ERC grant competitions 2021: Final lists of researchers offered funding

The initial results of the competitions for Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants and Advanced Grants under the ERC’s 2021 Work Programme were published in the first half of 2022. Since then, a majority of the successful candidates accepted the funding and signed their grant agreements.

In the meantime, however, funding has become available for researchers in the reserve list, as a result of two factors:

Firstly, the negotiations between the EU and Switzerland on the country’s association to the Horizon Europe programme were put on hold. Switzerland has since then been considered a third country non-associated to the programme. As a result, host institutions in Switzerland have not been considered anymore eligible for EU funding. Successful ERC applicants with Swiss host institutions could still choose to keep the grants provided that they transferred their proposals to an eligible host institution.

Secondly, among the successful applicants there were also several researchers hosted by universities and research institutions based in the UK. Most of them were not in a position to sign grant agreements. The reason is that the UK, a country in the process of associating to Horizon Europe, was not yet associated to the programme at the moment of the signature of these grant agreements and, therefore, its institutions were not considered eligible to host ERC grants. The ERC has given additional time for successful candidates based in the UK, so that they could decide whether they move the planned project to an eligible institution outside the UK and accept the funding or decline the grant.

That is why, the ERC funding which was declined by the researchers based in Switzerland and the UK during the year has become available for researchers whose proposals were evaluated as excellent but were initially put on reserve lists because of lack of funds. In the case of the Starting Grants, the ERC Scientific Council also decided to allot additional budget of around 120 million euro to respond to higher than expected number of applicants, allowing more candidates to be funded.

Lists of researchers selected for funding from the reserve lists

The lists include all researchers who were offered grants, including those in the UK and Switzerland, many of who had to decline the funding.

Starting Grants 2021