemical production.

In this study, the food waste consisted of ice cream and sour cream – but the team has expanded the work with experiments using coffee grounds and lake algae.

Eventual adoption of the technology could reap many benefits: efficient, sustainable and cost-effective production of multipurpose chemicals using source materials that would otherwise end up incinerated or in a landfill, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.

“We are creating an industry from another industry’s waste,” said first author Beenish Saba, a research scientist in food, agricultural and biological engineering at Ohio State.

“We’re making use of waste that a contractor charges businesses to take to a landfill, where it produces methane gas. We are suggesting that industries can put up a simple bioreactor in which they can produce other important byproducts.”

The study was published recently in the Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering.

This work builds upon previous waste valorization research done by Saba and Katrina Cornish, professor emerita of horticulture and crop science and food, agricultural and biological engineering at Ohio State and a co-lead author of the current study. 

The valorization work involved analysis of physical and chemical properties of 46 food waste samples to identify good candidates for conversion to chemicals and biogases through a variety of processes – including fermentation.

In the new study, Saba and colleagues compared the output and duration of conventional fermentation and electro-fermentation. Conventional practices consist of placing food waste and bacteria in a bottle, adjusting nutrient levels and incubating the materials at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Electro-fermentation is accomplished at room temperature inside a bioreactor outfitted with an electrode powered by minimal external voltage.

“In conventional fermentation, the bacteria are happily growing and they will produce some solvents and gases,” Saba said. “In the second step, we gave them a little tingling electricity so the bacteria can feel a little irritation, and the metabolism was fast. They were growing and happily eating, and they produced more byproducts – meaning we can increase the yield.”

There was another bonus to development of this new microbial electrochemical system: production of hydrogen gas.

Experiments showed that combining two bacterial species from the Clostridium family contributed to hydrogen gas production while also reducing fermentation waste – it is known that the commonly used species C. bijerinckii generates carbon dioxide while converting food waste into alcohols, but it turns out another species, C. carboxidivorans, consumes that CO2.

“It means the waste product of one bacteria is utilized by the other bacteria,” Saba said. “It was possible that there could have been an antagonistic relationship, but we tested growing them together and found there’s a synergistic relationship between these two bacteria that works well.”

And in addition to consuming the CO2, C. carboxidivorans produces hydrogen gas and solvents.

“Carbon dioxide is still there, but most of it is consumed, and it gives us hydrogen gas – an additional product. We now we have two valuable products and one waste product,” she said.

The work dovetails with an increased focus on using food waste and agricultural residue to create biobased products, Saba said.

“We are working on improving the yield, cost efficiency and scalability,” she said. “The government is asking for work in this area and industry is interested in getting value from waste and not paying for its disposal.

“So much material that is agricultural or biological in nature is just going to waste. It’s much better to utilize them and make valuable products.”

This research was supported by the Ohio State President’s Research Excellence-Catalyst program funding and the Ohio Water Development Authority.

Additional co-authors were Stephen Akinola, Ann Christy and Thaddeus Ezeji, all of Ohio State.

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Contact: Beenish Saba, Saba.20@osu.edu

Written by Emily Caldwell, Caldwell.151@osu.edu; 614-292-8152 

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Journal

Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering

DOI

10.1016/j.jece.2025.117732 

Article Title

Biomanufacturing of early platform chemicals from industrial processing food waste using mono- and co-culture electrofermentation

Study reveals caffeine may undermine blood transfusion effectiveness

Genetic factors could help personalize donor selection

University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

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AURORA, Colo. (September 4, 2025) – A new study from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus has found that caffeine, the world’s most consumed psychoactive substances, may impair the quality of donated blood and reduce the effectiveness of transfusions – especially in recipients whose red blood cell (RBC) metabolism is influenced by a common genetic variant.

“We’ve long understood caffeine’s effects on the brain and central nervous system, but this is the first large-scale study to demonstrate its impact on RBC biology,” said Angelo D’Alessandro, PhD, professor of biochemistry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and study senior author. “These findings suggest that something as common as your morning cup of coffee could have important implications for the quality of stored blood and how well it works when transfused into patients.”

Published today in Haematologica by researchers involved in the REDS RBC-Omics study, which analyzed samples from over 13,000 blood donors, the study reveals that higher levels of caffeine in the blood are linked to RBCs that are more prone to damage during storage and less effective after transfusion. In a clinical setting, transfusions of RBCs with relatively high levels of caffeine resulted in lower increases in patients’ hemoglobin levels and greater signs of RBC breakdown (hemolysis).

These negative effects were especially pronounced in transfusion recipients and blood donors carrying common variants in the ADORA2b gene, which regulates how RBCs function under low-oxygen conditions. The findings open the door to a new, more individualized approach to blood transfusion that takes into account not just blood type, but lifestyle factors and genetic traits that influence red blood cell quality.

“The translational implications of our findings are significant,” said D’Alessandro.“First, donor caffeine consumption, a common dietary exposure for up to 75% of Americans, emerges as a modifiable behavioral factor potentially influencing RBC storage quality and transfusion outcomes.

“Given caffeine's short biological half-life, transient dietary modifications around the time of blood donation might mitigate its negative impact, aligning with blood donation guidelines in several European countries where donors are advised to limit caffeine intake prior to donation. Conversely, in other regions, such as the United States or Italy, caffeine consumption before blood donation is not actively discouraged and may even be implicitly encouraged due to its known beneficial acute effects on blood pressure, potentially expediting the donation process and reducing vasovagal reactions.

“Indeed, moderate caffeine intake can transiently increase donor blood pressure and vascular tone, facilitating venous access and blood withdrawal efficiency. However, this advantage must be balanced against caffeine’s mild diuretic properties, which may predispose donors to dehydration—an established risk-factor for adverse donation-related events and poorer blood flow during collection.”

This study may also help explain the well-documented performance-enhancing effects of caffeine in exercise and sports. Caffeine increases oxidative stress in red blood cells by two distinct mechanisms: it blocks activation of the ADORA2B receptor and inhibits glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD), a rate-limiting enzyme in the antioxidant pentose phosphate pathway. Both actions can elevate oxidative stress, which—paradoxically—may promote physiological adaptation. Exercise itself triggers the production of reactive oxygen species, and a controlled increase in oxidative stress is thought to drive beneficial training responses.

“Interestingly, we recently discovered that mice with G6PD deficiency showed improved exercise tolerance,” said Travis Nemkov, PhD, co-author and associate professor of biochemistry. “These findings illustrate how insights from transfusion medicine can inform our understanding of exercise physiology and broader aspects of human health.”

 

About the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus is a world-class medical destination at the forefront of transformative science, medicine, education and patient care. The campus encompasses the University of Colorado health professional schools, more than 60 centers and institutes and two nationally ranked independent hospitals - UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital and Children's Hospital Colorado – which see more than two million adult and pediatric patient visits yearly. Innovative, interconnected and highly collaborative, the CU Anschutz Medical Campus delivers life-changing treatments, patient care and professional training and conducts world-renowned research fueled by $910 million in annual research funding, including $757 million in sponsored awards and $153 million in philanthropic gifts. 

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Journal

Haematologica

DOI

10.3324/haematol.2025.288332 

 

One dose of penicillin is as effective as standard three doses in treating early syphilis, according to UAB-led study

University of Alabama at Birmingham

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The number of syphilis cases is on the rise, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC-recommended treatment for early syphilis is one dose of benzathine penicillin G, but there is debate among clinicians about whether three weekly doses are needed, particularly among persons with HIV. Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting one dose of BPG is as effective as the three-injection regimen at treating early syphilis. The National Institutes of Health funded the research. 

“These results will help physicians simplify the treatment of syphilis for patients and reduce the time and inconvenience associated with multiple injections of penicillin administered in the past,” said Edward Hook III, M.D., lead author of the study and a professor of medicine and epidemiology in the UAB Division of Infectious Diseases.   

Syphilis is an acute and chronic human bacterial sexually transmitted infection (caused by Treponema pallidum) that has been recognized as a threat to human health for centuries. In 2023, the United States reported more than 209,000 cases of syphilis — the greatest number of cases reported since 1950 — and 3,882 cases of congenital syphilis. Without treatment, syphilis can result in neurological and organ damage, as well as adverse pregnancy outcomes and congenital abnormalities. Syphilis can also increase a person’s likelihood of acquiring or transmitting HIV. While BPG has been used as a primary treatment for syphilis for decades, treatment with BPG has been hampered by stock-outs and periodic shortages. 

“We are living in era of unreliable stock of the BPG drug supply to treat syphilis, which has led to the use of alternative therapies that may not be as effective,” said Jodie Dionne, M.D., associate professor of medicine and co-author of the paper. “Now that we know one dose of the drug is just as effective as three doses, this helps extend our local and national drug supply to treat as many people as we can.” 

The study, which was open to anyone with early syphilis, enrolled 249 persons at 10 sites across the United States. Ninety-seven percent of participants were men, 62 percent were Black, and 64 percent were living with HIV infection. According to the study authors, these findings provide substantial evidence that the current treatment guidelines of treating early syphilis with a single dose of penicillin is as effective as the three-injection method.

Read the full study here.

 

 

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Journal

New England Journal of Medicine

DOI

10.1056/NEJMoa2401802 

Method of Research

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

One Dose versus Three Doses of Benzathine Penicillin G in Early Syphilis

Article Publication Date

3-Sep-2025