Each project will be allocated about 10.3 million euros.
Two European research projects, involving three Portuguese researchers, were today chosen to receive grants of around 10 million euros each from the European Research Council.
The Portuguese projects are part of a set of “66 research teams, bringing together 239 scientists, (who) will receive 684 million euros in synergy grants from the European Research Council (ERC, in the original acronym), which support small groups of researchers working together on ambitious, high-risk, and high-reward projects,” the institution announced in a statement.
According to the European Research Council, 712 proposals were submitted, of which about one in ten was selected.
The list of selected projects includes two involving Portuguese researchers, one of which is about centromeric instability in aging with Portuguese biochemist Elsa Logarinho from the Research and Innovation in Health Institute of the University of Porto and two other French researchers.
The other project focuses on moldable living platforms mediated by cells as highly efficient hybrid units for bioengineering human microtissues and includes scientists João Mano from the University of Aveiro and Nuno Araújo from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon and another British researcher.
The funded projects cover a wide range of areas, such as research on the use of microbes to correct genetic diseases, investigations into the first microseconds after the birth of the Universe, new approaches to modeling crowd behavior, combining physical and social sciences, and studies on how societies and mountainous ecosystems adapt to environmental and social changes.
