Luxinnovation is your National Contact Point for Horizon 2020. We offer customized support by doing pre-submission checks of your proposals, informing you about future opportunities, helping you identify strong consortia and by organizing thematic workshops on related soft skills.
Since 2017, the European Commission has reintroduced the ERC Synergy Grants. These are highly prestigious grants that finance a consortium of 2-4 high profile scientists for 6 years with a budget of up to 14M €. The idea of those grants is to bring together an exceptional team of group leaders from different or adjacent fields, working on a high-risk high-gain project that could not be financed through other means. The candidates need to have an outstanding track record that will be weighed by their respective career stage. The composition of the consortium is quite flexible (e.g. it could be composed of 4 principal investigators from the same host institute, or two PIs from different EU or associated countries etc) but they should complement each other and allow the project to be addressed from a completely novel point of view (no incremental continuation of an existing project). The ERC has significantly increased the budget for the Synergy Grants (SyG), which should lead to a success rate of around 10%. The next deadlines are in mid-November 2018 and 2019. As these are extremely ambitious projects, we want to help you to the best of our abilities.
For this reason, we propose two workshops:
- Information Event: 1 June from 10:00 – 12:00 at Luxinnovation: We will give you an introduction about the ERC SyGs, what kind of projects should be foreseen, what kind of researcher profiles are expected etc.
- Idea bootcamp: Based on your comments from the first session, we plan a follow-up event later this year (depending on if and when some of you plan to submit a proposal), where we work and discuss your project ideas, and where we invite past/current SyG holders, reviewers and experts.
Who is this for
The SyG are extremely competitive and thus you should be aware of its scope and of your track record. If in doubt, please contact us. If you are rather interested in the Starting, Consolidator or Advanced ERC grants, we will organize a separate event in September.
Registration
Please register before 1 May by sending an e-mail to Charles Betz (Charles.betz@luxinnovation.lu). If you cannot make it to the information event but you are strongly interested in SyGs, please get in touch.