Ryan Cook and Niels Rietveld receive prestigious starting scholarships

What’s called Start grants Designated for scholars who have a minimum of two years of work experience and a maximum of seven years after obtaining their doctoral degree. With grants worth €2.5 million each, they can run their own research team.

This time, the European Research Council (ERC) awarded 436 grants with a total value of €677 million. This is 56 million euros more than last year. As always, the chance of success was slim: only 13 percent of all applications were honored.

Germany is the biggest winner in this round with 88 grants. Second place went to the United Kingdom, which managed to obtain 62. It was followed by the Netherlands (42), France (38), and Switzerland (34).

from everything Start grants The Netherlands achieved 9.6 percent. The laureates conduct research on a wide range of scientific topics: from robots made of soft materials to the effect of pregnancy on the human brain.

Just like last year, most of the grants in our country went to scientists from the University of Amsterdam (8). Utrecht University also performs well (5), followed by Leiden University (4) and NWO institutes (4).

The Netherlands has done remarkably well in applying for European research funding for years. It is no coincidence that universities were angry when it became clear before the holiday that the billions allocated to the European science budget were less than initially planned.

September 4 update: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Erasmus University received the fewest grants of all Dutch universities. This is incorrect: the cities of Groningen, Tilburg and Twente receive one grant, while the cities of Groningen, Tilburg and Twente receive one grant in euros.