Funding Researchers

The human hand is a complex system of receptors, muscles and joints, making it hard to create a robot that can match not only its ability to move, but also to apply different levels of strength. Supported by the European Research Council (ERC), the SOFTHANDS team has succeeded in doing just this. Their prototype represents a great step-forward in robotics, since it is able to perform fine manipulations of a wide variety of objects.

By studying the geology of Mars, the team behind project 'E-MARS' has been able to identify the ideal landing spot for the next European mission to the planet. The 2018 ESA expedition is part of the ExoMars programme, which is set to provide new information regarding one of the most outstanding scientific questions of our time: whether there is life on other planets.

The project 'EARTH CORE STRUCTURE', funded by the European Research Council (ERC), has greatly improved the knowledge we have of the inside of our planet by determining a new method to understand its structure. The method uses knowledge from different disciplines and has helped scientists paint a picture of the Earth's core - more comprehensive than ever before.

Malaria has always been the centre of attention for Dr Ali Salanti’s, a molecular parasitologist and an ERC grantee. With his studies, he hoped to bring new insight into pregnancy-associated malaria, to save the lives of women and their babies in areas affected by the disease. Now, Dr Salanti’s research has shifted to battling against another deadly disease: cancer. This comes after an unexpected discovery yielded ground-breaking results for the diagnosis and treatment of this illness.

How close are we to developing a successful and comprehensive vaccine for cancer? ERC grantee Prof. Yvette van Kooyk thinks that a combination of glycobiology and immunology will lead us closer than ever before. Thanks to her ground-breaking multidisciplinary team and her new approach based on sugar receptors, she has developed a nanovaccine that promises to represent the future for cancer treatment.

EU and euro-area policymakers are planning reforms to the common rules that underpin economic and monetary integration in Europe. To help, researchers in the EU-funded project ADEMU are developing proposals to guide the reforms.

Those FET projects deal with new methods for data analysis, analysis of FET portfolio and emerging trends, and activities for FET communities at large.

As the number of babies born prematurely continues to rise, the list of milk banks has also grown in length, particularly in Europe. But as Europe also tops another league table - that of alcohol consumption per capital - do doctors need to worry about the safety of donated breast milk? An EU-funded researcher plans to find out.

EU-funding helped scholar Christophe Fricker restart his academic career and link it up with his experiences in the business world. His research has shed new light on the life and writing of controversial German author Ernst Junger.

Supramolecular chemistry could provide new, innovative materials for applications for medicine, data storage and other areas. Some European countries even have national programmes devoted to this field. The ASSEMZYME project is using EU funding to train a research candidate in this cutting-edge science.

Is a precise answer always better than a slightly less detailed one? Not necessarily. Some problems could take forever to compute and tie up vast IT capacity. Where solutions are needed urgently, e.g. in business or manufacturing, near-enough can be more than enough. ERC-funded research has produced a library of fast, powerful approximation algorithms.

EU-funded PENGUINAV was the first-ever study of how groups of king penguin chicks find their way home. We now know more about collective animal movements and how to study the movements of other species.

Cockayne syndrome (CS) is a devastating, inborn, progressive neurodegenerative disorder with a very early onset in childhood. The EU-funded project CHROMOREPAIR helped shed light on underlying issues in CS and related disorders, which may ultimately open the way for novel diagnostic options and treatment targets.

Marine bacteria play a crucial role in biogeochemical processes such as the cycling of carbon and nitrogen. They have a variety of functions, which in some species are triggered only when seasonal conditions indicate that the time is right. A Marie Curie fellow has taken a closer look at the task division among these tiny agents of change.

When the Sun sends a great mass of solar material hurtling through space, the repercussions can be felt here on Earth in the form of a geomagnetic storm. One EU-funded scientist set out to understand why these eruptions happen, and to create a methodology for predicting the timeframe between the explosion and its impacts 150 million kilometres away on our planet.

The FET Proactive call "Boosting emerging technologies" of the FET Work Programme 2016-2017 has 3 topics: "Emerging themes and communities" (deadline April 2016, check more information below); "FET ERANET Cofund in Quantum Technologies" (deadline April 2016);"FET ERANET Cofund" (to be opened for proposals submission in September 206).
There is also a dedicated call for proposals on High Performance Computing (which will be opened for proposals submission in April 2016).

The European Commission is organising an information session in Brussels for Grant Coordinators, so they can learn legal aspects, business processes and IT tools used to prepare amendments and reports with particular attention to the financial aspects and eligibility of costs.

Latest news on Future and Emerging Technologies research, funding opportunities in 2016, latest project news, reporting on workshops & conferences and future events.

Did you know the Horizon 2020 Future and Emerging Technologies programme "FET-Open" receives an extremely high number of submissions each year and the chances of new brilliant ideas to be funded by the EU programme have dramatically dropped? It leaves a lot of great interdisciplinary thinking unrewarded and a lot of people disappointed - this problem needs to be addressed if "FET-Open" is to remain credible as an early detector of future technologies.

With her degree in biology, Dr Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla left Mexico and embarked on an international career in epigenetics. She completed her PhD at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and then moved to Cambridge University. In 2006 she joined IGBMC in Strasbourg where she is currently a group leader. Supported by an ERC grant, she studies the mechanisms controlling embryonic cellular plasticity with the aim of shedding new light on today's fertility issues.