Europe’s top grant winners: CNRS, CSIS and Cambridge

For European research institutes, the exam results are finally in from the continent’s most prestigious new grant competition: the French and Spanish research agencies, and the University of Cambridge, won the most grants from the new European Research Council.

According to a Science|Business analysis of the published list of 430 confirmed and “reserve” winners released Thursday night by the ERC, France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique placed first among European research institutions by hosting the largest number of finalists for the ERC grants: 20. Cambridge and Spain’s Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas tie at second place with 12 finalists each. In fourth and fifth place are the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam with 10, and Imperial College London with nine.

Look out for the red faces

The awards list, awaited by research administrators across Europe, will give new boasting rights to the winners – and prove embarrassing to others.

The ERC, an executive agency of the European Commission, was launched last year with a seven-year, €7.5 billion budget and a mandate to award basic-research grants solely on the judgment of panels of scientific reviewers. The aim is to create the first large, pan-European competition for basic research, as opposed to the national grant programmes by which most academic researchers get funding.

But already political hackles have been raised. The winning countries, according to generic data previously released by the ERC, were Britain, France and Germany – whereas Austria, Hungary, Portugal and the Czech Republic had only one winning institution each. Poland had none.

But ERC officials have suggested caution in reading too much into the results of this first grant round. The agency was surprised by an avalanche of 9,167 applications – so many that it had to call in extra bureaucratic help from national research bodies.

Ultra-slim chances of success

With only €290 million allocated for the first round of awards, the resulting “cull” rate was extreme: about 97 per cent of applications failed. Those are daunting odds by the standards of most national research programmes – where rejection rates of more than 50 per cent are often considered stiff, and 90 per cent virtually unheard-of.  

A further factor influencing the results, ERC officials have said, is that its programmes are new – so the results may be a more accurate reflection of which institutions were best organised to pounce on the new grant opportunities. A different pattern may emerge in the next round of grants, aimed at senior researchers.

The awards announced on Thursday are for the ERC’s  so-called Starting Grants aimed at young researchers (defined as having received their PhDs within the past two to nine years). The ERC expects to spend about €290 million on the first call, and the finalists’ list is in two parts: 201 researchers on a “priority” list who are assured of getting the money, and another 229 on a “reserve” list; those at the top of the reserve list are also likely to get funding so long as the money holds out. In all, the ERC said, it expects there will be about 300 winners. The agency had previously released general statistics on its finalists by country and discipline and informed the winners and their institutions individually – but until Thursday it hadn’t publicly released the full list of finalists and their institutions.

The list has many surprises. Within Britain, for instance, Cambridge and Imperial beat Oxford (seven finalists), the Medical Research Council (six) and Cancer Research UK (four). University College London and King’s College London had just two researchers on the list – well below their positions on international academic league tables.

In Switzerland, ETH-Zürich had just one winner, while arch-rival EPF-Lausanne had three. In Sweden, Karolinska Institutet came first with five finalists, Gothenburg University came second, and Uppsala third – leaving Lund, Chalmers and others institutes behind. In Belgium, the Flemish Katholieke Universiteit Leuven came first with seven finalists, while Francophone rival Université Catholique de Louvain had three. Others among the ERC’s top ten were Germany’s Max Planck Society, Israel’s Technion, and France’s Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique.