Two Oxford University academics are to co-lead ambitious new research projects backed by European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grants , part of the EU's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. Synergy Grants foster collaboration between outstanding researchers, enabling them to combine their expertise, knowledge and resources to push the boundaries of scientific discovery.
Of the 712 proposals submitted this year, around 10% were successful. The grants are worth around €10.3 million each, and will support groups of researchers to tackle some of the most challenging scientific questions.
About the Oxford recipients
MINerVA
Prof Ellie TzimaProfessor Ellie Tzima (Radcliffe Department of Medicine) will be co-leading the MINerVA project (Mechanobiology of IntraNervous Vasculature).
Problems with the peripheral nervous system - the network of nerves outside the brain and spinal cord - can cause pain, numbness, and disability in people, affecting millions of people worldwide. Understanding how nerves and blood vessels talk to each other could help us repair nerve damage faster, and better treat illnesses related to diabetes, cancer treatments, or injuries.
The MINeRVA project will tackle this gap by mapping the cells and molecules that make up the peripheral nerves.
The team, made up of experts in neuroscience, vascular biology, mechanobiology, and nanotechnology, aims to:
Unravel the mechanisms by which nerves and blood vessels communicate with each other,
Show how peripheral nerves sense everyday movement and blood flow,
Develop new ways to send drugs directly to nerve cells.
We're only starting to understand how closely they communicate to keep our body tissues healthy. We want to crack the code of nerve-blood vessel communication.
Professor Ellie Tzima, co-Principal Investigator of the MINerVA project
Professor Tzima said: "One of the biggest unknowns in human biology is how nerves and blood vessels work together. We're only starting to understand how closely they communicate to keep our body tissues healthy. We want to crack the code of nerve-blood vessel communication, and this ERC Synergy Grant provides an exceptional opportunity to do so. Our project will bring together diverse expertise and resources from across Europe to understand how these two systems interact, and what goes wrong when their connection fails."
The MINerVA project is a collaboration between four Principal Investigators; Ellie Tzima (the University of Oxford), Dario Bonanomi (Hospital San Raffaele, Italy), Isabelle Brunet (INSERM; the National Institute of Health and Medical Research, France), and Tambet Teesalu (the University of Tartu, Estonia).
VePaSS
Professor Vincent Cheval
Prof Vincent Cheval
Digital systems like online banking, electronic voting, messaging, and cloud storage have become critical infrastructure. But these systems are increasingly under attack, with ransomware, payment fraud, and data breaches posing risks to all of society. Such systems are kept safe by security protocols - rules computers follow behind the scenes to stay secure.
To ensure their robustness, these security measures are rigorously tested and subjected to formal and mathematical verification within established security models. However, currently, verifying security systems requires simplifying their probabilistic behaviours (how they use randomness to stay unpredictable to attackers).
We're using ideas from security, game theory, and symbolic computation to check that real-world security systems - like those used in industry - are actually secure.
Professor Vincent Cheval , co-Principal Investigator of the VePaSS project
This simplification can leave potential gaps and unknown weaknesses in systems that safeguard critical applications such as online banking and digital communications. At the same time, over the past two decades, probabilistic verification and game theory have been extensively applied to other domains, like networking, cyber-physical systems, and economics, for more nuanced and accurate analyses.
The VePaSS project brings together computer science and maths, to fix this problem. It aims to create new ways to verify security systems that use randomness. By combining recent advances in probabilistic game and computer modelling, the project hopes to make digital systems safer for everyone - improving trust, safeguarding the economy, and ensuring the integrity of elections. Professor Cheval said: "It's really exciting to work with experts in different areas of computer science and maths. We're using ideas from security, game theory, and symbolic computation to check that real-world security systems - like those used in industry - are actually secure. At the same time, it requires us to solve some fundamental, long-standing questions in theoretical computer science."
The VePaSS project is a collaboration between four Principal Investigators (PIs); Vincent Cheval (University of Oxford) and Mahsa Shirmohammadi from the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), France, who is a visiting researcher to the Oxford Department of Computer Science and a stipendiary lecturer at University College. They will be working in close collaboration with fellow PIs at the CNRS, Sébastien Tavenas and Véronique Cortier.
Further information about the 2025 ERC Synergy Grants can be found on the ERC website .
