Nine Research Groups Win ERC Funding

This year, the competition for European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grants was fiercer than ever. Researchers submitted 3,121 proposals, a 35% jump from last year, leaving just over 11% of applicants successful. The new grantees, representing 44 nationalities, will pursue cutting-edge research in 25 countries across Europe and beyond.

Against this highly competitive backdrop, nine principal investigators and their research groups at the University of Zurich (UZH) secured funding, achieving an impressive success rate of 22%. Three grants went to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, three to the Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, two to the Faculty of Medicine and one to a dual-affiliation institute of the Faculty of Medicine an the Faculty of Science.

The ERC awarded 349 Consolidator Grants this year, distributing €728 million to some of Europe’s most promising mid-career researchers. Aimed at researchers seven to twelve years after their PhD, the grants support ambitious research projects and enable grantees to build or strengthen their research teams and consolidate their independent careers.

This year also marks Switzerland’s return to ERC funding calls. After three years of substitute funding provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), researchers in Switzerland were once again able to compete directly for ERC Starting, Synergy, Consolidator and Proof of Concept Grants.

This project investigates how copyright protection shapes the creation and reuse of music, movies, books and news. Using detailed product-level datasets and state-of-the-art empirical methods, it measures the optimal duration of copyright, examines how digital music reuse affects the value and visibility of original works, and studies how news reuse on social platforms influences information access. The findings will provide evidence-based guidance for designing copyright policies that better fit today’s digital markets.

This project explores why market-based tools – such as carbon trading, weather derivatives, parametric insurance, and catastrophe bonds – have become central to managing climate risk. Examining insurance archives from the eighteenth century onward, it analyzes how financial institutions shaped meteorological knowledge, risk measurement tools, underwriting policies and enforcement mechanisms. The research aims to explain how the business of risk management influenced evolving conceptions of climate and why market mechanisms, rather than regulation, dominate current climate-risk governance.

Land is one of the most valuable resources in low-income countries, yet its markets remain poorly understood. This project investigates how access to land and land ownership affect livelihoods, productivity and urban growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. Combining administrative data, satellite imagery and innovative field experiments, the project examines how land markets are changing and identifies the causal effects of participating in them. The results will generate new evidence on how land markets function – and inform policies that promote fairer access to land and more sustainable economic development.

Birth rates are declining almost everywhere. What should governments do about this? Should they incentivize people to have more children? At what costs, and for what reasons? The goal of this project is to inform this policy discussion by integrating some relevant ethical considerations into the economic assessment of population policies.

Explaining the origins of abstract thoughts, passed down over thousands of generations, has been one of the major challenges faced by anthropologists and archaeologists. This project will develop a method to reconstruct the evolution of abstract concepts, especially spirituality, ethics and social relations. Using linguistic and anthropological data from hundreds of cultural groups, the project will apply new statistical techniques to infer historical trajectories that produced today’s conceptual diversity. The research could substantially expand what we know about the history of human thought, while also highlighting intellectual traditions that are most at threat from globalization.

Childhood environmental stress from experiences like violence, neglect or trauma is linked to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease in adulthood, yet the mechanisms remain unclear. The BETonSTRESS project investigates how early environmental stress influences epigenetic changes related to heart disease. The research will focus on the role of epigenetic readers, specifically BET proteins, and their therapeutic potential to address stress-related heart conditions. By uncovering how early environmental exposures shape cardiovascular pathology, the project aims to identify new therapeutic targets and improve prevention strategies.

This project examines how tuft cells – chemosensory epithelial cells in barrier tissues – detect and respond to intestinal parasites (helminths). It aims to develop tools to track tuft-cell activation, identify helminth-derived agonists and their receptors and map protein networks that govern tuft-cell effector outputs. The work will fill major gaps in our understanding of innate immunity and provide broadly applicable methodological advances for epithelial cell research.

Tumors harbor a small population of so-called tumor-initiating cells that drive cancer growth and therapy resistance, yet how they regulate protein synthesis is poorly understood. This project develops technologies to measure protein production in single cancer cells within their native environment. By mapping synthesis pathways that sustain tumor initiation and resistance, the research aims to uncover vulnerabilities that could form the basis for treatments targeting the cells responsible for cancer progression and relapse.

The Pan-African Longitudinal Study (PALS) will address Western bias in psychological research with a large-scale project in six African countries. Following 1,500 participants per country from over 100 ethnolinguistic groups, the project will investigate how the socio-cultural context shapes mental health, personality, religious engagement, values and beyond. Together with a large pan-African team, PALS will generate key data that can update psychological theory to better account for both universality and cultural variation.