Six ERC Starting Grants for Ghent University in an increasingly competitive funding landscape

ERC starting grants 2026 (large view)

(09-09-2026) Six researchers have been awarded a prestigious ERC Starting Grant, reaffirming the university's strong position in European research. Despite the European success rate falling further to 8.8%, Ghent University achieved a success rate of almost 20%.

Competition for European research funding continues to intensify. This year's ERC Starting Grant call attracted a record 4,807 proposals, up 22% from the 3,928 proposals submitted in the previous call. Only 8.8% of proposals were funded, compared with 12.2% in the 2025 call and 14.2% in 2024.

Against this backdrop, Ghent University once again performed strongly. Nicolas Englebert, Hilde Gunnink, Mina Ibrahim, Nick Rahier, Wouter Saelens and Akash Koppa have been awarded ERC Starting Grants. 

VISIR (Nicolas Englebert): Measuring light with unprecedented precision

The ERC project, VISIR, aims to develop a novel nanophotonic platform to measure light frequencies across the ultraviolet, visible, and mid-infrared with unprecedented precision. Such technology will enable cheaper, easier-to-deploy detectors to monitor greenhouse gas emissions, as well as highly accurate navigation systems.



LoLaSa (Hilde Gunnink) The Lost Language of Southern Africa

Southern Africa in the cradle of humankind, with a history of human settlement that goes back further than almost anywhere else. But our understanding of Southern African history is seriously limited by the loss of indigenous languages, which became extinct in the last few centuries. In this project, we aim to recover relics of these lost languages of Southern Africa, through the traces they left in the languages that are spoken in Southern Africa today. In this way, we will shed new light on the long but little-understood history of Southern Africa.

GPS-Archives (Mina Ibrahim): Everyday media, hidden histories

What can a dubbed Latin American soap opera or Japanese anime series tell us about life under Hafez and Bashar al-Assad? What can television broadcasts, radio programmes and films reveal about everyday life in Syria?

GPS-Archives investigates how such everyday media experiences can shed light on incarceration, torture, enforced disappearance and exile up to the fall of the Ba'ath regime in December 2024. Rooted in Syria's ongoing and uncertain transition, the project explores how memories of watching and listening to popular media can help people reclaim their own stories.

These memories can bring overlooked experiences into our understanding of the past and contribute to more inclusive forms of remembrance and epistemic justice alongside official archives, legal evidence, literature and artistic practice.

HEATWAYS (Nick Rahier): Rethinking life in a hotter world

With the ERC project HEATWAYS, anthropologist Nick Rahier investigates how communities in the East African Rift Valley experience, understand and anticipate increasing heat and a warmer future. The project addresses a fundamental limitation of existing heat models.

While current models can accurately predict future temperatures, they reveal little about the social consequences of heat, how people experience it in specific places, and how it shapes lives and futures.

The East African Rift Valley offers an exceptional setting for this research. Here, heat acquires meaning through religious practices, medicinal knowledge, moral understandings and everyday metaphors. These perspectives provide a unique starting point for broadening our understanding of what it means to live in a hotter world.

A key ambition of the project is to rethink the concept of "thermal viability". Today, it is largely defined through biomedical, economic and ecological limits. HEATWAYS adds a socio-cultural dimension by asking when existing ways of life become unsustainable as temperatures rise and which new practices emerge to create viable futures on an overheating planet.

The project's findings will be brought together in an innovative ethnographic dashboard, offering new ways to understand, model and develop policy for a warmer future.

PowerPortrait (Wouter Saelens): Building a complete Portrait of Cell Differentiation

(project hosted at the Flemish Institute of Biotechnology – VIB)

Scientists have been building cell atlases (like the dendritic cell atlas or the fruit fly atlas) to map the types of cells that make up our tissues and organs. These atlases provide a reference of which cell types are present in a given tissue, where they are found, and how they differ between healthy and diseased states. However, they mostly show what cells are there, but not how they became that way. Understanding this process, known as cell differentiation, requires knowing which genes push a cell toward a particular identity, when these genes act, and what happens when they are disrupted.

Wouter Saelens’s ERC-funded project, PowerPortrait, aims to answer these questions. Prof. Saelens and his team will alter genes and follow how individual cells respond as they develop in their native environment. Initially, they will focus on macrophages in the liver, versatile immune cells that play important roles in maintaining healthy tissues but are also involved in many diseases. While the combination of biomedical urgency and experimental convenience makes them ideal targets for drawing up a “full portrait”, the hope is that the lessons learned from this endeavor will enable many others in the future.

 

Akash Koppa will not conduct his research at Ghent University but at the University of Reading (UK).

About the ERC

The European Research Council (ERC), set up by the European Union in 2007, is Europe’s premier funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It supports creative researchers of any nationality and age to run projects based in Europe.

The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants. Through its additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees bridge the gap between their pioneering research and the early phases of commercialisation.

A new ERC Plus Grants scheme is open for applications since June 2026.

Researchers inside and outside Ghent University wishing to apply for an ERC Grant with our university as host institution can contact the EU team for advice and support.

More information

Contact

EU Team Ghent University (eu-team@ugent.be)