The ERC Advanced Grant is a grant scheme of the European Research Council (ERC) targeted at leading researchers in different fields to pursue groundbreaking and ambitious projects with a potential for an extremely high-level impact.
Advanced Grants can be awarded to active researchers who have a track record of significant research achievements in the past 10 years. The researchers should have exceptional qualifications in terms or research leadership and management as well as research contributions.
Their field of research is not restricted.
Jan von Plato’s ERC funded project examines the shorthand notes, which the Princeton logician Kurt Gödel left behind.
Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems of 1931 are among the most iconic scientific achievements of the 20th century. Gödel introduced concepts such as formal syntax and algorithmic computability. These concepts were crucial in the invention of computers and the birth of the information society.
The central aim of von Plato’s project is to study Gödel’s unpublished materials, written in archaic German shorthand and make them available to future generations of logicians and philosophers.
The Gödel Enigma: Unveiling a Hidden Logical Heritage, 2018–2023.
Kari Rummukainen’s ERC-funded research project investigates the early stages of the universe with the help of gravitational waves.
Next-generation devices for measuring gravitational waves, such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) probes due to be launched into space in the 2030s by the European Space Agency, are sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves formed in the first nanoseconds of the universe. The theories of currently known and experimentally tested physics cannot explain the formation of these waves, so the detection of the waves would require the expansion of known theories of physics.
The project goals are
The primary research method in the project are very large-scale computer simulations. The research group has already published groundbreaking results in the field, which have significantly contributed to the design of LISA’s cosmological research programme.
Computational Cosmology and Gravitational Waves, 2024–2029.
Kari Alitalo’s ERC- funded project studies the lymphatic vessels, which transport fluid, proteins and waste out from the brain
Alitalo’s project seeks to reassess current concepts about cerebrovascular dynamics, fluid drainage and cellular trafficking in human physiological conditions. The team is studying the role of lymphatic vessels in the repair of brain damage. Even sleep may be regulated by the efficiency of the lymphatic brain drainage pathways.
The project aims to:
In 2010, 800 billion Euros was spent on brain diseases in Europe and the cost is expected to increase due to the aging population. Alitalo’s project seeks to alleviate this burden.
Translational implications of the discovery of brain-draining lymphatics, 2017–2022.
Alitalo has worked with ERC Advanced Grant funding earlier as well.
Alitalo also leads an Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence and a research flagship project.
Inverse problems are a field in the intersection of pure and applied mathematics. The problems arise in medical and seismic imaging where measurements made on the exterior of a body are used to determine the properties of the inaccessible interior. For example, in medical ultrasound imaging, sound waves are used to produce pictures of the inside of the body.
The goals of the project are
Applications of the project include accurate methods for imaging of viruses using electron microscopy and the medical imaging techniques based on elastic waves. In his earlier research, Matti Lassas has studied theory of invisibility cloaking. He has also studied the use of mathematics of general relativity in applied imaging problems. Matti Lassas is also the director of the Academy of Finland's Centre of Excellence in Inverse Modelling and Imaging.
Geometric Methods in Inverse Problems for Partial Differential Equations, 2023–2028.
Volker Heyd’s ERC funded project examines how the migration of the steppe people called Yamnaya, which started ca 3050 BCE, affected Europe. The impact of the Yamnaya migration is still visible in e.g. the European gene pool, social organization and spread of Indo-European languages.
The project aims to understand:
Heyd’s project increases our understanding of the mechanisms of mobility and migration. This project shows that migration, environmental change and diseases are in no way experiences of only the last couple of years. Their impact on European societies is millennia-old, and has affected ordinary people as much then, as it shakes our societies nowadays.
The project is an international collaboration between archeologists and researchers of biological and environmental sciences. It has so far identified unexpected outlier Yamnaya kurgans and burials as far away as in Kosovo and Albania. Heyd’s team has also found that interaction between Yamnaya and locals ranged from near total replacement to barely being touched by events.
The Yamnaya Impact on Prehistoric Europe (YMPACT), 2019-2024 (prolongation agreed due to Corona).
Markku Kulmala’s ERC-funded project investigates how gases in the atmosphere turn into particles that are smaller than 5 nanometers in size. The project’s focus is on heavily polluted Chinese megacities like Beijing and pristine environments like Siberia and northern parts of the Nordic region.
The main aims of the project are to:
Kulmala’s project provides understanding of how aerosols interact with clouds and solar radiation, which is crucial for more accurate predictions of future climate change. There is also an urgent need to significantly reduce air pollution levels in megacities, which is not possible without a proper understanding of conversion from gas to nano-sized particles.
