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The European Research Council (ERC) awards substantial project funding to researchers each year, and to date, several dozen Estonian scientists have brought an ERC grant home. At a conference held in Tartu, researchers who have already received the grant encouraged their colleagues to dream bigger, but also to be prepared for a long writing and waiting process.
“You need to have a great idea, you need to find funding to work on it for ten years and only then might you finally get the ERC,” says Laur Kanger, professor of sustainable transitions at the University of Tartu. It took him four attempts to secure the European grant. Over the course of a decade, he applied in a different category each time. Once as a starting, once as a consolidator and once as an advanced researcher. In the end, he received the funding in 2025 from the reserve list for consolidator grants.
Associate Professor of Genetics at the University of Tartu Hedvig Tamman agrees that writing an ERC proposal takes time, but says the time she invested eventually paid off. “My project was strongly based on what I actually know. I went back to my foundational knowledge, what I did during my PhD and postdoc and found a common theme between them,” she recalls. In 2023, Tamman was awarded a Starting Grant from the ERC, which began in 2024. Her research focuses on the arms race between bacteria and the viruses that attack them.
Kanger’s ERC project, on the other hand, revolves around the blind faith that science and new technologies will save humanity from environmental problems. His research investigates how this overconfidence in science and technology developed, what small mechanisms are holding back broader sustainable transitions and where such transitions are most likely to take root. “The trouble is that these ideas largely stem from the 19th and 20th centuries. So it shouldn’t come as a major surprise that we’re likely repeating the exact same problems seen during the history of industrial society,” he explains.
‘A calm mind and fire in your heart’
What advice do researchers who have already navigated the ERC process have for their Estonian colleagues who also hope to apply for funding from the European Research Council? According to Hedvig Tamman, the most important thing is to have the courage and initiative to try, to take one idea and really explore it in depth. “I think Estonians might be a bit self-conscious and self-critical,” she reflects. In her view, that’s no reason to shy away from applying out of fear that the project might not succeed and the effort will be wasted.
At the University of Tartu, a dedicated grants center supports researchers in both applying for and managing grants, including ERC projects. Tamman says this kind of institutional support is very helpful from a researcher’s standpoint. “Maybe other universities should consider implementing something similar, a grants center to support ERC applications,” she adds.
Laur Kanger points out that the ERC system is highly competitive. Since the evaluation process tends to focus on identifying flaws, projects that truly open up new directions are, in his words, often weeded out early. “A big part of writing a proposal is finding the right balance between novelty and feasibility,” he notes.
At the inspiration conference held in Tartu, Kanger says every ERC-funded researcher on his panel emphasized that the workload involved in writing an application should not be underestimated. “It’s not like you can sit down for three weeks and have a finished proposal,” he says. One panelist gave what he felt was a more realistic account: it took her a year and a half, including various stages, to write the application.
“In the end, you need a proposal where not a single word is superfluous or missing,” says Kanger. Moreover, the researcher must write for a non-specialist reader. Someone who, as Kanger puts it, cannot be expected to fill in the gaps on their own. “A calm mind and fire in your heart,” he offers as his final piece of advice.
Not too much red tape
According to both Laur Kanger and Hedvig Tamman, researchers who have already secured an ERC project need not worry about excessive bureaucracy. Kanger notes that large Horizon Europe projects involve far more paperwork and that the real challenge is the overall workload. “I didn’t allocate enough resources for managing the project and ended up spending a lot of time just trying to find someone to handle it,” he recalls.
Tamman, who currently also holds a grant from EMBO (the European Molecular Biology Organization) says that one involves even less bureaucracy. For her ERC project, she has a dedicated project manager who handles all the administrative work. “Compared to other grants, it really is very little. ERC is a very researcher-friendly grant,” Tamman points out.
In her view, ERC grants are largely aimed at fundamental research. In other words, the project doesn’t need to revolve around a clearly defined product or an immediately tangible goal. “It allows you to do a bit more curiosity-driven science. That might eventually lead to some kind of product, but it’s grounded in basic research,” Tamman explains.
Author: Airika Harrik / Editor: Marcus Turovski. This article was originally published on the the Estonian Public Broadcasting online news portal.
If ERC Grants sound like rocket fuel for brilliant minds, that’s because they are! Strap in and head to our next article where ambition meets funding and ideas are cleared for liftoff and read more about The exhibition “Estonian Research Excellence Showcase: ERC Grants Across the Years” is now also open for virtual viewing!
