UZH Secures Ten ERC Starting Grants

The European Research Council (ERC) received a record of 4,807 proposals for Starting Grants in this year’s call. Of these, only 8.8% were awarded funding. A Starting Grant provides up to EUR 1.5 million over a maximum period of five years.

Ten projects submitted by UZH researchers received one of the coveted grants. A total of 49 UZH researchers applied, and 23 of them advanced to the second round.

Here is a look at the UZH projects:

Immune cells can protect and repair tissues, but they can also fuel inflammation and cause damage. What determines which role they take on in the inflamed central nervous system (CNS)? To begin answering this question, this project studies monocytes – a subgroup of leukocytes, or white blood cells –  in chronic neuroinflammation, focusing on multiple sclerosis.

Using high-resolution single-cell mapping, multiplexed imaging, and genetic tools, the project investigates how local environments reshape these cells and identifies signals that make them beneficial or harmful. The goal is to find markers of progression and treatments that redirect harmful immune responses while preserving protective ones.

Immunotherapy has transformed the treatment of some solid cancers, but many patients do not respond or do not achieve lasting benefit. Often, the immune cells meant to attack the tumor accumulate around it but fail to effectively penetrate the tumor core.

ExclusionMap asks what creates this state, known as immune exclusion. The project combines large-scale data from patient tumors with experimental models to identify the signals associated with immune exclusion and to test which of them drive it. The findings will provide a basis for developing therapeutic strategies to improve immune access to solid tumors.

The research program revolves around the mathematical study of many-particle systems found both in quantum mechanics and in the field of probability. Famously known as the curse of dimensionality, these systems are notoriously hard to solve as their complexity grows rapidly with the number of interacting participants.

The central goal of this project is to understand how the underlying complex microscopic structures give rise to macroscopic patterns and how to effectively describe them using a low-dimensional theory that is far easier to work with.

Antimicrobial resistance is a major challenge to the health system, and new strategies to combat this thread are therefore required. LASSOVERSE explores lasso peptides, a unique group of natural molecules that could provide new building blocks for future medicines.

By combining chemistry and biology, the project will develop new ways to produce and modify these molecules, improving their properties and expanding their potential. The goal is to turn these largely unexplored natural products into useful tools for developing new antimicrobial treatments.

Extremal black holes are special solutions to the Einstein equations, representing black holes with the maximal spin or charge for their mass. According to black hole thermodynamics, these black holes have absolute zero temperature and were thus thought to be merely an idealized, unattainable limit.

Recent mathematical progress, however, has shown that extremal black holes can indeed form in finite time in gravitational collapse of charged matter. Building on this discovery, this project will study the dynamical role of extremal black holes with a particular emphasis on criticality, universality and instability.

Most research on media and politics studies news and political messages, yet these make up only 3% of what people encounter online. HIDDENPOL turns to the other 97% instead: entertainment, lifestyle sites, blogs and social media influencers.

The project combines large-scale computational analysis of this content in the Netherlands, Spain and the United States with survey- and field-experiments, asking whether it quietly shapes citizens’ values and beliefs. The aim is to find out where political influence hides in media that never announce themselves as political.

One in six European teenagers is bullied at school, and many more are exposed to harassment and harmful content online. Yet we know little about the lasting damage these experiences cause, or what actually works to prevent them.

SAFECHILD will fill this gap by studying the lasting impact of a major anti-bullying program on children’s education and careers into adulthood. It will also investigate whether parents accurately perceive their children’s online risks and run an experiment testing whether parental-monitoring tools and other preventive measures can protect children’s learning and mental health.

Climate change threatens economies around the world, but its full economic costs and the trade-offs involved in climate policy remain uncertain. This project studies how rising temperatures affect growth, health, consumption and prices, and how these effects spread across countries through trade. It also examines the economic impacts of policies such as carbon pricing, green investment and subsidies.

By combining new data, modern empirical methods and economic models, the project will provide better estimates of climate damages and inform decisions about how best to tackle climate change.

Two additional grants secured by researchers who were employed at UZH at the time of the application will be transferred to other higher education institutions:

Isabel Raabe: Blending Online and Offline Social Ties: How Digital and Inperson Social Processes in Peer-Family-Embedded Networks Shape Educational Inequalities

Vakil Takhaveev: Error or Program? Resolving the Mechanisms of Ageing via High-Resolution Cross-Species Mapping of Major DNA-Damage Types