The grant program

Horizon Europe is the ambitious EU research & innovation framework programme for 2021-2027.

Its overarching goals are:

1. to strengthen the EU's scientific and technological bases and the European Research Area (ERA)
2. to boost Europe's innovation capacity, competitiveness and jobs;
3. to deliver on citizen's priorities and sustain our socio-economic model and values.

with a particular focus on creating impact or the European Green Deal, the digital and sustainability transition and recovery from the coronavirus-crisis.

The ERC Synergy grant is meant to support a small group of two to four Principal Investigators to jointly address ambitious research problems that could not be addressed by the individual Principal Investigators and their teams when working alone.

Synergy projects enable substantial advances at the frontiers of knowledge, stemming, for example, from the cross fertilization of scientific fields, from new productive lines of enquiry, or new methods and techniques, including unconventional approaches and investigations at the interface between established disciplines. The transformative research funded by Synergy Grants should have the potential of becoming a benchmark on a global scale.

Principal Investigators, referred to as the 'Synergy Grant Group', must demonstrate the ground-breaking nature, ambition, and feasibility of their research proposal with competitive track records as appropriate to their career stage. Principal Investigators must also demonstrate that they can successfully bring together those elements – such as skills, knowledge, experience, expertise, disciplines, methods, approaches, teams, access to infrastructures – necessary to address the scope and complexity of the proposed research question.