Berlin Scores Big With Five ERC Advanced Grants
From childhood brain tumors to urban stress and biomolecular simulation: Berlin researchers are taking on some of science's biggest challenges with fresh EU funding.
Berlin has had a strong showing in the latest round of ERC Advanced Grants, with five researchers from the city's universities and research institutes landing some of Europe's most competitive scientific funding. The European Research Council selected 319 winners from 3,329 applicants across the continent. Out of that elite group, Berlin claimed five grants.
Two went to scientists at the Max Delbrück Center: Professor Uwe Ohler and Dr. Gaetano Gargiulo, each receiving 2.5 million euros over five years. Ohler will use his grant for the TRANS-DECODE project, investigating how cells regulate translation, the process by which messenger RNA is used to build proteins. Many genetic diseases arise not from mutations in protein-coding genes but from errors in this regulatory process. Ohler's team will combine machine learning with modern molecular biology to decode these mechanisms and ultimately develop tools for targeted RNA therapies and vaccine design. Gargiulo's project, MOIRA, takes aim at childhood brain tumors. His team will build highly realistic tumor models, or "avatars," in human brain organoids, tracking how healthy developing brain cells turn cancerous. The approach merges synthetic biology, organoid research, and AI-based validation. It's already Gargiulo's fourth ERC award.
At Freie Universität Berlin, physicist Prof. Cecilia Clementi receives around 3 million euros for ProDyGe, which aims to simulate biomolecular dynamics across scales previously out of reach for computation.
At TU Berlin, two further grants go to Prof. Klaus Gramann, studying how urban environments shape the brain (URBRAIN, 2.75 million euros), and art historian Prof. Bénédicte Savoy, whose REMAPP project (2.5 million euros) investigates African traditions of preserving and presenting cultural heritage.