No fewer than seven new ERC Starting Grants for Ghent University researchers
(04-09-2025) This year, seven young Ghent University researchers will receive an ERC Starting Grant. This grant will enable them to expand their research group and conduct groundbreaking research. Ghent University's leading position in Europe is confirmed again.
This year, seven young Ghent University researchers will receive an ERC Starting Grant, each worth around 1.5 million euros. This grant will enable them to expand their research group and conduct groundbreaking research.
The European Research Council (ERC) has announced that it will award Starting Grants to 478 early-stage researchers, including seven Ghent University researchers: Lisa Maria Franke, Sander Govaerts, Filomeen Haerynck, Yi Ouyang, Possum Pincé, Juliana Stachurska and Marie Van de Sande.
This confirms Ghent University's leading position in Europe once again, with only four top institutions ahead of it: CNRS (17 new grants), Max Planck Society (16), University of Oxford (13), and ETH Zurich (8).
ERC Starting Grant funding – €761 million in total for this call – supports groundbreaking research in a wide range of fields, from life sciences and physics to social sciences and humanities. It helps early-career researchers launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas.
The winning projects:
HAIR offers a compelling new perspective on the everyday politics of beauty, religion, and identity by placing the under-researched topic of Muslim women’s head hair - rather than the headscarf - at the center of analysis. Focusing on Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates, the Starting Grant HAIR explores how women feel and express themselves about their bodies as they navigate changing socio-religious expectations.
What makes HAIR unique is its interdisciplinary and innovative blended methodology. The project brings together Islamic studies, social anthropology, and the anthropology of emotions to explore the plurality of beauty practices in relation to understandings of religiosity and identity. It combines fieldwork, digital ethnography, and literary analysis to comparatively examine how women experience, share and talk about their intimate selves – both online and offline.
By foregrounding gendered body politics and the emotional and cultural dimensions of beauty, HAIR challenges dominant narratives and offers new ways of understanding rapidly changing societies. It opens up fresh perspectives on the entanglements of the body, beauty, and belief in diverse Muslim contexts. The project will produce scholarly publications and an online exhibition that rethink how concepts of gendered beauty and religious lifeworlds are constructed and re-imagined in globalised contexts.
ECOLENT: Biodiversity and Ecological Entanglements in Northern Europe, 1400-1600 (Sander Govaerts) – no picture to be published
Biodiversity loss is one of the great challenges of our era, and the introduction of efficient measures to stop it are further complicated by the lack of historical data. We know after all very little about long-term changes in the geographical distribution of animals and plants. Every new generation takes the nature of his/her/their youth as the new normal, which means that there is a general lack of awareness about the full extent of ecological change (the so-called shifting baseline syndrome).
The research project aims to develop a new conceptual-methodological framework to study the impact of long-distance trade on the regional diversity of animals and plants in a historical context. This is possible by combining historical and archaeological sources with modern ecological studies.
ECOLENT focuses on the Hanseatic League, a long-distance trade network of mostly German speaking merchants that connected Western- and Eastern Europe in the late Middle Ages. It argues that this network created ecological entanglements, interconnections between different regions, which means that ecological changes in one part of the trade network can only be understood by considering all its constituent parts simultaneously.
The main question this project wants to answer is whether these entanglements also caused an ecological divergence. It is possible that differences between Western- and Eastern Europe increased because ecosystems adapted to the pressures generated by this trade system. This implies that environments that are now considered typical for specific European regions were actually created by long-distance trading in the Middle Ages. ECOLENT does not treat plants and animals as passive victims of human action, but will examine to what extent adaptation by fauna and flora played an essential role in this potential ecological divergence.
The LYNCID project will explore a completely new mechanism that leads to severe immune deficiencies. Children with these conditions have a severely weakened immune system, making even a common infection potentially fatal. Currently, 1.4 million people worldwide live with these life-threatening disorders. The underlying mechanism remains unclear in 40% of these patients, lacking targeted therapeutic interventions and leading to high mortality.
Through LYNCID, Filomeen Haerynck will investigate how nucleolar stress disruption causes immune system failure. They will use innovative laboratory techniques including artificial thymic organoids and specifically engineered zebrafish that develop similar immune problems as patients. In addition, the team will develop the “Nucleolar Stress Index" – a novel diagnostic test that will be used to identify dysregulated nucleolar stress in patients with undefined immune disorders.