Previously Kulmala and his team have, among other achievements, predicted the existence of neutral atmospheric clusters and found them. They created the theoretical prediction of size dependent aerosol growth, which has later been observed in a laboratory environment and in the atmosphere. Kulmala’s team also introduced the idea of, quantified and verified the Continental Biosphere-Aerosol-Cloud-Climate feedback loop.
Kulmala has pioneered the SMEAR initiative, which sets up research stations that can measure more than 1,000 different variables in the atmosphere, ecosystems and their interaction.
Atmospheric Gas-to-Particle Conversion, 2017–2022.
Kulmala has worked with ERC Advanced Grant funding from 2009 to 2013 as well.
Kulmala also leads a research flagship project and the Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research INAR.
Anna-Liisa Laine's ERC funded project aims to uncover the consequences of human-imposed environmental change on both ecology and the evolution of species interactions.
Plant biodiversity is currently under extensive change due to human-imposed climate change and habitat use. As primary producers, plants support life on Earth, and do so by relying on certain microbes for nutrient acquisition and stress tolerance while at the same time, other pathogenic microbes attack plants and reduce their fitness.
Project aims to understand how plant-associated microbial diversity and the interactions between plants and microbes are changing due to changes in biodiversity.
Long-term nature observations collected in Finland offer unique opportunities to study how past plant biodiversity change affects associated microbial communities.
Laine has worked with ERC Starting Grant and Consolidator Grant funding earlier.
Coevolutionary Consequences of Biodiversity Change (Co-EvoChange).
Virpi Timonen's ERC funded project the LEGACIES will break entirely new ground in understanding the intertwined material and environmental legacies that pass between co-existing generations. Material legacies – wealth and assets – that are transferred from one generation to the next are greater in volume than ever. At the same time, our environmental legacies are compromising the viability of life and flourishing for many humans and other species.
The project will yield new concepts and theory essential for explicating how strategies and practices at the micro level reflect and shape the greatest challenges that humans and the natural environment face. Timonen's approach is inherently high-risk due to its novelty in straddling multiple generations and the societal and environmental spheres in diverse contexts.
Human legacies are more important and influential than ever before because the window of opportunity for generational interaction has been greatly extended due to longer life expectancies, and because legacies assume unprecedented importance in a world marked by inequality and environmental degradation. Illuminating how environmental legacies are shaped through generational interaction will better equip us to formulate effective agendas for combating environmental degradation and help to substantiate new modes of decision-making that incorporate the youngest and future generations as stakeholders.
Judith Pallot’s ERC funded project examines how former communist countries deal with multiculturalism in their prisons.
Since the end of communism, these prisons have developed in different ways. This makes them uniquely well suited for examining how different penal regimes address the problems of punishment and rehabilitation.
The project’s main aims are to:
Pallot’s project provides insights that can help deal with challenges in today’s penal systems, such as the risk of prisons becoming recruiting grounds for extremist movements.
Pallot has studied the Russian penal system since 2006. She has focused particularly on issues of gender and ethnicity in Soviet and Russian prisons. Pallot has also extensively studied the Russian peasantry in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods.
Gulag echoes in the multicultural prison: historical and geographical influences on the identity and politics of ethnic prisoners in the former communist states of Russia and Europe, 2018–2023.
Jan Klabbers’ ERC funded project investigates the tension between intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and the private sector.
IGOs such as the World Health Organization have always been assumed to work for the public good. Yet, they also engage with the private sector. Some are funded by the private sector or set up public-private partnership. IGOs themselves act and compete in markets. Their operations and standard-setting activities inevitably affect the distribution of benefits between private parties.
Klabbers’ project aims to examine
Ultimately, Klabbers’ project will change how IGO law and lawyers perceive and understand IGOs. The project also aims to develop the legislation relating to IGOs and build up solid theoretical foundations, mindful of the huge impact of IGOs on our everyday lives.
Intergovernmental Organizations between Mission and Market: International Institutional Law and the Private Sector - PRIVIGO, 2020–2024.
Pekka Martikainen’s ERC-funded project investigates the causes of health inequalities between different social groups and related change. Inequalities in health and mortality among population groups have been observed in all countries, and the differences have grown over the past 30 years. Differences in life expectancy between people with a low or high income can be as great as those seen between smokers and non-smokers.
The project aims to understand
Martikainen’s project brings together perspectives and approaches from a number of disciplines, aiming to establish a theoretical and practical framework. The group’s research data comprise an internationally unique mix of population registers and survey datasets that contain genetic and clinical data.
Extensive longitudinal datasets enable research designs that are better equipped to verify causalities compared to traditional social research and epidemiological studies. The research carried out in the project can make it possible to increasingly effectively direct measures aimed at promoting health and reducing health inequalities. Through international comparisons, the research group will also assess the significance of national contexts to health inequalities.
