ERCs

Infertility affects about 1 in 6 couples worldwide, and in many cases the cause is still unknown. Often, early embryos fail to develop properly due to errors in their very first cell division. A tiny structure in sperm, the centrosome, plays a key role in this process, but we still don’t fully understand how it works. CentRed studies how this structure changes as sperm develops and how problems in this process may lead to infertility. Using advanced imaging and laboratory techniques, the team will map these changes, track when they happen, and test how well the centrosome functions in different individuals. The project aims to uncover a hidden cause of male infertility and could lead to better diagnoses and more effective treatments in the future.

EXPULSE investigates the impact of urban expulsion regimes on the lived experiences of housing insecurity for poor residents in four European cities: Brussels, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Thessaloniki. Amid rising global inequalities, these cities face escalating forms of expulsion, including housing evictions, the displacement of the poor from welfare systems, and the exclusion of migrants. This study offers a timely and critical analysis of these urban expulsion regimes, defined as the interplay between state policies, housing market regulations, and moral discourses, alongside the governance practices of street-level bureaucrats and private actors involved in eviction processes across Europe.

Iron is a critical cofactor for proteins and enzymes involved in oxygen and energy metabolism, functions that are especially vital in pancreatic β-cells. With IRON-BETA, I seek to unravel how iron metabolism regulates β-cell identity, function, and survival, under both normal and stressed conditions, such as type 2 diabetes (T2D) and early post-transplant ischemia. By evaluating how iron deficiency and hypoxia impact β-cell survival and graft success during islet transplantation, we aim to improve transplantation outcomes and advance therapeutic strategies.

We rely on antibiotics to treat life-threatening gastrointestinal bacterial infections, but individual susceptibility to these infections varies. The project will focus on colonisation resistance, the mechanism by which the intestinal microbiota protects itself against new microorganisms. CoRe Defense will explore ecological niches and competitors through metabolic modelling, screen for growth-inhibiting bacterial strains using a new in vitro co-culturing platform and test colonisation resistance predictions in mice with a human microbiome. The project seeks to provide groundbreaking insights into the factors influencing bacterial infection susceptibility.

Sub-Saharan Africa is often bypassed in global histories and its print cultures seldom approached through a transnational lens. To recover a lost history of global engagement, AFROPRESS will turn to the subcontinent’s cultural and political magazines from the period 1918-68—a vast, yet slowly disappearing archive. These magazines played key roles in effecting change, from fuelling decolonisation to creating literary and artistic canons. AFROPRESS advances the hypothesis that magazines shaped this transformation through their global orientation, that is, the way they reached out, across borders within and beyond Sub-Saharan Africa, to Black internationalist and anticolonial networks.

The worldwide increase in the number of individuals that are ageing behind bars sparks heightened concerns about the extent to which carceral environments can foster the foundational conditions for ageing individuals to lead meaningful lives. However, the underdevelopment of research on carceral ageing is one of the most significant contemporary challenges in the social scientific study of criminal behaviour and society’s response to it. Scholarship is particularly lagging behind in Europe. The CAGED project addresses this critical need by understanding how existential psychosocial changes induced by human ageing intersect with effects of incarceration. It is designed to bridge two distinct academic realms: gerontology, which encompasses the multidisciplinary study of ageing, and penology, which is the study of punishment and incarceration.

The aim of PoreMADNeSS is to develop innovative strategies to enable the design of transmembrane β-barrels (TMBs), a class of membrane proteins with excellent properties to act as nanopore sensors. Using multidisciplinary approaches, we will address basic biophysical knowledge gaps that currently limit TMB design. The design of TMB folding in synthetic membranes gives access to a wealth of TMB sequences and structures not sampled by nature because of constraints associated with biogenesis and with the composition of biomembranes. This project has all the components to translate into transformative advances in nanopore sensing and sequencing by providing the nanopore R&D community with accurate and innovational computational design methodologies.

CODE examines technological competition between China, the United States (US) and Europe in three key sectors for contemporary economics and geopolitics: semiconductors, cloud computing and space, with the goal to explain the dynamics of competition for access to and control of critical technologies. The project combines methods from international relations, political economy, and innovation management, and uses network analysis and machine learning to analyze market and patent data. The project highlights the geopolitical, economic, and strategic implications of this technological competition.

