Today, eleven researchers at the University of Oxford have been selected to receive prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants , each worth €1.5 million for a period of up to five years.
The ERC is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. Their Starting Grants, part of the Horizon Europe programme, are designed to support exceptional researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch their own projects, build research teams, and pursue their most promising ideas. This year, the scheme attracted 3,928 proposals, with just 478 (12%) of these being funded.
About the Oxford recipients:
Dr Martina Baradel (Department of Sociology): Dr Baradel's ERC-funded project, CrimCross, will investigate how organised crime groups, focusing on the Japanese yakuza, expand abroad by navigating cultural, linguistic, and legal barriers. It will examine how these groups build connections and adapt to different cultural contexts in East and Southeast Asia. Ultimately, this will advance understanding of cross-border criminal networks and their local entrenchment.
All these bright minds and the plethora of brilliant ideas that they will go after really inspire me, and so does their scientific creativity.
President of the European Research Council Professor Maria Leptin
Associate Professor Rachel Bernhard (Department of Politics & International Relations): Her project will investigate how complexity shapes politics, from simple slogans such as "build the wall" to the challenges of solving climate change. By developing new theories, data, and methods, the project will reveal why some problems are reduced to simple narratives while others remain stubborn "wicked problems."
Dr Yi-Ling Chen (CAMS Oxford Institute, Nuffield Department of Medicine): Dr Chen's funded project will investigate how lipid molecules generated during Group A Streptococcus (GAS) infection (e.g., strep throat) contribute to autoimmune diseases. By using patient samples and advanced Omics technologies, her team will deepen our understanding of how lipid antigens can be recognised by the immune system, as well as uncovering new treatment strategies that could prevent or mitigate autoimmune complications, amidst a global rise in GAS infections.
Associate Professor Natalia Chepiga (Department of Physics): Her ERC-funded project will develop new methods to computationally model quantum systems, focusing on the phenomena that occur between different quantum phases of matter. This could lead to the discovery of many new quantum phase transitions, in particular those that do not conform to known rules. These theory predictions could also be verified on available quantum simulation platforms.
Dr Dan Congrave (Department of Chemistry): The absorption and emission of light by organic molecules has broad ramifications across technologies, from cellular imaging in medicine, to the pixels in your mobile phone display. This ERC project aims to pioneer Discreet Organic Superluminophores (DISCOS) as a new class of molecules that will challenge long accepted views on how efficiently organic dyes can absorb and emit light, and serve as new tools to tackle a range of important longstanding research problems across traditional scientific boundaries.
Clockwise from top left: Dr Martina Baradel, Associate Professor Rachel Bernhard, Dr Yi-Ling Chen, Associate Professor Natalia Chepiga, Dr Dan Congrave (photo credit: Petri Murto), Dr Jiarui Gan, Associate Professor Amir Kafshdar Goharshady, Associate Professor Ana Namburete (photo credit: Pembroke College), Professor Christian Rupprecht, Dr Tina Schreier (photo credit: John Baker), Dr James Whittington.Dr Jiarui Gan (Department of Computer Science): His project aims to establish the computational foundations of the principal-agent framework, by developing algorithmic theories and tools for orchestrating "multi-agent symphonies" in next-generation agentic systems. This could power applications in areas that are being rapidly transformed by modern AI-from the sharing economy and transportation management to public policy making and collective problem-solving. These advances will help to ensure that AI agents and AI systems are not only more powerful, but also more principled, more cooperative, and better aligned with the common good.
Associate Professor Amir Kafshdar Goharshady (Department of Computer Science): Professor Goharshady's project aims to make software verification several orders of magnitude more scalable by exploiting the fact that many programs have significant underlying sparsity and tree-like structure. This can be leveraged to design more efficient verification algorithms. By applying methods from advanced mathematics and computer science, such as parameterized complexity and algebraic geometry, these faster algorithms will be capable of reliably checking very large, safety-critical software systems.
Associate Professor Ana Namburete (Department of Computer Science): Professor Namburete's ERC-funded project will develop advanced ultrasound-based imaging tools to seamlessly track brain development from foetal life into neonatal care. Using innovative AI and biophysics-inspired 2D-to-3D reconstruction, the project aims to deliver precise, high-resolution brain assessments at the bedside, improving early detection of developmental vulnerabilities in infants born prematurely or with growth restrictions.
Professor Christian Rupprecht (Department of Computer Science): The largest computer vision models are now trained on huge amounts of images from across the internet. But preparing this data is costly: expert labelling is expensive, and even simple labelling tasks become unaffordable when dealing with billions of images. This shortage of usable data has become a bottleneck to progress. Professor Rupprecht's ERC-funded project will tackle this problem by making data an active part of the training process itself, using generative models to help overcome the labelling barrier.
Dr Tina Schreier (Department of Biology): Dr Schreier's project will explore the cell biology that leads to the formation of specialised bundle sheath cells in plants that conduct C4 photosynthesis. In C4 photosynthesis, carbon dioxide is concentrated, increasing photosynthetic efficiency by up to 50% compared to plants that use C3 photosynthesis, which is more common. Dr Schreier will focus on two striking features of bundle sheath cells in the C4 plant Sorghum: the placement of plasmodesmata, the pores that connect neighbouring plant cells, and organelle positioning to uncover their underlying mechanisms and to link structure to metabolic function.
Dr James Whittington (Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences and Department of Experimental Psychology): His project aims to understand the algorithms by which networks of neurons support flexible behaviour, by both building neural network models and developing mathematical theories of optimal neural codes that flexibly solve tasks. He will then collaborate with experimentalists to test model and theory predictions in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.
Further information about the 2025 ERC Starting Grants can be found on the ERC website.
