Israeli research teams win prestigious ERC Consolidator Grants in a variety of fields

Fourteen Israeli university teams have won the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grants, with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) getting six and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot winning four.  The ERC, established by the European Union 16 years ago, is the premier European funding organization for excellent frontier research from engineering to life sciences to the humanities. 

Out of 2,130 candidates, the ERC chose 308 researchers for this year’s Consolidator Grants. The funding will support excellent scientists and scholars at the career stage where they may still be consolidating their own independent research teams to pursue their most promising scientific ideas. Worth in total €627 million, the grants are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe program. 

Women won 39% of grants in this competition, the highest-ever share for the grants. The laureates of this grant competition will carry out their projects at universities and research centers in 22 EU Member States and other countries associated with Horizon Europe. Israel is an EU associate state. Among the EU countries, the highest numbers of grants will be located in Germany (66 projects), Netherlands (36), France (23) and Spain (23). The grants will create some 1,800 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students, and other staff at the host institutions.  

HU researchers will get NIS 47 million to spend on their research.

These individual grants, ranging from 1.5 to two million euros This achievement position HU at the forefront among Israeli research universities. The HU recipients are Dr. Erez Zohar from the Rakah Institute of Physics; Prof. Yair Furstenberg who chairs the Talmud and Halacha department; Prof. Oren Ram from the Institute of Life Sciences, Dr. Yonatan Anahory also from the Rakah Institute of Physics, Prof. Katrina Ligett from the School of Engineering and Computer Science and overseeing the Center for the Study of Rationality; and Dr. Nicholas Stone, also from the Rakah Institute of Physics.

Research in neuroscience

Bar-Ilan University (BIU) Prof. Ilanit Gordon of the psychology department and the Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center also received a grant. She heads the social neuroscience lab that focuses on the neuro-physiological basis of social interactions, using automated tools to assess naturalistic social interactions, together with brain imaging, measures of the autonomic nervous system, eye-tracking and motion tracking.

Meanwhile, Prof. Ido Kaminer of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa also won an ERC Consolidator grant. Kaminer of the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering and his research team aim to develop a theory and innovative experimental platform for a new field in electron microscopy: Q-in-PINEM. The research will focus on creating new quantum states and identifying unique quantum properties for materials. The team is planning to produce the first-ever many-electron entangled states and measure the quantum correlations produced on extremely short periods of time, occurring for electrons moving at a big fraction of the speed of light.”

The other Israeli universities are Tel Aviv University, and the University of Haifa.