ICE³ will revolutionise the regional- to global-scale modelling of glaciers, by strongly reducing uncertainties in model input through innovative inversion of climatic information, developing new approaches to model glacier processes in 3D, and simulating past glacier evolution globally over centennial time scales with an ice-dynamic model. These improvements will culminate in new global glacier evolution projections under a range of future emission scenarios, which will in turn inform the next generation of sea-level rise and water availability projections.

This project investigates how inequalities in digital news consumption and political knowledge acquisition can be addressed, focusing on the influence of social differences and digital platforms. It identifies vulnerabilities to disinformation and tests interventions to reduce these inequalities. The approach combines various methods within a global North/South comparative framework.

FORAGENCY offers a new take on indigenous agency in colonial Central Africa. It will study how local communities managed to counter, alleviate and/or minimize their encroachment by outside forces through the maintenance and adaptation of pre-existing uses of the environment. It will lead to the development of a new conceptual framework on indigenous ecologies, at the crossroads of decolonial and posthumanist studies, which will open new perspectives on the history of vernacular responses to colonialism and capitalism.

This project investigates the complexity of end-of-life trajectories in older adults with severe chronic diseases by integrating both quantitative and qualitative methods. It aims to understand the common and individual aspects of these trajectories, as well as the influences that shape them. TRAJECT will lead to a fundamental re-thinking of how we examine, understand, and categorise end-of-life trajectories contributing to better care and methodological innovations in related scientific fields.

Ancient wisdom writings like Kepler, Bacon, Gassendi, Newton and Leibniz were considered part of a tradition that regarded them as containing universal truths about God, humanity and the cosmos. The VERITRACE project aims to delve into the debates surrounding these texts and analyse how they were perceived during the early modern era in Europe by customising existing techniques for distant reading. This will deepen our understanding of how these writings, rediscovered in the Renaissance, informed the early modern foundations of modern science.

Frogs are an ideal model system for the study of sex chromosome diversity and evolution. Their sex chromosomes are not degenerated and with frequent turnovers. The ERC-funded FrogWY project will use robber frogs to study unconventional sex chromosome evolution, challenging the paradigm predicted by the canonical model of degenerate Y/W.

The DATAUNION project will theorise the socio-material practices that underpin database interoperability. It will evaluate the implications of the Data Union’s construction, develop a multimodal study of how digital technologies feed European security integration, and deliver new insights about the frictions shaping the making of a European Data Union.

TREATYLAB explores how international law was created in practice before 1870. Instead of solely focusing on theories or final treaties, the project studies the behind-the-scenes work of diplomats and civil servants. It focuses on the vast, largely unexplored writings of Nicolas-Louis Le Dran, a key advisor in early French foreign affairs. Using both close reading and digital tools, TREATYLAB analyses this “mountain of paper” to uncover how decisions were shaped in real time. The project will produce a searchable, annotated corpus and new research on diplomatic practice. By highlighting everyday legal work and hidden strategic knowledge, TREATYLAB offers a fresh perspective on the international history of law.

IONIAN builds a unique concept combining distributed source coding and signal processing knowledge with modern deep learning. It will have a profound impact on the way intelligent machines, including ground and aerial vehicles, and mobile robots, compress and communicate multi-sensory data to collaboratively perceive the environment for autonomous safe navigation, ultimately leading to trustworthy operation and acceptance of such systems.

Two of the most profound sources of exclusion in current-day societies are people’s ethnic and social origins. The main goal of MARIS is to examine the interlinked patterns of different dimensions of racism and intergenerational social immobility at the level of societies. What both racism and social mobility research have in common, is that there is little interdisciplinary integration of their dimensions. This is a serious gap, because each approach only covers a specific aspect and often yields different answers to basic research questions. By combining both, this project bridges two long-standing research fields within the social and economic sciences.

