ERC Awards Proof of Concept Grants to 182 Researchers, Including Three at TU Darmstadt
核心洞察
The European Research Council (搜索) awarded 182 Proof of Concept Grants in its latest funding round, selecting one in three proposals from 554 applications.
Three TU Darmstadt (搜索) researchers received €150,000 each over 18 months for projects in electron microscopy, cryo-microscopy for living cells, and AI-resistant chip design security.
The Proof of Concept scheme helps ERC grantees explore the commercial and societal innovation potential of discoveries from their frontier research.
The European Research Council (搜索) (ERC) has awarded Proof of Concept Grants to 182 researchers across Europe in its latest funding round, selecting approximately one in three proposals from a competitive pool of 554 applications — a 15% increase over the previous year's first round. Among the recipients, the Technical University of Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt (搜索)) secured three grants, placing it alongside Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (搜索) and behind only the Technical University of Munich (搜索), which received four.
The Proof of Concept scheme, now having supported nearly 2,500 projects since its inception, provides top-up funding exclusively to researchers who currently hold or have previously been awarded ERC frontier research grants. Each award provides €150,000 over 18 months, not for new research activities, but to assess market potential and advance application maturity, commercialisation, or marketing of ideas stemming from completed or ongoing ERC-funded projects.
"Many of today's innovations begin with a researcher asking a fundamental question. These 182 projects show that curiosity-driven science and real-world impact go hand in hand," said Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation. "With Proof of Concept funding, ERC researchers can test how their discoveries could become new treatments, technologies, services or solutions that benefit people across Europe."
Prof. Maria Leptin, President of the European Research Council (搜索), added: "It turns out to have been a very good move of the ERC Scientific Council to introduce the top up funding 'Proof of Concept'. By now, nearly 2,500 such grants have helped our grantees explore the innovation potential of discoveries from their ERC-funded research."
Three TU Darmstadt (搜索) Projects Funded
TU Darmstadt (搜索) achieved a perfect success rate in this round, with all three submitted projects selected for funding. "I am delighted that, following the successful basic research carried out in our ERC Grant projects, we can now explore and harness the economic and societal innovation potential of these scientific findings in three different ways," said Professor Matthias Oechsner, Vice-President for Research at TU Darmstadt.
The CALIBRATE project, led by Professor Leopoldo Molina-Luna of the Department of Materials- and Geosciences, aims to develop a new calibration standard for transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Currently, no universally applicable standard exists for accurately measuring electron beam intensity at the sample position. The project integrates microscopically small Faraday cups onto MEMS chips already used in modern TEMs, enabling direct and precise measurement. CALIBRATE builds on Molina-Luna's prior STARE and BED-TEM Proof of Concept projects and represents his fifth ERC-funded project, conducted in collaboration with Goethe University Frankfurt (搜索).
The cryo-iLM project, under Professor Thomas Burg of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, addresses a fundamental limitation in biomedical microscopy: existing techniques struggle with living cells due to movement, light sensitivity, and ongoing biological changes. While flash-freezing within fractions of a second can solve this, optical microscope performance degrades severely at low temperatures. Burg's team is developing a novel microscopy platform using microsystem technology to bring ultra-cold samples into direct, non-destructive contact with the microscope objective lens, enabling high-resolution imaging of internal structures even at cryogenic temperatures. The project builds directly on Burg's MICROCRYO ERC project.
The MIRAGE project, led by Professor Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi of the Department of Computer Science, tackles security risks in the exchange of chip designs. Modern computer chips are assembled from numerous IP blocks shared between companies, but artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly adept at identifying and replicating such designs. MIRAGE automatically transforms RTL code — the hardware description language for chip circuitry — so that functionality remains intact while rendering designs virtually unrecognisable to AI systems. This extends the protection developed in Sadeghi's HYDRANOS project, which received an ERC Advanced Grant in 2022, upstream to the design level itself.
Funding Distribution and Outlook
Germany led all participating countries with 31 grants, followed by the Netherlands with 27, Italy and France with 18 each, and Spain with 13. The new grantees are based at universities and research centres across 21 EU Member States and associated countries. By discipline, 54% of funded projects fall within physical sciences and engineering, 37% in life sciences, and 8% in social sciences and humanities.
The ERC 2026 work programme includes two rounds of Proof of Concept calls with a total budget of €60 million. The next application deadline is 17 September 2026.