European Research Council is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research that funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based in European Union member states or associated countries. The ERC’s mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields, based on scientific excellence. In this talk, I will give an overview of the available ERC funding schemes (Starting, Consolidator, Advanced and Synergy Grants) in Horizon Europe and will describe the evaluation process of proposals, by peer review panels. I will also talk about specific points to consider when applying for an ERC grant.

This talk will be followed by the presentations of two ERC Consolidator grantees, Prof. Fabrizio Montesi and Prof. Jian-Jia Chen who will talk about their ERC experience.

Bio: Mikaela Poulymenopoulou is a Scientific Officer at the European Research Council Executive Agency (ERCEA) in the Computer Science and Informatics panel (PE6) of the Physical Sciences and Engineering Unit. She works mainly on the support of the evaluation and selection processes of research proposals and the follow-up of the implementation of ERC funded projects. Before joining ERCEA in 2019, she worked as scientific officer at the Joint Research Centre of European Commission and as researcher in health informatics at the University of Piraeus in Greece.

Bio: Fabrizio Montesi is Professor (Full Professor) of Computer Science at the University of Southern Denmark, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, where he currently serves as member of the management group and Head of Section for the section of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, and Programming Languages. Fabrizio also serves as President of the Microservices Community, maintainer of the open-source programming language Jolie (for microservices), management group member at the SDU Digital Democracy Centre, and Chair of Cloud Technology at the SDU eScience Center. He is also Founding Director at italianaSoftware, where he previously served as Co-CEO.