New appointments to European Research Council

The European Research Council, the EU’s funding agency for basic research, has chosen two new vice-presidents and three new members for its scientific council on Tuesday (17 February).

The incoming vice-presidents are Sierd Cloetingh, a Dutch professor of earth sciences and tectonics at the Utrecht University and Mart Saarma, an Estonian national and a director of the Centre of Excellence in Molecular and Integrated Neuroscience Research at the University of Helsinki.

Cloetingh will lead the ERC’s physical science and engineering division while Saarma will oversee the ERC’s life science activities. Both previously served on the ERC scientific council, the body which elects new vice presidents.

The new appointees will replace Pavel Exner of Czech Republic’s Doppler Institute for Mathematical Physics and Applied Mathematics and Carl-Henrik Heldin of Sweden’s Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, whose terms of office came to an end in December. A third vice president, Núria Sebastián Gallés of Spain’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra, will remain vice president for social sciences and humanities.

Scientific council appointees

The three new members selected for the ERC’s 22-person top level of management are Tomas Jungwirth of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Janet Thornton of the UK-based European Bioinformatics Institute, and Fabio Zwirner of the University of Padova in Italy.

Scientific council appointments are made by the European Commission, on advice from a special “identification committee”, which is made up of seven researchers based almost exclusively in Western Europe institutes.

More new scientific council appointments will be announced later this year, an ERC statement read.  
Press release including biographies of new members here