ERC publications

The contribution of frontier research to the understanding of human mobility across frontiers

Computational and systems biology are interdisciplinary sciences that have been greatly advancing in the last decades by harnessing the increased power of computation and mathematics. Their aim is to apply large-scale computational and numerical methods to the fields of molecular, cellular and structural biology, in order to answer emerging biological questions that were not possible to tackle with traditional approaches. The foundations of these disciplines lie in computer science, applied mathematics, statistics, biochemistry, chemistry, biophysics, molecular biology, genetics, genomics, ecology, evolution, anatomy, neuroscience, visualization, animation, etc. In this context, thousands of researchers around the world work on a wide range of computational, analytical and theoretical methods, to study amongst others gene regulation, structure prediction, protein design, analysis of cell signaling and metabolic networks. They focus on the design, prediction and discovery of emergent properties of cells, tissues and organisms, on studying and modelling complex interactions within biological systems, on developing algorithms and databases, and on the use of advanced computing. To date, the European Research Council (ERC) has supported close to 350 projects in computational biology, systems biology, bioinformatics and biostatistics, representing more than EUR 700 million invested in these research areas. This brochure has been published on the occasion of the 25th International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology / 16th European Conference on Computational Biology, taking place from 21 to 25 July 2017 in Prague (Czech Republic).

The Workshop is intended to showcase relevant research on Climate Change and Climate Action supported by the ERC under Horizon 2020 and FP7, to provide a forum of networking between Principal Investigators leading ERC-funded projects, and to position ERC as a contributor to ‘climate action’ through its ‘bottom up’ approach.

Annual Report on the ERC activities and achievements in 2016

The European Research Council has supported more than 200 research projects so far focused on the study of the human past - history and archaeology. In this brochure, we are presenting a small selection of ERC-funded research in this domain showing the depth and breadth of the grantees’ scholarships.

The ERC will again take part in the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF), this time with President Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, Vice President Klaus Bock, Scientific Council members Dame Athene Donald and Thomas Jungwirth, as well as over 40 ERC grantees, of which more than 20 take part in nine ERC sessions. Discover them below. ESOF, held once every two years, is a showcase for excellent European science. The forum brings together over 4 500 leading thinkers, innovators, policy makers, journalists and educators from more than 90 countries, to discuss current and future breakthroughs in contemporary science.

Anthropology is a dynamic discipline that is rooted in the social sciences with strong ties to the humanities and the natural sciences. With its focus on lived realities and fine-grained ethnographic and comparative methods, anthropology is poised to make a substantive contribution to crucial questions about society, counterbalancing the abstract and numerical knowledge of cultural, political and societal transformations. Initially, anthropology has essentially been about doing ‘field research’ in remote places to record the material practices, ecological adaptation, marriage patterns, religious beliefs, and legal habits of ‘exotic’ cultures. However, contemporary anthropology has become much more than the study of ‘traditional’ societies. Today, cultures are regarded as informed and shaped by all sorts of global influences. It is this interaction between cultures that captures the focus of contemporary anthropologists. To date, the European Research Council (ERC) has supported close to 200 projects in anthropology and its manifold branches such as palaeoanthropology and anthropological linguistics, and ethnographies of emerging fields of study such as powerful elites, social movements, and larger entities like transnational corporations and state bureaucracies. This brochure has been published on the occasion of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) Inter-Congress, taking place from 4 to 9 May 2016 in Dubrovnik (Croatia).

2015 was a very fruitful year for the ERC, fulfilling its core mission to support ambitious projects proposed by scientists. Some of these will certainly result in ground-breaking research pushing ahead the frontiers of human knowledge, indispensable to open the way to radical innovations. This is key in the battle for keeping Europe an exciting place to be and strengthening its capacity to deal with the numerous challenges it has to come to grips with.

This summary report provides a general overview of the research landscape of the projects funded by the ERC in FP7 in the domains of life sciences, physical sciences and engineering, and social sciences and humanities. One interesting analysis in the report concerns how bottom-up research funded by the ERC contributes to particular European thematic policy priorities — the examples given are nanotechnology, energy, health and migration. Other analyses that could be envisaged include how the scientific content of projects varies along the career stage of researchers (i.e. Starting Grant/Consolidator Grant versus Advanced Grant grantees). The data could also be used to localise clusters of excellence in particular research fields at a European level. The possibilities are almost infinite and provide an exciting avenue for further exploration.

This report aims to provide an authoritative quantitative overview of the European Research Council (ERC) funding activities over the course of the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Union for research, technological development and demonstration activities 2007-2013 (FP7).