ERC grants analysis reveals research strengths of European countries

A map of grants awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) over a seven-year period has revealed several hot spots that have benefited most from the funding.

The analysis of more than 6,700 projects funded between 2014 and 2020 found that UK-based researchers were the most successful, winning 18 per cent of the total, followed by Germany and France on 17 and 11 per cent, respectively. 

Disciplinary strengths vary among countries, with the UK and the Netherlands hosting 40 per cent of social science and humanities projects and France hosting 21 per cent of all those for mathematics. 

Researchers based in Germany won a quarter of all molecular biology grants, while Israel won 15 per cent of omics grants, well above its 5 per cent overall share from the funder. 

But ERC president Maria Leptin told Times Higher Education the funder’s outlay on projects, €13.3 billion (£11.2 billion) over the time period analysed, was “a drop in the ocean” compared with overall European funding. 

“I cannot emphasise enough that national governments have to do their own bit,” she said. “Young people in the countries need to be trained to do basic research and that’s done by the researchers in the country. They can't all send them to ERC researchers' labs.” 

Dirk Inzé, the member of the ERC’s executive council who led the analysis, told THE that domestic funding “can help young researchers to make this next step in order to make their research ERC level”. 

Despite being entirely led by applicants’ own ideas, ERC projects were shown to still contribute to the EU’s political goals, according to the funder’s own analysis of project topics, with a third likely to be useful for the bloc’s health agenda and 14 per cent relevant to climate change. 

“This report refutes again the view that you have to tell researchers what to do because otherwise they’ll never get down to practical matters and urgent problems. Nothing is further from the truth,” said Professor Leptin. 

While the UK may have topped ERC grantees during the period that covered the last EU funding programme, Horizon 2020, researchers elsewhere in Europe are already benefitting from its exclusion from the successor programme, Horizon Europe. 

Professor Leptin said the funder was in the process of reallocating funds from grants that UK-based winners could not take up because of the country’s ongoing freeze-out from the programme due to Brexit. 

An ERC spokesman told THE in June that 143 UK-based winners had not yet transferred their planned projects to an eligible host institution within the EU.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com