©
Sharmaine Ijada, Getty Images.
The ERC Advanced Grants competition, part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, is one of the most prestigious and competitive funding schemes in the EU. It gives senior researchers the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs.
This year, the competition attracted 2,534 proposals, which were reviewed by panels of internationally renowned researchers. Only 281 (11 %) of proposals were selected for funding.
Among the awarded researchers, four are from the Medical Sciences Division:
Professor Ana Domingos, Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics
The brain helps control body weight by sending signals through the sympathetic nervous system. However, trying to treat obesity by targeting this system has raised concerns about possible side effects on the heart. This stems from the fact that very little is known about how these nerve networks are organised, mainly due to their anatomical inaccessibility. Professor Domingos’ lab is addressing this by developing advanced imaging and single-cell technologies to map the specific nerve cells that control fat burning without affecting the heart. Using the ERC Advanced Grant, she will characterise these neurons across different species used in drug development. Ultimately, her goal is to discover new ways to boost fat burning without affecting appetite or heart health, through a systems-level approach to sympathetic neuroscience.
Receiving this competitive grant is an honour reserved for a few, and it validates the importance of my research vision: that we must have a modern understanding of a long-overlooked neural system. This support enables my lab to pursue neuroscience-driven strategies for safe and cheaper obesity treatments - uncovering mechanisms that benefit millions
- Professor Ana Domingos
Professor Kevin Foster, Sir William Dunn School of Pathology
Professor Foster’s work focuses on the microbial communities that live on us and all around us, including the human gut microbiome. These communities contain many evolving and interacting species, which has made them notoriously difficult to understand and predict. Using the ERC Advanced Grant, he will tackle this complexity by focusing on something that unifies all microbial communities: metabolism and the need of microbes to harvest nutrients. By bridging metabolism and ecology, the goal is to predict how particular sets of species will behave in combination and establish the principles needed to rationally manipulate our own microbiomes.
Being awarded this grant is a testament to the talented people in my group who were pivotal in developing the ideas and preliminary data for the project. I am excited to work with them to pursuev our goal of predictive microbiome science.
- Professor Kevin Foster
professor Deirdre Hollingsworth, ndm Centre for Global Health Research and Big Data Institute, Nuffield Department of Medicine
Professor Hollingsworth’s project will focus on understanding interactions between neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), malaria and other diseases. While these diseases often affect the same communities, their dynamics are usually studied independently, despite some evidence that they can interact with each other in ways that impact disease transmission and control. Professor Hollingsworth will use advanced computer models and data analysis to map where these diseases overlap, study how they interact, and test how combining control efforts could improve health outcomes. The main goals are to better understand the fundamental biology of co-infections with NTDs, TB, malaria and HIV/AIDS, and help policy makers design better strategies to fight multiple diseases at once, ultimately improving the lives of some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.
I am looking forward to addressing a problem which is at the edge of our understanding of the transmission of infectious diseases, but at the forefront of the individual and public health implications of these complex infections - in partnership with our fabulous team of researchers and collaborators.
- Professor Deirdre Hollingsworth
Professor Peter Visscher, Oxford Population Health
Understanding human genetic variation is important, since this influences differences in disease risk, lifespan, and behaviour, and impacts how societies are organised. However, despite enormous advances in DNA sequencing technologies and the discovery of hundreds of thousands of DNA variants statistically associated with complex traits, we still have little information on which variants are causative, what traits they affect, and how they function. Professor Visscher’s project aims to quantify the full range of human traits influenced by genetics and pinpoint the specific DNA changes responsible for each one, by applying new statistical methods on data from millions of human genomes and thousands of traits.
EnterI am truly privileged to receive this ERC award after moving to Oxford only two years ago. Oxford University has been world-leading in establishing a number of very large human biobanks for research purposes, and data from these are essential for my ERC-funding research. I look forward to working with outstanding researchers across disciplines and departments on the project.
- Professor Peter Visscher
Congratulations to all the awardees!
Read the full story on the University of Oxford website