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Record number of researchers in Sweden to get ERC Starting Grant
It has now been decided who will get ERC Starting Grants under this year’s call. In total, 436 researchers from 25 different countries will share 677 million euro, to be used in developing their research and building up their own teams. 23 of them have a Swedish host institution.
Among the 23 researchers receiving ERC Starting Grants, 5 are active in social sciences and humanities, 5 in physical and engineering sciences and 13 in life sciences.
–This is a record year for Sweden, both for the number of research projects approved, but also for the number of funded projects within humanities and social sciences. The number approved within life sciences also breaks the record. Sweden’s approval rate of 15% is also higher than the overall approval rate for ERC Starting Grants, which is 13%, says Lena Renner, national contact person for the ERC.
Approved research projects 2020
Chalmers University of Technology
- Jessica Jewell: MANIFEST MechANIsms and actors of Feasible Energy Transitions
- Marianne Liebi: MUMOTT Multi-Modal Tensor Tomography
University of Gothenburg
- Björn Redfors: De-StunHeartAttacks Re-defining clinical care and reasoning in ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) by shifting focus to ischemic myocardial stunning - Mechanisms prognostic implications and a new treatment
- Bettina Schulz Paulsson: NEOSEA Neolithic Seafaring and Maritime Technologies shaped a New World of Megalithic Societies (4700-3500 cal BC)
Karolinska Institutet
- Niklas Björkström: RESIDE Dissecting tissue-resident lymphocyte homeostasis in humans
- Nils Landegren: SEXimmune Deciphering sex differences in the human immune system
- Janina Seubert: OLFLINK Olfaction as the link between flavor preference formation and retrieval during food consumption
KTH, Royal Institute of Technology
- Ian Hoffecker: DNA_MICROSCOPY In situ DNA sequencing-based microscopy for subcellular spatial transcriptomics
Linköpings universitet
- Eric Glowacki: OPTEL-MED Optoelectronic medicine - nerve cell regulation with light
Lund University
- Paul Bourgine: hOssicle Bioengineering of human ossicles as advanced in vivo hematopoietic model
- Nathalie Feiner: EvoOnRepeat Unravelling the developmental origins of parallel evolution
- Alison Gerber: SHOW AND TELL Show and Tell: Scientific representation, algorithmically generated visualizations, and evidence across epistemic cultures
- Emma Hammarlund: ParadOX The hardships for life to become big – rethinking hypoxia as an evolutionary driver for the rise of complex multicellularity
- Rik Ossenkoppele: TAU-NOW Tau Pathology in Alzheimer’s disease: Spreading and Resilience
- Pablo Villanueva Perez: 3DX-FLASH Probing MHz processes in 3D with X-ray microscopy
Stockholm University
- Mikael Lundqvist: Hot-Coal WM The Hot-Coal hypothesis of working memory
- Ben Wilson: REFU-GEN A Better Life for the Children of Exile: Intergenerational Adaptation of the Descendants of Refugees
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
- Barbara Locke Grandér: BEE NATURAL A sustainable future for honeybees by unravelling the mechanisms of natural disease resistance
- Maria Westerholm: SYNAG Deciphering the network of microbial, environmental and physical factors underlying aggregation and enhanced performance in syntrophic microorganism communities
Umeå University
- Jonas Barandun: PolTube A molecular model of the microsporidian infection apparatus
Uppsala University
- Magnus Johansson: SMACK Single-molecule tracking for live-cell protein synthesis kinetics
- Gabriele Messori: CENAE compound Climate Extremes in North America and Europe: from dynamics to predictability
- Chao Zhang: DeepProton Deep multi-scale modelling of electrified metal oxide nanostructures
The ERC website has more statistics and a list of all the grant recipients External link.
Sweden and ERC Starting Grant 2016–2020
Over the last five years, 89 researchers in Sweden have received an ERC Starting Grant.
Aproval rate over time

Source: ERC
Swedish Research Council and ERC
The Swedish Research Council works to encourage more Swedish researchers to apply for and be awarded ERC grants. Some of our work consists of arranging interview training for researchers who have been selected for stage 2 of the application process, and visiting higher education institutions to inform about the application process and upcoming ERC calls.
The ERC Starting Grant is aimed at researchers at the beginning of their careers, who were awarded a doctoral degree 2–7 years ago. The grant amount is 1.5 million EUR, over a period of maximum 5 years.
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