The European Research Council (ERC) has just announced that it has funded its 10.000th researcher and the RadioNet community congratulates heartily the ERC and all the grantees.
The ERC grants come in different categories, e.g. for researchers starting or consolidating their careers, for collaborations, and for advanced leaders in their fields. The grants have in common that the only award criterion is scientific excellence, without considering political aspects. The rules are the same for all researchers in Europe and the evaluation panel consists of the most eminent experts in different research fields. The awards are highly oversubscribed with a success rate of less than 1 in 10. This is why the ERC Grants are considered the gold standard for scientific excellence, not only for individual researchers, but also for their host institutions.
We are proud that researchers from the RadioNet partners have been quite successful in the past in receiving ERC grants. Among them Thomas Ray with the project Ejection Accretion Structures in YSOs (EASY), Andrei Barychev with the project Study of Terahertz Focal Plain Arrays (TFPA), Jan Mathijs Van Der Hulst with the project The HI Story of Galaxy Evolution in the Nearby Universe (HISTORYNU), Michael Kramer with the projects Large European Array for Pulsars (LEAP) and BlackHoleCam (BHC), and Anton Zensus with the project Mapping Magnetic Fields with INterferometry Down to Event hoRizon Scales (M2FINDERS).