Funder: European Research Council
Due Dates (Anticipated): October 2027 (Starting Grant application deadline)
Funding Amounts: Up to €1.5 million over 5 years, plus up to €1 million additional funding (€2 million for eligible relocating investigators)
Summary: Supports early-career researchers establishing independent research programmes through ambitious frontier research in any field.
Key Information: Principal Investigators must devote at least 50% of working time to the project and 50% to EU or Associated Country work.
Description
The European Research Council’s Starting Grant supports excellent researchers starting, or having recently started, their own independent research team or programme. Funded through Horizon Europe and administered by the ERC Executive Agency, the scheme supports investigator-led frontier research across life sciences, physical sciences and engineering, and social sciences and humanities. It operates bottom-up, without predetermined scientific priorities, and welcomes interdisciplinary, pioneering and unconventional approaches.
Projects are led by a single Principal Investigator (PI), whose team may include researchers of any nationality, including members outside Europe. In fields where research is performed individually, the team may consist solely of the PI. Scientific excellence is the sole evaluation criterion, considering the project’s ground-breaking ambition alongside the investigator’s intellectual capacity, creativity and ability to execute the work.
