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The application process for ERC Starting Grants is highly competitive: this year, around 14% of applications were successful, with 494 researchers selected out of 3,474 proposals.
Each of the Oxford researchers selected for a Starting Grant will receive up to €1.5 million for a period of five years.
Iliana Ivanova, Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, said: ‘The European Commission is proud to support the curiosity and passion of our early-career talent under our Horizon Europe programme. The new ERC Starting Grants winners aim to deepen our understanding of the world. Their creativity is vital to finding solutions to some of the most pressing societal challenges.’
Among the awarded researchers, three are from the Medical Science Division:
Dr Georgia Isom, Sir William Dunn School of Pathology
Antimicrobial resistant (AMR) micro-organisms are a major global threat to modern medicine. A major determinant of AMR in bacteria is the cell envelope, consisting of layers of protection that form physical barriers to drugs. Dr Isom’s research combines structural biology, biochemistry, and microbiology to study the molecular mechanisms by which bacteria build the cell envelope and protect themselves against antibiotics. The ERC Starting Grant will fund new work to uncover how bacteria transport lipids to build this cell envelope, potentially revealing new drug targets to weaken these barriers.
Dr Clémence Ligneul, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences
Dr Ligneul’s research focuses on methods to non-invasively image the microstructural properties of the brain. The ERC Starting Grant will fund a new project – called CellPrism – to track how the shape and quantity of different cell types in the brain changes during healthy development or disease. This will couple MRI scans with an advanced magnetic resonance spectroscopy method, called “diffusion-weighted MRS” (dMRS), which can detect the displacement of certain intracellular brain metabolites. These have distinct concentrations in different cell types, making dMRS highly sensitive to specific cell morphologies.
Dr Antoni Wrobel, Department of Biochemistry
Dr Wrobel’s project focuses on the structure and evolution of viral glycoproteins: molecules which bind to receptors on cell surfaces to enable a virus to enter a host. By combining structural, biochemical, and biophysical approaches, he and his team will investigate how different receptor types are recognised structurally by very similar viral glycoproteins, and how the type of receptor affects the strength of interaction and the process of viral entry. In addition, they will explore how changes in receptor binding can influence viral evolution, including the emergence of pandemic viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2.
Congratulations to all the awardees!
Read the full story on the University of Oxford website.