NCN Podcast 04/07 – How our region can win more ERC grants

In the latest episode, Prof. Leszek Kaczmarek, a member of the ERC Scientific Council, and Katarzyna Kubica-Oro, from the National Contact Point for EU Research Programmes at NCBR, discuss how ERC proposals are assessed, why countries in our region win so few grants, and what researchers considering an application can actually do.

Leszek Kaczmarek is a molecular biologist at the Marceli Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He sits on the ERC Scientific Council and has served on the agency’s panels almost from the outset, since 2007. Katarzyna Kubica-Oro is an ERC specialist at the National Contact Point for EU Research Programmes and an experienced research project manager. The conversation is hosted by Anna Korzekwa-Jzefowicz.

How the ERC identifies a breakthrough

The ERC assesses proposals against a single criterion: scientific excellence. What counts as a breakthrough is for the panel to decide. “None of us on the Scientific Council defines it. We have a system that allows us to identify it. It is our collective wisdom that decides what counts as a breakthrough,” says Prof. Leszek Kaczmarek.

Katarzyna Kubica-Oro adds that a breakthrough looks different in every field. “A project has to be robust, but above all it has to surprise you,” she says.

An idea is only the beginning. At interview, the panel checks whether the researcher genuinely masters the methods the project will require. “Sometimes people come in with an interesting idea and stand before the panel like a manager: I will hire this person and that person, all of them specialists. And it is clear that they do not know the field themselves. Someone like that stands no chance of winning a grant,” notes Prof. Kaczmarek.

The Contact Point specialist highlights the simplest condition of all, one that researchers sometimes overlook. “The ERC wants to fund science, not science fiction. When preparing a proposal, researchers often do not even open the documentation or look at the assessment criteria. Yet the very first thing I would do is check whether my project is actually what the ERC is looking for,” she stresses.

25 per cent of the population, 5 per cent of the grants

The ERC Scientific Council, whose working group was chaired by Prof. Kaczmarek, published the White Paper on the low share of widening countries in ERC grants on 26 March 2026. The category of widening countries covers the states that joined the Union from 2004 onwards, together with Greece and Portugal. They account for about 25 per cent of the EU population, yet together they win fewer than 5 per cent of ERC grants. Fewer than 10 per cent of panel members come from these countries as well.

The White Paper sets out several reasons for the gap:

• low national spending on research,
• weak institutional support,
• limited access to international research networks,
• language and psychological barriers.

Prof. Kaczmarek traces the gap to a mechanism that, in his view, weakens science at its very roots. “The worst thing that can happen to Polish science is metric-based assessment. It pulls in exactly the opposite direction to what the ERC wants. There you have to focus on great achievements, whereas we are forced to do the opposite,” he says.

For him, the shortage of grants has a civilisational dimension. The untapped intellectual potential of a quarter of Europe’s population means fewer discoveries, fewer technologies and fewer therapies for everyone. Individual grants help reverse this: they build local centres of outstanding science that attract and train the next generation of researchers.

“Even single ERC grants create what I would call islands of good fortune here: pockets of outstanding science that draw in young researchers. And there they learn how to do good science. If we fail to harness scientific excellence, we do not move forward as a civilisation, as humankind,” says Prof. Kaczmarek. Western Europe’s leading centres lose out too, deprived of researchers who would otherwise have been trained in such places. Building islands of outstanding science in widening countries is in the shared interest of the whole continent.

What a researcher can do

What matters most is to build the right body of work from the doctorate onwards: a small number of genuinely significant papers in which the researcher is first author and makes the decisive contribution.

Environment and networking are just as crucial. Czechia is the prime example: in one Consolidator Grant call, it achieved a 25.5 per cent success rate, the highest of any country. Its success came from a grassroots initiative by ERC grant winners and panel members, who built a system of mentoring and support for prospective candidates.

In Poland, support is available from the National Contact Point, from horizontal contact points across six macroregions, and from the PAS Scientific Excellence Office, which runs workshops, training sessions and mock interviews. A further tool is the ERC Mentoring Initiative. “You have to surround yourself with people who have won these grants and who assess them,” Katarzyna Kubica-Oro stresses. “Without building a network, it will simply be harder.”

Finally, the host asks whether the conversation makes applying more or less tempting. “We do not encourage people to submit proposals. We move exceptional people to submit exceptional proposals,” replies Prof. Kaczmarek.

Selected remarks

Leszek Kaczmarek

The aim is not to win ERC grants. The aim is outstanding science; ERC grants are merely a measure of it, because Europe has no better yardstick for the highest scientific quality. The Nobel Prize may be a better one, but it is already extremely selective.

In 2012, I chaired a panel that awarded an ERC grant to a young researcher from Austria. After seven years as a postdoc in California, he returned with a single first-author paper, but a hugely significant one. He received the grant and a laboratory in Vienna. It shows very clearly what really counts in a track record.

Katarzyna Kubica-Oroń

The ERC is open to everyone, regardless of age, gender or background. The evaluation is not about your institution. I have often encountered the view that ERC grants are reserved for researchers at Europe’s top research centres. That is not true, and it is important that we do not keep the myth alive.

At the “ERC Stages” event during the Copernicus Festival, I invited many ERC grant winners who are currently running projects in Poland. The great majority of them did not win grants on their first attempt, but on a later one. It is a fiercely competitive call, so there is no point in giving up early. If it does not come off, you revise the application and learn how to do it better.