The European Research Council is five years old

Five years ago I attended a symposium and reception hosted by the European Union at the National Geographic Society’s headquarters in Washington, DC. The goal of the event was to introduce the newly founded European Research Council (ERC) to European scientists who’d moved to the Washington area. The EU wanted European scientists to return to Europe. The prospect of ERC grants was the lure.

To make the case for the ERC, the EU brought in Janez Potočnik, who was the European commissioner for science and research at the time, and Fotis Kafatos, who was ERC’s founding president. John Bruton, the EU’s ambassador to Washington and a former prime minister of Ireland, made the opening remarks.

The ERC was different from other European grant-awarding bodies, Kafatos told the audience. Grants would be made to individuals, not to institutions, and they’d be awarded on merit. If sticking to that principle meant that scientists based in a handful of countries ended up with all the grants, so be it.

After Bruton, Potočnik, and Kafatos spoke, the scientists in the auditorium had the chance to comment and ask questions. One scientist, an Italian molecular biologist, was skeptical of the ERC. What he liked about working at the National Institutes of Health was not so much the salary, but the lower levels of bureaucracy and political maneuvering needed to do his job. Holding a new grant, even a large one, in his native Italy was not attractive.

I hadn’t thought much of the ERC until earlier this week, when I noticed a news story on the BBC’s website. Using the ERC’s fifth anniversary as a news peg, reporter Jonathan Amos briefly reviewed the ERC’s history, albeit from a British perspective. He noted that UK-based researchers have won 20% of all ERC grants devoted to frontier or “blue skies” research.

I also learned from Amos’s story that ERC grants are open to non-Europeans, provided they hold them at European institutions. What’s more, even though the ERC is funded by the EU, researchers in non-EU countries are eligible, including—thanks to a commendable gesture of enlightened generosity—Israel and Turkey.

The UK accounts for 8.4% of the population of Europe. Its share of ERC grants is therefore disproportionally large and would seem to suggest that grants are awarded without regard to national boundaries. To check further, I turned to the most recently available ERC annual report, the one for 2010 .

On page 62 you’ll find a list of the universities that have the most ERC grantees. Eight are home to more than 20 grantees: University of Cambridge (47), University of Oxford (43), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (42), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (33), ETH Zürich (32), Weizmann Institute (32), Imperial College London (27), and University College London (26). Only three countries are represented: Israel, Switzerland, and the UK. A separate table on page 63 lists the eight non-university research organizations that host more than 10 ERC grantees. Five of them are in France; one each is in Germany, Spain, and the UK.

As an independent gauge of how successful the ERC has been in funding science, I turned to the American Physical Society’s publication search tool . Entering “European Research Society” into the full-text box yielded an impressive 243 papers in APS journals that acknowledge ERC funding. The most cited paper, “Uniaxial strain in graphene by Raman spectroscopy: G peak splitting, Grüneisen parameters, and sample orientation ,” appeared in Physical Review B. In the three years since it was published, the paper has garnered 129 citations.

So I think we can congratulate the ERC not only on its fifth anniversary but also on its success.