The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the winners of its latest Advanced Grant competition. A total of €838 million in funding will go to 319 leading researchers across Europe.

Three ambitious University College Dublin (UCD) projects have secured funding. Associate Professor Rory Johnson, UCD School of Medicine will lead the REVOLVER project, Professor Porscha Fermanis, UCD School of English, Drama and Film, will lead PanAsia, and Professor Anthony O’Mullane will lead ALMERS with UCD School of Chemistry.

The highly competitive Advanced Grants are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, supporting senior researchers to pursue curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs. There were a record number of 3,329 proposals to the competition this year.

European Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation, Ekaterina Zaharieva, said, ‘My congratulations to all the 319 new ERC Advanced Grant winners and a warm welcome to the researchers from Australia, Canada and the United States who have chosen Europe to carry out their research. These projects embody the spirit of scientific exploration that drives progress. The increase in applications from researchers based outside Europe shows that initiatives such as ‘Choose Europe’, aimed at attracting and keeping talent, are helping to reinforce Europe's appeal to top scientific talent worldwide.’

President of the European Research Council Professor Maria Leptin said, ‘The new Advanced Grant projects demonstrate the creativity, ambition, and intellectual boldness that frontier research requires. The ERC’s role is to support researchers who are asking difficult scientific questions and want to venture into unexplored territory in pursuit of new knowledge. Congratulations to all our new grantees. They are of 33 different nationalities - testament to Europe's strength as a destination for outstanding scientific talent, regardless of origin. We need to step up investment for Europe to lead in science and innovation.’

UCD now hosts 46 ERC frontier grants under Horizon Europe - totalling over €95 million which constitutes approximately 45% of the national ERC drawdown.

Professor Kate Robson Brown, Vice-President for Research, Innovation and Impact at UCD said, “The three outstanding projects awarded under the highly competitive ERC Advanced Grant programme highlight the breadth and diversity of research strengths at UCD. We are very proud of the success of our research leaders in this prestigious funding scheme.”

The UCD Projects

Associate Professor Rory Johnson, UCD School of Medicine, UCD Conway Institute, leads the REVOLVER project (Directed Evolution to Understand and Engineer Bioactive Long Noncoding RNAs).

COVID vaccines demonstrated that RNA, a molecule found in all our cells, can be harnessed as a powerful therapy. But researchers believe that RNA has far greater potential in medicine, particularly the enigmatic regulatory RNAs that inhabit the ‘Dark Matter’ of our genome and determine how our cells behave. To realise this potential, they must first solve the mystery of how regulatory RNAs work, and then learn to engineer them.

Backed by 2.5 million in ERC Advanced Grant funding, the REVOLVER project tackles both problems by harnessing the fundamental force of life: evolution. By pitting many thousands of different RNAs against each other, the project will allow survival of the fittest to select “enhanced” RNAs that protect cells against diseases like fatty liver disease.

The result will be not only new treatments for liver disease, but also a flexible new approach to developing drugs with applications in cancer and neurodegeneration. More fundamentally, this evolutionary approach can shed light on how natural selection has shaped the RNA in our genomes.

Associate Professor Johnson said, “The “Dark Matter” of our genome holds huge potential in medicine, but we lack the experimental tools to exploit it. I’m delighted that this ERC award will give me the chance to change that, by harnessing evolution to create RNA medicines that could transform how we treat disease."

Professor Porscha Fermanis, UCD School of English, Drama and Film, leads the PanAsia project (Anticolonialism, Pan-Asianism, and Periodical Culture in Southeast Asia, c.1850-1920).

With €2.5 million in ERC Advanced Grant funding, PanAsia is the first systematic analysis of the newspapers, journals, and magazines of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Southeast Asia. Spanning three European empires (French, British, and Dutch) and five interconnected port cities (Singapore, Penang, Rangoon, Batavia, and Saigon), the project will investigate how cooperative cultural endeavours between different ethnic groups laid the groundwork for the future decolonisation of Southeast Asia.

The project team will examine how periodicals created both “bonding networks” across diasporic communities and “bridging networks” between different ethnic groups. More specifically, they will consider pan-Asianism as a particular form of anticolonialism that advocates for the political, economic, and/or cultural unity of Asian peoples, and examine how the idea of a common Asian heritage was deployed by various ethnic groups to promote self-determination and liberation from western influence. The team will also address the significant challenges of dealing with print media publications in multiple languages across several territorial sites.

Professor Fermanis said, “I'm delighted to receive this award and hope that it will result in a multilingual periodical database that will be a resource for scholars of Southeast Asian literary and cultural history for years to come. I also hope that the project's focus on grassroots anticolonialism will result in the recovery of little-known literary texts and bring to the centre previously marginalised vernacular voices from diasporic and minority communities, serving as a prompt for further archival recovery projects in the region.”

Professor Anthony O’Mullane, Queensland University of Technology School of Chemistry & Physics, will lead ALMERS (Adaptive Liquid Metal Electrocatalytic Reaction Systems) working with UCD School of Chemistry.

Electrocatalysis underpins critical technologies for sustainable energy and environmental protection, but conventional solid catalysts which have been used for over 100 years still face fundamental limitations, including irreversible poisoning, poor selectivity and inability to adapt during operation. The ALMERS project has received €3,665,546 in ERC Advanced Grant funding to develop a new generation of catalysts based on liquid metals that can adapt, self-heal and be controlled during operation.

Unlike conventional catalysts, whose surfaces are fixed, liquid metal catalysts can be reconfigured continuously, opening new possibilities for sustainable chemical manufacturing and environmental remediation. Building on Professor O’Mullane’s recent discoveries, the project will investigate how these materials can be used to produce ammonia and urea more sustainably and to break down PFAS "forever chemicals" that contaminate water supplies.

By combining fundamental scientific discovery with solutions to major environmental and industrial challenges, ALMERS aims to establish a leading group in the emerging field of liquid metal catalytic science and position Europe at the forefront of adaptive catalysis technology to address climate change.

Professor O’Mullane said, "Many of the technologies needed for a sustainable future depend on discovering better catalysts. Liquid metal electrocatalysis is an emerging field that offers entirely new possibilities because these materials can adapt and regenerate themselves while operating. This ERC Advanced Grant provides the freedom and scale needed to explore these ideas at a fundamental level with the potential to influence clean energy, sustainable manufacturing and environmental remediation.”