The ERC Advanced Grants competition, part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, is one of the most prestigious and competitive funding schemes in the EU. It gives senior researchers the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs. A record of 3,329 proposals was submitted to this funding round, with 9.6% of proposals being selected for funding.
President of the European Research Council, Professor Maria Leptin, said: ‘The new Advanced Grant projects demonstrate the creativity, ambition and intellectual boldness that frontier research requires. The ERC’s role is to support researchers who are asking difficult scientific questions and want to venture into unexplored territory in pursuit of new knowledge. Congratulations to all our new grantees.’
Professor Bernhard Staresina's Ontogeny of Memory (MemOnto) project will address the paradox known as infantile amnesia: the fact that most of us retain little or no conscious memory of our earliest years, despite the extraordinary amount of learning that takes place during this period. The project will combine electroencephalogram recordings, studies in rodents and computational modelling to test two complementary possibilities: that early memories fade because sleep-based consolidation mechanisms are still developing, or because the developing brain progressively transforms how memories are represented, rendering them difficult to access later in life.
Professor Staresina said: “Receiving the Advanced Grant allows me and my team to apply our work on sleep and memory to one of the most intriguing remaining puzzles in psychology and neuroscience - why do we remember so little from a time when we learned so much? It fosters an exciting collaborative network within and beyond Oxford, spanning developmental psychologists, rodent electrophysiologists and computational modelers.”
Despite decades of research, the brain mechanisms underlying stuttering remain one of the great unanswered questions in speech neuroscience. Professor Kate Watkins was awarded the advanced award for her STUTTER project which will bring together advanced brain imaging, neurophysiology and novel therapeutic approaches to understand why stuttering starts, why it stops and why it sometimes persists, with the ultimate goal of improving outcomes for children and adults who stutter.
Professor Watkins said: “This grant means a great deal to me, both professionally and personally. Like many researchers, I have had to navigate repeated rejections in an increasingly challenging funding landscape, so receiving support for this work is both validating and motivating. It gives us the opportunity to pursue questions that have motivated my research for many years and that could make a real difference to people who stutter.”