European Research Council grant success

Links:

ucl.ac.uk/research/europe/contact/" target="_self">European Research and Development Office

Professor Ian Robinson

Professor Matteo Carandini

Professor Rani Spiegler

Professor Dimitri Kullmann

Professor Phillipe Jehiel

European Research Council

UCL has won five Advanced Grants worth a total of nearly nine million Euro for research and development from the European Commission's European Research Council (ERC).

ERC applications are designed to fund teams where the only evaluation criterion is scientific excellence - which means that only the very best applications from across Europe are funded.

Michael Browne, Head of UCL European Research and Development said: "For UCL to secure five ERC Advanced Grants, with an overall European-wide success rate of 12.5 per cent, is an outstanding achievement for both the principal investigators and the university as a whole."

The five research projects that have been funded are below.

• Professor Ian Robinson from the London Centre for Nanotechnology received 2.5m Euro for a project that will explore the effects of strain formations in nanostructures using x-ray diffraction methods that his team has developed.
• Professor Matteo Carandini of the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology won 2.5m Euro to investigate computations by neurons and populations in the visual cortex.
• Professor Rani Spiegler (UCL Economics) has 1.1m Euro to look into bounded rationality in industrial organisation.
• Professor Dimitri Kullmann (UCL Institute of Neurology) has received 2.5m Euro to explore long-term synaptic plasticity in interneurons (a subset of inhibitory neurons in the brain).
• Professor Phillipe Jehiel of UCL Economics has won 169,000 Euro to investigate game theory and application in the presence of cognitive limitation.

To find out more about the awardwinners, follow the links at the top of this item.