Synergy Grant of the European Research Council

The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organization for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants, and Synergy Grants. With its additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees to bridge the gap between their pioneering research and early phases of its commercialization. The ERC is led by an independent governing body, the Scientific Council. Maria Leptin has been the President of the ERC since November 2021. The overall ERC budget from 2021 to 2027 is more than €16 billion, as part of the Horizon Europe programme, under the responsibility of European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, Iliana Ivanova.

In the case of the ERC Synergy Grants, research projects are funded specifically for projects carried out by a group of two to four individual Principal Investigators (PIs) working together and bringing different skills and resources to tackle ambitious research problems. Synergy Grants can be up to a maximum of € 10 million for a period of 6 years. The grant scheme is designed to support ambitious research projects that require the collaborative efforts of two to four academic research groups. Grants are awarded based on the scientific excellence of the proposal and the anticipated intrinsic benefits of interdisciplinary synergy.