The European Research Council has announced projects selected for the ERC Synergy Grant 2025 competition.

The European Research Council (ERC) announced on November 6th the projects selected for the ERC Synergy Grant 2025 , which aims to fund highly complex and interdisciplinary collaborative cutting-edge research.

The Synergy Grants aim to foster collaboration between teams of two to four researchers, enabling them to set more ambitious goals that they would not be able to address individually. 66 projects were selected, totaling €684 million in funding.

Two of the selected projects, totaling €20 million, involve researchers working in Portugal, representing a direct benefit of €10.1 million for their teams:

• João Mano (CICECO/UAveiro) and Nuno Araújo (CFTC/FCUL) are part of a consortium that also includes a researcher in the United Kingdom, with the RODIN project – “Cell-mediated sculptable living platforms as highly efficient hybrid units to bioengineer human microtissues” , combining the areas of bioengineering, physics and personalized medicine.
• Elsa Logarinho (I3S/UPorto) is part of a consortium with two researchers in France, with the project CenAGE – “ CenAGE, a 'Centromeric' view on AGEing: unveiling centromere instability in ageing ” , which focuses on the interconnection between chromosomal instability and biological processes of aging.

The RODIN project is the first consortium with two Portuguese teams to be funded by the ERC-Synergy Grant and, given the specific nature of this competition, will represent a significant funding volume of €6.8 million, directly benefiting national institutions. With the CenAGE project, whose funding volume is €3.3 million, I3S becomes the first institution in the National Science and Technology System (SNCT) to host two projects of this type. To date, national researchers have been involved in four Synergy Grant projects, now totaling six.

With these results, research conducted in institutions within the National Science and Technology System (SNCT) has reached the milestone of €140 million secured through ERC funding since the start of Horizon Europe , the European framework program for research and innovation funding for the period 2021-2027. For reference, Portugal has already secured €150 million from the ERC between 2014 and 2020.

The FCT has been developing a set of innovative programs covering all cycles of national participation in ERC calls, from application preparation to securing permanent positions for researchers conducting research abroad (ERC-PT Careers – Attract ) and researchers conducting research in Portugal (ERC-PT Careers – Retain ). The ERC-Portugal Program includes the following core programs: Pre-Assessment , to support the national scientific community in preparing proposals; ERC A-Projects , for funding national applications with top rankings not selected for ERC funding; and ERC-PT Careers , for attracting and retaining researchers with ERC projects.