The European Research Council (ERC) and COST both contribute to the free flow of ideas and researchers across Europe. Both share a philosophy that welcomes individuals regardless of their scientific field, career status, or country of origin. The ERC has a focus on scientific excellence, while COST has a unique bridging role bringing together researchers and innovators to share and develop ideas with their peers.
COST networking activities function as a stepping stone for complementary funding schemes covering all parts of a research career from Erasmus+ all the way to ERC Grants helping promising young talent to access and exploit these schemes.
High impact
Professor Wim Thiery is a climate scientist in his mid-thirties at the Free University of Brussels and was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for work on climate risk and impact attribution in November 2023. He has participated in two COST Actions: as the Science Communication Coordinator in COST Action ‘Understanding and modelling compound weather and climate events’ (DAMOCLES) and currently in COST Action ‘Process-based models for climate impact attribution across sectors’ (PROCLIAS).
Both Actions are closely linked to the work the ERC grant will support and Wim is clear that involvement in them was extremely influential in his successful ERC proposal.
“My ERC project benefitted tremendously from COST Actions.”
Prof. Wim Thiery of the Free University of Brussels
“The first Action, DAMOCLES, looked at compound climate and weather events, when a combination of climate hazards occurs simultaneously or consecutively at different locations increasing risks,” says Wim. “This was a very successful Action that really brought the community together on a very new topic that had not been on the radar of climate scientists and disaster experts.”
The second Action, PROCLIAS, simulates the impacts of climate change with the goal to improve the modelling of these impacts on different sectors of society. “This Action brings together modelling teams and also statistical expertise to enable the identification of the human imprint on, for example, river floods, crop failures or wildfires – we want to quantify how much manmade climate change has affected these sectors,” explains Wim. “My ERC project benefitted tremendously from both these Actions.”
Wim’s ERC project will study the impact of climate change across the lifetimes of different generations and to do this requires bridge-building between communities working on climate science, climate impact modelling and demography. “Both Actions enabled me to link up with key experts extending my personal network. The exchanges with these scientists were a key source of inspiration to develop my ideas for the ERC proposal,” says Wim.
Career changing
“Participation in my COST Action was really career-changing,” claims Dr Ainhoa Martinez Medina. “At that moment I was an early-stage researcher, and it was a super important opportunity for me to be able to connect with important people in the field in a relaxed, informal environment. The atmosphere is very inspiring and allowed me to open my brain.”
“Participation in my COST Action was really career-changing”
Dr Ainhoa Martinez Medina of the Institute of Natural Resources and Agrobiology in Salamanca
Ainhoa was also a recipient of an ERC Consolidator Grant in November for her project ‘Exploring the Molecular Imprint of Microbe-Induced Plant Resistance in Plant-Associated Communities’. She is currently the Leader of the Molecular Agroecology Laboratory at the Institute of Natural Resources and Agrobiology in Salamanca, but in 2015 she was a researcher at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Leipzig and joined the COST Action looking at interactions between plants, microbes and arthropods to enhance crop protection.
Ainhoa was the Science Communication Coordinator for the Action. “This was very important and also a lot of work, but it gave me great visibility,” says Ainhoa. “You had to deal with many Action members, but all the members also knew who I was. And I learnt a great deal about communication and organisational skills.”
Ainhoa remained in contact with many of the networks she established during the Action, and this was extremely helpful when she was thinking about her ERC project and developing the proposal. “They were like scientific mentors to me. We could discuss my ERC idea and they gave me lots of feedback,” she says. “It was like a ready-formed support group.”
Indirect links
Heidi Stöckl is Professor of Public Health Evaluation at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and before that she was a professor and Director of the Gender Violence and Health Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
She is also the recipient of two ERC grants. The first was an ERC Starting Grant in 2017 to study predictors of intimate partner violence in a cohort of Tanzanian women that helped shape future global programmes to improve the lives of women and their families. The second, awarded in November 2023, is an ERC Consolidator Grant to investigate maternal and paternal risk factors for violence during pregnancy. She was also a very active member of the COST Action ‘Femicide across Europe’ that ran from 2013 to 2017.
“The COST Action definitely had an indirect link to the ERC grants through creating networks,” Heidi says. “It was really useful to meet other people interested in quantitative research and with different perspectives who I otherwise would never have met.”
“The Action helped in terms of the publications output,” she continues. “And it also gave me more maturity on certain things, like how to collaborate in publications with lots of different authors. It also gave me knowledge on networks and how to work with others to maximise the benefits for everyone.”
“The Action helped in terms of the publications output”
Prof. Heidi Stöckl of Public Health Evaluation at Ludwig-Maximilians-University
Heidi has fond memories of the group meetings during the Action, especially the smaller ones, and the social interactions. “These personal discussions on career advice or how you position yourself were very valuable to me. And gave me the confidence to actually go for high-level proposals like the ERC grants,” she concludes.
Quantum leap
Another recent recipient of an ERC Consolidator Grant is Professor Nicola Poccia of the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden (IFW-Dresden) for work on 3D Cuprate Twistronics as a platform for high-temperature topological superconductivity.
He is also an active participant in the running COST Action ‘Superconducting nanodevices and quantum materials for coherent manipulations’ (SUPERQUMAP), but his journey towards the ERC grant starts in an earlier COST Action ‘Nanoscale Superconductivity: Novel Functionalities through Optimized Confinement of Condensate and Fields’ (NanoSC -COST), that ran from 2012 to 2016.
“The interactions at the COST Training School eventually led to a publication in Science.”
Prof.Nicola Poccia of the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden
“My first interaction with COST was at a training school organised in Rhodes called Vortex VIII,” says Nicola. “I was a postdoc and it was for sure a very important moment in my career.”
At the time Nicola was working on the physics of conventional superconductors. “During the school I met a renowned scientist, Valerii Vinokur, who I was able to share my data with and he noted some interesting features,” he continues. “This helped me to discover an important effect in terms of the critical behaviour of the vortex states in superconductors that eventually led to a publication in Science.”
Nicola focused on these novel superconductor architectures and how their physical configuration leads to the generation of interesting phenomena that could lead to applications in quantum technologies. Creating these “weird architectures” led him subsequently to Harvard to construct novel technologies for manipulating more complex superconducting materials in “lego twisted architectures” and to the ERC Consolidator grant.
The Action was also the spark for a joint professorship that Nicola is now starting between his institute in Dresden and the University of Naples “Federico II” where he will be helping to establish the Italian superconducting quantum computing node.
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