The ERC awards the Advanced Grants to established, leading principal investigators who require long-term funding to pursue a ground-breaking, high-risk project. Have a look at the researchers of Erasmus University Rotterdam who were able to start such a project because of an ERC Advanced Grant.
ERC Advanced Grant in 2023
Prof Caroline Klaver, affiliated with the Department of Ophthalmology (Erasmus MC), has been awarded the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant of 2.5 million euro for research on myopia. Over the next five years, she will investigate the effectiveness of therapy, develop a prediction model for high myopia and examine children's lifestyle and patient participation.
Klaver's research will help improve the treatment of myopia, or nearsightedness. Klaver: 'We need to gain a better understanding of why people become myopic, so that we can use the right treatment for the right child to prevent high myopia. We also need to raise awareness about children's lifestyle, because there is still a lot to gain here. For clinical care, we need to arrive at, among other things, an artificial intelligence-based decision model that relies on a solid scientific basis of integrated multidisciplinary data.'
Previous years
In 2020, Prof Thea Hilhorst (ISS) received an ERC Advanced Grant for her project 'Humanitarian governance: accountability, advocacy, alternatives'. The ERC awarded her this grant for a 5-year research project into how humanitarian governance is evolving, how civil society actors and crisis-affected people shape humanitarian governance, and how humanitarian studies can become more participatory and respectful of local research capacities. It aims to understand what patterns of governance emerge in different types of crises and in different contexts of state–society relations, government traditions, and styles of statehood. The study focuses on Colombia, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as case studies.
In addition, it will study the international policies of climate-related displacement to understand how humanitarian governance is challenged through accountability and advocacy practices. The evaluation committee states that the research is unique as it proposes methodologies 'to de-colonize humanitarian research and to develop a bottom-up perspective that has been largely missing to date.'
In 2019, Professor Jun Borras was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant to study land politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Borras will use this ERC Grant to build upon his long-standing work on land politics and widen it to examine how it reshapes five spheres of global social life, namely, food, climate change politics, labour, nation-state/citizenship, and geopolitics in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
> For more information see project page.
In 2017, Prof. Jan Hoeijmakers (Erasmus MC) received an ERC Advanced Grant for his project 'DNA damage and ageing'. Hoeijmakers discovered that deficiencies in DNA repair processes in humans and mice accelerate ageing in virtually every organ. In addition, he established that quickly ageing mice that are put on a diet l see a 200% increase in their lifespan and remain far healthier. Hoeijmakers now wants to gain a clearer understanding of the mechanism behind this dietary restriction. In addition, he is examining how this knowledge can be applied in a clinical setting – for the benefit of patients suffering from accelerated ageing or early-onset dementia, for example. The results could contribute to healthy ageing and the prevention of ageing diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and cancer.