ERC's Advanced Investigator Grant

Calls
See the ERC web-site for information.

Grant facts
Funding per Grant: Up to € 2,5 Mio (in some exceptional cases up to € 3,5 Mio)
Duration: Up to 5 years
Research fields: Any field of science, engineering & scholarship
Evaluation Criteria: Scientific Excellence

Application and review process
The application is a single stage application with a 2-step peer-review evaluation. The applicant will submit a full application:

• Scientific leadership profile
• CV
• 10-year track-record
• Synopsis
• Research proposal
• Research environment

The 25 panels, divided across three domains, will in the first step evaluate the applicants' leadership profile, CV, track record and synopsis. The applicants that pass a predefined quality threshold will in the second stage get their full proposals and research environments evaluated. No interviews will take place.

To limit the number of applications, some restrictions are adopted. No Principal Investigator (PI) may apply to the next call (ERC-2011-AdG) unless the proposal was evaluated above the quality threshold during second step but not funded due to insufficent budget. For these reasons it is important to consider what year one has the highest competitiveness. (Notice that those PI:s that submitted a proposal 2008 or 2009 and did not reach step 2 of the evaluation will not be permitted to apply in 2010.

There are no restrictions with regards to passed time after PhD for researchers applying for an Advanced Grant (this differs from the Starting Grants, for which there is an eligibility window of 2-12 years after PhD). The Advanced Grant is intended to complement the call for young researchers. Thus, researchers applying for an Advanced Grants may have a track-record slightly shorter than 10 years.

The budget is divided between different scientific domains accordning to: Physical Science & Engineering 40 %, Life Sciences 35 %, Social Sciences and Humanities 15 % and the 4th domain (cross-disciplinary or cross-domain applications) 10 %.

Contact
Enquiries regarding ERC grants can be sent to EU-officers at Swedish universities or directly to the European Commission via their Help desk (see link to the right). National Contact Points in Sweden are Ana Beramendi at the Swedish Research Council.

More information
Information in more detail, for instance work programme, guide for applicants and rules for submission, can be found on the ERC website.