European Research Council Advanced Grants

European Research Council (ERC) grants are available to support researchers in carrying out frontier research projects. The European Research Council (ERC) is a European funding initiative, designed to support the best scientists, engineers and scholars in Europe. Its mandate is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-initiated frontier research across all fields of research, on the basis of scientific excellence.

ERC Advanced Grants

Allow exceptional established research leaders of any nationality and any age to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk projects that open new directions in their respective research fields or other domains.
The ERC Advanced Grant funding targets researchers who have already established themselves as independent research leaders in their own right.

In brief:

Research proposal: pioneering frontier research in any field of science, including social sciences.
Researchers: candidates can be of any nationality, any age, must be scientifically independent and have a recent research track-record and profile which identifies them as leaders in their respective field(s) of research
Host organisation: Legally the Host Institution must be based in one of the EU Member States, or one of the Associated Countries.

Notice for UK applicants: The UK is expected to soon become an associated country to the EU’s R&I Framework Programme Horizon Europe. The UK will therefore have the same rights and obligations as other countries associated to the Programme. Read more.

The grant

Funding: up to EUR 2.5 M per grant (Up to an additional EUR 1 000 000 can be requested in the proposal to cover).
Duration: up to 5 years
Calls for proposals: published annually on the ERC page, the European Commission’s Funding and Tenders Portal and in the Official Journal of the European Union.