Our Mythical Childhood...

The Reception of Classical Antiquity in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture in Response to Regional and Global Challenges

Meet the ERC

Meet the European Research Council (ERC)

The European Research Council (ERC) is a public and independent body supporting excellence in science and scholarship. Its mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields, on the basis of scientific excellence. The ERC was officially launched in 2007 and now it operates within the Horizon 2020, the European Union’s Research Framework Programme for 2014 to 2020. 

The idea for establishing the ERC first came out of widespread discussions between European scientists, scholars, and research umbrella organisations at a time when no clear European mechanism to support basic research on a broad front existed. Ultimately, the ERC strives for making the European research base more prepared to respond to the needs of a knowledge-based society and provide Europe with the capabilities in frontier research necessary to meet global challenges. The ERC aims to:


  • Support the best of the best in Europe across all fields of science, scholarship, and engineering;
  • Promote wholly investigator-driven, or ‘bottom-up’ frontier research;
  • Encourage the work of the established and next generation of independent top research leaders in Europe;
  • Reward innovative proposals by placing emphasis on the quality of the idea rather than the research area;
  • Raise the status and visibility of European frontier research and the very best researchers of today and tomorrow.


The ERC wishes to stimulate scientific excellence by funding the very best, creative researchers of any nationality and age, and supporting their innovative ideas. The ERC operates within the three main funding schemes: Starting, Consolidator, and Advanced Grants. The Consolidator Grants – available to researchers of any nationality with 7–12 years of experience since completion of PhD, a scientific track record showing great promise and an excellent research proposal – are designed to back up scholars who wish to establish or strengthen their independent and excellent research teams.* 

 

*The presentation of the ERC has been extracted from the materials available at its website: https://erc.europa.eu. 

See also: https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/european-research-council. 

Our Mythical Childhood at the ERC’s website: https://erc.europa.eu/projects-figures/stories/linking-classical-antiquity-and-modern-youth-culture.