January 2011

EU funding for research at the University and the ETH of Zurich

The European Research Council has awarded its Advanced Grants 2010. A total of 27 million francs have been awarded to 9 projects of researchers of the University of Zurich and the ETH Zurich, among them the biochemist Andreas Plückthun and the neuroinformatics scientist Richard Hahnloser.

Andreas Plückthun, professor at the institute of biochemistry of the University of Zurich, and his team of 30 researchers have received the ERC Advanced Grant for their «Next generation binding proteins» project. This project is dedicated to the engineering of new synthetic protein molecules such as DARPins, that are capable of recognizing antigens, e.g. DARPins are already used for target structure recognition in the body, of tumor cells for instance. This therapeutic feature will be put to medical use and developed further.

Another laureate of the ERC Advanced Grant 2010 is Richard Hahnloser, professor for neuroinformatics at the Institute for neuroinformatics of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, for the project «Vocal template computations in the songbird brain». When learning to chirp a song, the cognitive process of songbirds resembles human language acquisition. Hahnloser has been the first to discover long searched-after nervous cells responsible for the auditory feedback by songbirds.

About the ERC Advanced Grants
The European Research Council (ERC) is dedicated to funding basic research through two funding vehicles: ERC Starting Grants for young innovative researchers about to start a new research group, and the ERC Advanced Grants. The latter are awarded annually to recognize already established top researchers. With a planning horizon of 5 years, they can award up to 3,5 Million Euro for a single research project submitted by the researchers.

The European Research Council

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