31. August 2018

Talented researchers receive ERC Starting Grants

Logo: ERC
Logo: ERC

At the end of July, the European Research Council (ERC) disclosed this year’s 403 recipients of the so-called ERC Starting Grants, which supply funding of up to 2 million EUR over a period of up to five years. This type of grant is awarded annually to talented researchers with two to seven years’ experience since completing their Ph.D. theses and can be used to build a research group around an innovative research project. This year, 13 percent of the applicants received the coveted Starting Grants.

Among the recipients, 15 promising researchers are affiliated with Danish research institutions, a Danish record. Four of the recipients are affiliated or have been affiliated with a DNRF center.

The DNRF center iCourts at the University of Copenhagen impressively claims two of the 15 Danish ERC Starting Grants: one to Associate Professor Mikkel Jarle Christensen and another to Professor Jan Komárek. Christensen will receive 11.1 million DKK for his project, called The Global Sites of International Criminal Justice (JustSites), which will run from 2019-2023. Komárek will also receive 11.1 million DKK for the project European Constitutional Imaginaries: Utopias, Ideologies and the Other (IMAGINE), which will run from 2019-2024.

Read more about the research projects at iCourts here

Another recipient is Associate Professor Claudio Orlandi from Aarhus University, who received the grant for his research on confidential, efficient and secure multiparty computing (MPC). Orlandi was previously affiliated with the Danish-Chinese Center for the Theory of Interactive Computation, which was funded by the DNRF from 2011-2017.

Kirsten Ørnsbjerg Jensen, a former Ph.D. student and post-doc at the DNRF Center for Material Crystallography (CMC), is also one of this year’s 15 Danish recipients. Jensen is currently a professor at the Nano-Science Center at the University of Copenhagen.

The full list of the Danish recipients can be found here (in Danish)

Read the press release from the ERC here 

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