The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the results of its Advanced Grants competition. A total of 281 outstanding researchers from across Europe will receive €721 million in funding for ambitious research projects under the Horizon Europe programme. Among the winners are four Polish researchers.
Each Advanced Grant provides up to €2.5 million to support cutting-edge research conducted by active researchers who have achieved significant scientific success over the past ten years. Each grant provides up to €2.5 million in funding.
The Polish Grantees
Prof. Cezary Galewicz from Jagiellonian University will carry out the project Voices from the Deep South: pāṭṭu song cultures of South Asia (acronym: VOICES). The 5-year research will involve specialists from the fields of cultural studies, literary anthropology, linguistics, ethnomusicology, and digital humanities from Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, France, the USA, and India. This project offers a completely new, comprehensive, and integrative view of the history of South Asian song cultures in general, and the Indian south in particular. It involves building a digital archive of songs in the form of audiovisual recordings, transcriptions, identification, and documentation of written sources and other types of artifacts.
Prof. Joanna Mizielińska from the University of Warsaw will conduct a project Rethinking Queer Kinship: LGBTIQ* Families with Children in Central and Eastern Europe (QUEERSHIP) . Her previous research has focused on everyday queer life, caregiving practices, definitions and representations of family, queer parenting, homophobia within families, and interpersonal relationships across the life course. “The project also takes into account different perspectives – bringing together the voices of LGBTIQ* families, their loved ones – families of origin, friends – activist individuals and professionals working with families, thus capturing the complexity of the everyday experiences of these families,” Prof. Mizielińska adds.
Prof. Paweł Moskal, also from Jagiellonian University, received a grant for his project Can tissue oxygenation be sensed by positronium? (acronym: POSITRONIUM). Developing a method for non-invasive assessment of hypoxia (oxygen deficiency in tissues) is one of the major challenges in medical imaging. This project is motivated by the exciting question of whether it is possible to assess the level of oxygen concentration in tissues by measuring photons from positronium annihilation inside cells. The exotic positronium atom (a bound state of an electron and a positron) is produced in the human body during diagnosis performed by positron emission tomography (PET). This phenomenon has not been used in medicine until now.
Prof. Dominika Zgid from the University of Warsaw will conduct a project Modelling disorder in crystalline materials using systematically improvable correlated methods. The researcher intends to develop models of disorder in crystalline materials using systematically improved methods that describe electron correlation. The project will result in a set of computational tools enabling the modelling of disorder in realistic systems – from weakly to strongly correlated. The tools will allow the use of high-performance computing to reduce the number of costly laboratory experiments and help in the rational design of new, technologically relevant materials.
The next call for ERC Advanced Grants 2025 is now open, with the application deadline set for 28 August 2025. A key novelty in this edition is that researchers relocating to Europe will be eligible for up to €2 million in additional funding to establish their laboratories—twice the amount previously available.
Source:
Nauka w Polsce
Jagiellonian University in Kraków
University of Warsaw
