The “5 Years of Excellent IDEAS” event celebrated last 29 of February marked the achievements achieved by the European Research Council to date. After five years of existence, the ERC has funded more than 2,500 excellent researchers of 53 different nationalities working in some 480 different institutions across Europe. The total funding allocated to date has been €4.2 billion.

The European Research Council celebrated in a two-days event, the “5 Years of Excellent IDEAS”, its five years to funding researchers. Since its setting up in 2007, the ERC has funded more than 2,500 excellent researchers of 53 different nationalities working in some 480 different institutions across Europe. The total funding allocated to date, €4.2 billion, has given them a chance to conduct their projects in Europe, of which many will spark new and sometimes unpredictable scientific and technological discoveries. In total, the ERC has therefore contributed to supporting over 12,000 researchers.

With regard to the topics covered by the ERC funding, it covers the entire spectrum of disciplines; ranging from studying the epidemiology of diseases like malaria or the causes of Parkinson, to improving critical infrastructures such as telecoms networks or water systems, creating new prototypes of chemical robots or discovering archaeological treasures in Africa, such as the evidence of a lost civilisation in Libya discovered thanks to an ERC-funded project.

The ERC operates according to an 'investigator-driven', or 'bottom-up', approach, allowing researchers to identifynew opportunities in any field of research. The ERC is a component of the EU’s Seventh Research Framework Programme (‘Ideas’ Specific Programme), which has a total budget of €7.5 billion from 2007 to 2013. For the next Framework Programme, 'Horizon 2020', the European Commission has proposed an increase of 77% of the ERC budget.