The Population Research Unit headed by Martikainen has been conducting groundbreaking research on health inequalities between social groups for a long time. This work has helped to understand the causes and trends of health and mortality inequalities in Finland, demonstrating particularly the effect of alcohol consumption and smoking on mortality inequalities.
The comparative research conducted by Martikainen's group has demonstrated that health inequalities between population groups in the Nordic welfare states remain considerable in a global comparison.
Name and duration of the project
Social inequalities in population health: integrating evidence from longitudinal, family-based and genetically informed data, 2021–2026.
Jason M. Silverman’s ERC-funded project re-analyzes the ways pre-industrial economies were socially constructed and assess the implications for how economics are understood today.
Ancient empires, including the Persian Empire (550–331 BCE), utilized temples for labor taxation. The project looks at temples in one particular region of the Persian Empire, the Southern Levant (now Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine) for locally supplied and imperially demanded labor. These include agricultural work, road maintenance, and construction.
Social structures enabled temples to function and to fulfill imperial labor demands, but this was not always wholly voluntary. Understanding the various levels of dependency and coercion is essential for recreating how imperial labor demands reshaped social relations.
Work, taxation, and religious institutions remain key elements of the human experience, and this project will expand our understanding of their histories and alternate possibilities.
Jason Silverman is also the PI of Team 2 in the Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires.
Work without End: Informal Taxation and Forced Labor within Persian Southern Levantine Temple Economy and Society (WORK-IT)
Craig Primmer’s ERC funded project aims to uncover the genetic mechanisms that lead to the remarkable diversity of reproductive ages in Atlantic salmon as well as their ecological and evolutionary fitness consequences.
The project includes experiments ranging from analyses of molecular processes in salmon reared in controlled laboratory conditions to studying the reproductive success of wild salmon in remote populations in far north Finland.
The main aims of the project are to:
Research in Primmer’s project has diverse applications. Maturation timing is an important factor for salmon aquaculture, where early male salmon maturation results in large financial losses. It is also an important characteristic of wild salmon populations, and variation in maturation timing can help buffer populations against population crashes.
Remarkably, the same gene that controls salmon maturation has been linked with pubertal timing in humans, and with Lupus, a skin disease that occurs more frequent in females than males.
Age at maturity in Atlantic salmon: molecular and ecological dissection of an adaptive trait (MATURATION) 2017–2022.
In contrast to facts such as 2+2=4 which could not be otherwise, flipping a fair coin 100 times reveals that you have a roughly equal chance of getting heads as of getting tails. This polarity between absolute certainty and multiplicity is what Jouko Väänänen’s ERC funded project is all about.
Väänänen’s project inserts into the traditional logical picture the concept of a multitude as a new feature. The project develops a logic for the concept of dependence, which is at the core of Quantum Mechanics and Set Theory, among other fields
The most important goals of the project are:
The concepts of dependence and independence occur abundantly throughout society as well as in the sciences and humanities. Väänänen’s project aims at building the foundations of the logic, the rules, that these concepts obey. When such rules are uncovered, they can lead to applications in artificial intelligence, biology, computer science, economics, game theory, logic, mathematics, philosophy, physics, and statistics.
The Helsinki Logic group is famous for its results in model theory, set theory, computer science logic, and foundations of mathematics. The group has particular expertise in using games in logic. A lot of the group’s recent research has been on dependence logic and team semantics, developed by Väänänen in his 2007 monograph.
Väänänen’s work spans a broad range of areas in logic. He is best known for his results on games in logic, on set theoretic methods in model theory, for his work on strong logics, and for the introduction of dependence logic.
Team semantics and dependence, 2021–2026.
Antti Kupiainen’s ERC funded project studies how mathematical models can describe the statistical similarity and universality of seemingly random structures in different natural phenomena.
Natural systems are rarely isolated from each other. Their environment affects them in random ways. Still, their structures often repeat universally in all scales. For instance, even though individual clouds are all different, they may be statistically identical.
The project develops mathematical methods to study scale invariance and universality in:
Kupianen’s research has applications with large potential societal impact in various areas. These mathematical theories can be applied for instance when studying aerosols and their motion in the atmosphere or the spread of pollutants in the ground water.
Antti Kupiainen has worked on quantum field theory, phase transitions, dynamical systems and chaos, turbulent advection and random geometry. His past results include proof of phase transition in disordered magnets, intermittency in turbulent transport and ergodicity of two dimensional turbulence.
Quantum Fields and Probability, 2017-2024.
Kai Kaila: Arginine Vasopressin and Ion Transporters in the Modulation of Brain Excitability During Birth and Birth Asphyxia Seizures, 2014–2019.
Bo Stråth: Between Restoration and Revolution, National Constitutions and Global Law: an Alternative View on the European Century 1815–1914, 2009–2014.