Filomeen Haerynck's pioneering LYNCID project represents a completely new way of thinking about immune disorders by uncovering hidden connections between dysregulated nucleolar stress and immune system function. This breakthrough provides faster, more accurate diagnosis for patients with unexplained immune deficiencies and opens novel therapeutic modalities for immune disorders. Since nucleolar stress mechanisms are also involved in cancer and neurological diseases, filling these crucial knowledge gaps could unlock treatment doors for these disorders as well, potentially improving lives of countless individuals.
Cutting CO₂ emissions is one of the biggest challenges of our time, yet today’s capture plants are still large, expensive and use a lot of energy. In e-CAPTURE, Yi Ouyang and his team are developing a new approach. Instead of using bulky towers or spinning machinery, it creates strong, well-controlled vortex flows in a high-gravity environment inside a compact, static and electrified reactor. This design brings gases and liquids into very effective contact, enabling CO₂ to be captured faster while using less energy.
The result will be a new type of CO₂ capture unit that is smaller, cheaper and easier to install, expand and operate on green electricity. This makes it more practical to clean up industrial sites and move faster towards net zero. By using turbulent reactive flows under high gravity — the key idea behind e-CAPTURE — this electrified reactor technology can also support cleaner, more sustainable ways of producing the materials and products we depend on every day.
As the last Ice Age drew to a close, hunter-gatherers returned to Western Europe. Around 12,850 years ago, however, this warming trend was interrupted by a sudden and dramatic cold reversal that transformed the landscape once again. Forests gave way to tundra, plant resources declined, and large reindeer herds reappeared. At the same time, traces of human presence became far scarcer. This period, known as the Younger Dryas, lasted about 1,200 years. Although often seen as a single cold episode, evidence from Greenland ice cores shows that it was far more variable. Yet how these climate fluctuations played out in Western Europe, and how humans and ecosystems responded, remains largely unknown.
FROST tackles this challenge by studying in detail natural archives such as stalagmites, sediment deposits, and reindeer remains, and by refining the chronology of archaeological sites. With this integrated approach, FROST aims to reveal for the first time regional climate patterns, ecosystem shifts, reindeer migrations, and human settlement dynamics in Western Europe during this pivotal period.
FROST thus addresses a question that is highly relevant today: how even small climatic shifts may have significant effects on ecosystems and human populations. Moreover, the onset of the Younger Dryas was likely triggered by a major slowdown in North Atlantic circulation, caused by massive meltwater flooding. This process has striking parallels to today’s weakening of the Atlantic circulation system, known as AMOC. By reconstructing how climates and ecosystems in Western Europe responded at the time, FROST will provide insights into the risks of similar tipping points in the future.
Neutrinos are elementary particles that have long been assumed massless but are now known to possess mass. However, we have not been able to measure their mass yet, because it is very tiny, and because neutrinos don’t like to interact with other particles. Yet as neutrinos are so abundant in the Universe, they play an important role in the cosmic evolution. Their tiny mass really matters!
The most promising approach to directly determine the neutrino mass is through the study of beta decay. In this process, an electron is emitted alongside the elusive neutrino. Within the NuMass project, Ghent University researcher Juliana Stachurska and her team are developing a large-scale detector capable of capturing the extremely faint radio signals emitted by these electrons.
Together with international collaborators, Ghent University aims to pave the way for the next generation of neutrino experiments. The ultimate ambition? To finally measure the neutrino mass – and in doing so, gain deeper insight into the cosmic evolution of our Universe.
As stars like our Sun near the end of their lives, they shed their outer layers via a strong stellar outflow. These outflows enrich the Universe with freshly formed dust - the building blocks for the next generations of stars and planets. However, despite its key role in driving the outflow and ending the star’s life, we still do not know exactly how dust is made.
Forming dust grains is a chemical process, beginning with chemical reactions between simple molecules that grow into clusters and eventually solid particles. Only recently has it become possible to carry out such a bottom-up treatment of dust formation. ASHES will combine theoretical chemistry, advanced computer simulations, and astronomical observations to unravel how dust forms around dying Suns and how it is affected by a companion star or planet.
These discoveries will transform our understanding of the final stages in stellar evolution and shed light on the chemical evolution of galaxies.
About the ERC
The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants. With its additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees to bridge the gap between their pioneering research and early phases of its commercialisation.
The overall ERC budget from 2021 to 2027 is more than €16 billion, as part of the Horizon Europe programme, under the responsibility of European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, Iliana Ivanova.
Researchers within and outside of Ghent University who wish to apply for an ERC Grant with our university as host institution, can contact the EU Team for advice and support.
Contact
EU-team Ghent University, eu-team@ugent.be