Professor Nataša Pržulj has won a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant to fund her research entitled Integrated Connectedness for a New Representation of Biology (ICON-BIO). As one of just 7 recipients at UCL, she will receive €2 million over 5 years for her research.
Grants of this kind are the most prestigious single PI grants, and in this awarding round, only 13% of the 2538 research proposals will be funded. Natasa has previously received an ERC Starting Grant for her project Biological Network Topology Complements Genome as a Source of Biological Information for 2012-2017.
“It is a great honour to receive a prestigious ERC award again,” said Professor Pržulj. “I am delighted to have been given this opportunity that will enable me to undertake very exciting, new research directions.”
“Within the project, I will work towards designing holistic, integrative approaches to modelling and analysing the complexity of biological and medical phenomena. The focus will be redefining currently accepted paradigms in data science, biology and medicine necessary for deeper insights and advancements in these disciplines. The ultimate goal is to find new treatments for complex and currently incurable diseases.”
The ERC announced the awarding of Consolidator Grants last week, which go to 329 top researchers across Europe. Part of the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, the funding is worth a total €630 million and will facilitate a far-reaching impact on science and beyond.
Nataša Pržulj is Professor of Biomedical Data Science. Her research mines ‘big data’ to extract information for biomedical knowledge. She studies the patterns of heterogeneous, large and complex omics networks, disease ontologies, clinical patient data, drug-drug and drug-target interaction networks, and uses this information to learn about biological systems and improve medical understanding.
In 2017, Professor Pržulj was elected into The Academy of Europe, Academia Europaea. In 2013, she was elected into the Young Academy of Europe. She has been a British Computer Society fellow since 2014, and was awarded the 2014 British Computer Society Roger Needham Award in recognition of the potential her research has to revolutionise health and pharmaceutics.
Read more about Professor Pržulj.
Read more about the 2017 ERC consolidator grants.