Vladislav Verkhusha: Near-infrared fluorescent probes based on bacterial phytochromes for in vivo imaging, 2014–2019.
Päivi Peltomäki: Epigenome and Cancer Susceptibility, 2009–2014.
Anu Wartiovaara: Metabolic consequences of mitochondrial dysfunction, 2011–2016.
Karri Muinonen: Scattering and absorption of electromagnetic waves in particulate media, 2013–2018.
Ilkka Hanski: Ecological, molecular, and evolutionary spatial dynamics, 2009–2013.
Eero Castrén: Induction of juvenile-like plasticity in the adult brain, 2013–2018.
Lauri Aaltonen’s ERC funded project examines benign tumors called uterine leiomyomas and seeks targeted treatments.
Every fourth woman suffers from uterine leiomyomas at some point in premenopausal life. Uterine leiomyomas are benign tumors of the uterine smooth muscle wall. They cause a substantial health burden through symptoms such as excessive uterine bleeding, abdominal pain and infertility. These tumors are the most common cause of hysterectomy.
Aaltonen’s group hypothesizes that uterine leiomyomas can emerge through several distinct mechanisms and anticipate that each mechanism contributes to somewhat different tumor biology, clinicopathological features, and response to treatment.
The main goals of Aaltonen’s project are to:
This project will provide new insight into how uterine leiomyomas emerge, and will lay the scientific basis of their classification. Aaltonen’s team will develop the tools needed for routine diagnosis of uterine leiomyoma subclasses, and provide clues toward targeted, better treatments.
Aaltonen’s project will be an important step towards non-invasive management of uterine leiomyomas. Reaching this goal would benefit hundreds of millions of women.
Aaltonen is the Director of the Academy of Finland’s Center of Excellence in Tumor Genomics Research. He has contributed to breakthrough findings in hereditary and somatic genetic defects contributing to uterine leiomyomas as well as colorectal cancer.
Project name and duration
Towards prevention, early diagnosis, and non-invasive treatment of uterine leiomyomas through molecular classification (MYCLASS), 2016–2021.
Aaltonen also leads an Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence.
Sarah Green’s ERC funded project Crosslocations investigates changes in the relations between people and places in the Mediterranean region.
Green’s project examines how people’s location still makes a difference, despite the Internet, smart phones and globalised trade.
The ultimate aim of the project is to develop a better way to understand the dynamics of different kinds of relations and separations between places. These include, for example, financial, legal, technological, religious, linguistic and environmental conditions.
Crosslocations will provide tools to help understand the complex social, political and environmental problems that involve cross-border relations in our globalised world. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic’s spread has followed particular paths of connection and disconnection between places. Deeper knowledge about the relations between places can help to understand such complex problems.
Green’s team has identified, among other things, that
Project name and duration
Crosslocations in the Mediterranean: rethinking the socio-cultural dynamics of relative positioning, 2016–2021.
Hanna Vehkamäki’s ERC funded project aims to achieve a comprehensive understanding of how atmospheric nanoclusters and ice crystals form from condensable gases..
The main aims of the project are to:
Vehkamäki’s project will lead to improved understanding of molecular clustering in the atmosphere. This will help create more accurate predictions of aerosol concentrations and size distributions. More accurate predictions lead to improved air quality forecasts and more accurate estimates of how aerosols affect the climate and climate change.
Vehkamäki’s group has pioneered the application of accurate quantum chemistry methods to multicomponent atmospheric clusters, and developed efficient conformal sampling protocols for these clusters. They have achieved an impressive match with experiments concerning sulphuric acid-based clustering.
Project name and duration
Simulating Non-Equilibrium Dynamics of Atmospheric Multicomponent Clusters (DAMOCLES) 2017–2021.
Vehkamäki previously worked with ERC Starting Grant funding.
Kari Alitalo’s ERC- funded project studies the lymphatic vessels, which transport fluid, proteins and waste out from the brain
Alitalo’s project seeks to reassess current concepts about cerebrovascular dynamics, fluid drainage and cellular trafficking in human physiological conditions. The team is studying the role of lymphatic vessels in the repair of brain damage. Even sleep may be regulated by the efficiency of the lymphatic brain drainage pathways.
The project aims to:
In 2010, 800 billion Euros was spent on brain diseases in Europe and the cost is expected to increase due to the aging population. Alitalo’s project seeks to alleviate this burden.
"Our research deals with difficult illnesses of great socioeconomic burden, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Multiple Sclerosis." - Kari Alitalo
Read more about Alitalo's research group on the Translational cancer biology group's website.
Translational implications of the discovery of brain-draining lymphatics, 2017–2022.
Alitalo has worked with ERC Advanced Grant funding earlier as well.
Alitalo also leads an Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence and a research flagship project.