FLUX studies how micrometeorites (MMs) influence the Earth by analyzing fossil MMs from the Phanerozoic era to investigate how the influx of cosmic dust changed and influenced the dynamics between the Solar System and the Earth. The project will better position the Earth in the context of a dynamic Solar System and constrain the causes and consequences of the variations in the flux of cosmic dust to Earth.

The ReplaceMi project aims to develop an innovative strategy to replace embryonic microglia using specific progenitors. This strategy offers new possibilities to treat neurodegenerative disorders by transforming microglia into protein production factories and identify gene networks for improving microglial disease responses.

MERLIT explores how meritocratic narratives in the 17th century are written, how they are written into cultures, but also how they are written back to in text forms that have shaped the zeitgeist of particular moments respectively. Situated at the intersections of literary history, new formalist theory and cultural translation, MERLIT not only offers a literary history of meritocratic thought, but significantly advances our understanding of the workings of a set of hegemonic forms in and through writing, and of the formative, worldmaking role of literature.

Under a continued increase in global warming, extreme events such as heatwaves will further rise in frequency, intensity, and duration over the next decades. This project will develop novel concepts and methodologies to express climate change impacts and risk from a cohort perspective. By bridging physical climate science, demography, and planetary health, LACRIMA will comprehensively identify whether and where people will live an unprecedented life in terms of climate impacts, and how mitigation choices can alter the climate change burden on current young generations around the world.

The SINATRA project will explore the degree to which the EU freely makes decisions concerning its dealings with the US and China in areas such as trade, thechnology and foreign and security policy. It rejects the theory that the EU will become either an independent subject, object or battlefield in the Sino-American rivalry; instead, it claims that the EU is both subject and object.

Modern humans migrated to colder regions out of Africa during the Pleistocene, but evidence suggests that early hominins inhabited temperate zones in South Africa millions of years ago. The ERC-funded PLIODIS project will explore changes in the Kalahari/proto-Limpopo basin and examine the hominin fossil record to better understand species diversity, gene flow, and dispersal patterns in deep time. The project will test several hypotheses: that early hominin ranges in East Africa expanded and contracted with changing wet and dry phases, that shifts in dispersal corridors led to intermittent gene flow between East African and South African populations, and that tectonic changes eventually turned the Zambezi River into a significant barrier, prompting South African hominins to adapt to distinct ecological niches.

The fastidious balance of our immune system to fight infections or cancer while avoiding autoimmune reactions is regulated by coinhibitory and co-stimulatory immune checkpoint complexes (ICCs), which have become major drug targets. Surprisingly, but likely fueled by the most obvious focus on IC inhibitors, the field largely ignored that ICCs are genuine transmembrane receptors that transmit signals upon binding of an extracellular protein ligand. Allosteris will uncover unexplored modes of therapeutic intervention by validating allosteric Nanobodies (Nbs) that bind and stabilize ICCs in ternary associations to agonize their activity as first-in-class allosteric modulators, thus tipping the immune homeostasis balance opposite to ICC inhibitors for treating autoimmunity or cancer.

This project aims to deliver proof-of-concept for in vivo PERTURB-Flow, a new technology for the systematic discovery of therapeutic targets in immune cells called macrophages. It will focus on microglia, the brain’s own immune cells, to understand how they behave in both healthy and disease conditions. By studying these cells directly in living systems, the approach aims to uncover more reliable ways to treat diseases. At the same time, the PERTURB-Flow team will work with industry partners and explore business opportunities, including patents and potential spin-offs. The project’s goal is to create a powerful, scalable platform that accelerates the discovery of new therapies and overcomes the current lack of effective targets in this field.

Immune checkpoints are key regulatory molecules that modulate immune responses to maintain balance and prevent autoimmunity. Conventional drugs blocking these molecules have been explored for cancer therapy and autoimmune diseases. The ERC-funded PAMinMICE project will explore an entirely new strategy through the development of positive allosteric modulators (PAMs) that enhance checkpoint signalling. PAMs stabilise the natural interaction between immune cells, thereby promoting the suppression of immune responses prominent in autoimmune diseases. Researchers will test this pioneering approach in advanced mouse models that mimic human diseases like lupus, psoriasis and colitis. Project findings will pave the way towards a novel therapeutic avenue for autoimmune diseases.