Prof Aisling Ní Annaidh. Image: Vincent Hoban
Viking history, legal parenthood, refugee law and breast reconstruction are some of the winning projects this year.
Six researchers from University College Dublin (UCD) and University College Cork (UCC) have received millions in grants from the European Research Council (ERC) to support their research.
328 researchers across Europe received a total of €678m in ERC Consolidator Grants – a part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme – this year to pursue ideas under a broad spectrum spanning engineering, life sciences and humanities.
This year, UCD is in receipt of five of the six winning projects from Ireland – the highest number of ERC Consolidator Grants awarded to an Irish university in one call. Each awardee will receive €2m for their project.
UCD’s Prof Cathryn Costello will conduct a global comparative study of the workings and effectiveness of international refugee law (IRL).
The study, titled RefLex, aims to fill a knowledge gap in the field by developing a new dataset to explore the conditions IRL is effective in delivering protection for refugees.
“RefLex aims to provide vital insights at a time when the global refugee regime is increasingly adrift from international law,” said Costello, who will be working on this project alongside researchers from Syracuse University and Queen’s University, Canada.
Also from UCD, Dr Aisling Ní Annaidh will explore a patient specific approach to tissue expansion in breast reconstruction by developing a novel acoustoelastic method which can non-invasively determine key parameters that evaluate and predict the amount of tissue growth from the procedure.
“This project will initially develop a tool to monitor tissue growth in vivo, offering valuable fundamental insights into growth and remodelling processes,” said Ní Annaidh.
“Using this new methodology, BreastRecon will ultimately advance patient-specific tissue expansions by designing optimum surgical protocols, offering a disruptive breakthrough in reconstructive surgeries.”
While Dr Tom Birkett – a senior UCC lecturer in Old English and Old Norse – will be exploring the reception and legacy of Vikings in Europe.
This year’s winning grantees were selected from a pool of more than 2300 proposals with a gender divide consisting of about 60pc men and 40pc women.
Meanwhile, Germany leads the chart with 67 winning grant proposals, followed by 38 in France and the UK.
According to the ERC, the grants will likely create around 2,750 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and other staff at the host institutions.
Prof Maria Leptin, the ERC president pointed out that budget constraints restricted more researchers from receiving funding.
“Whilst we had the funds available to back more applicants this year than in 2023, the fact remains that many applicants who were rated as excellent in this competition will still not be funded due to lack of budget.
“This waste of talent can only be tackled by increasing the investment in blue-sky research in Europe,” she said.
The ERC, set up in 2007, is the EU funding organisation for frontier research. With an overall budget from 2021 to 2027 of more than €16bn, the Consolidator grants have already funded more than 900 projects worth nearly €2bn since 2021.
Ekaterina Zaharieva, who asserted the need for higher investments and equal gender-based representation on Horizon-related boards and expert groups during her confirmation hearing last month, took over as the first-ever EU commissioner for start-ups, research and innovation on 1 December.
Last year, seven researchers from Ireland received grants from a total pool of €627m to fuel their research projects.
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