 I'm Christos Linteris, I'm a social anthropologist here at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, or CRASH, of the University of Cambridge, and I was awarded a starting ERC grant in the summer of 2013. So this is the fourth year of my project, whose title is visual representations of the third plague pandemic. Now this is the first project combined in anthropology and history in examining the first epidemic to be ever photographed in human history. That was an epidemic of bubonic plague which started in Hong Kong in 1894, and then it spread across the globe in every inhabited continent, actually very fast and causing more than or about 12 million deaths. What my project is interested in is precisely the fact that it was the first epidemic to be photographed and these photographs were made available to the general public as well as to medical scientists across the globe. It established a paradigm for the way in which we visualise and we understand epidemics and pandemics to this day. Well, an ERC grant is a unique opportunity, something truly amazing, in the sense that first of all it fosters interdisciplinary work. It also fosters analytical tools and the creation of new methods between the disciplines in order to analyse this visual record and its importance for today. So I am Marta Mirason-Lar and I work in the Liverham Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies. It's in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology here at Cambridge. I got a grant from the ERC in 2012, so my project is called In Africa. I work with late human evolution and I'm interested in the evolution of modern humans and how modern people became different from each other. So we actually have now the largest collection of human fossils for this period in the whole of the continent, which is extraordinary. So what is special about an ERC grant? An obvious side is that it's a lot of money, but I think it's more than just the money. The ERC grant, first because it's five years, it allows you to get a group and build a really, a real good community around the project you're doing. It also allows you to explore things in more depth. David Balkome, I'm Professor of Botany in the Department of Plant Sciences. The first project was following up some work that we had done before, actually, I came to Cambridge in 2007. We discovered a novel type of regulator, genetic regulator in plant cells. It turns out they're small RNA molecules and it turns out that plants have them, animals have them, they're part of the tree of life. And in the ERC project, the first ERC project, we were just following up precisely how these little small RNAs do what they do in plant cells. The second project is an evolution, if you like, from the work that we did in the first project. And it involves this whole topic of epigenetics. And you can think of epigenetics as really being molecular memory. So cells have a way of remembering what they have experienced, either genetic experience or environmental experience. And it's taken us into an interest in hybrid plants. But we're finding out about epigenetics, hybrid vigor. And this is influencing, or I think it will influence, three things. Firstly, our approach to making hybrid crops. It'll influence our thinking about how evolution works, because hybridization is an integral process in normal evolution, both in plants and animals. And thirdly, it's leading us to a new technology that we hope will find application in the field. We've developed an approach to improving crops and we call it epigenetic modification. My name's Ottolene Leiser and I am the director of the Saint Louis Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. I have an ERC Advanced Investigate Award to look at the ability of plants to change their development in response to the environmental conditions in which they're growing. And we're interested in particular in shoot branching and how plants adjust their shoot branching depending on nutrient availability. And one of the things that is very useful about that is that from an agricultural point of view we should be able to use that understanding of how plants prioritize their decisions about what to do in different nutrient conditions to keep high yields with low fertilizer supply. That ultimately would be an application for what we're doing. So the ERC ethos is really a very exciting opportunity for scientists. Something that particularly in plant science has not really been available before. That's these five year longer time window projects with a substantial resource really to break into a new area, a new way of thinking about a problem. And that's what we've been able to do with this grant. And what the ERC has really given us the opportunity to do is, as I say, take our molecular understanding that we've built up in over many years now into this much broader question about variability in nature and what that might mean for the different adaptive strategies of plants. And we could not have done that without the five year opportunity that ERC provides and the emphasis they have on taking things in new directions. They really value that in a way that a lot of grant funding schemes don't. They want to see that slow build rather than the kind of risky step into the unknown. I'm Nicholas Thomas. I'm the Professor of Historical Anthropology and also the Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. And in 2013 we began a project, Pacific Presences, Oceanic Art and European Museums that responded to vast collections of ethnographic material, artefacts and works of art in many museums in Europe. Those collections consist of extraordinary works of art and ordinary articles of material culture. They amount to tens, hundreds of thousands of artefacts that are hugely important resources for people in the Pacific. They exemplify the material heritages of their ancestors, ways of life that have changed. Pacific Presences, the project, was about methodological innovation, thinking through how we work with collections. It was also about getting to grips with those collections, understanding what was there, understanding what its significance is in the present for communities, for scholars, for researchers. European funding has been enormously important for us. It's enabled us to realise a very ambitious project that's engaged with scattered material evidence, very extensive bodies of material evidence, to draw specialists together, to engage in wonderful conversations with curators and academic researchers across Europe, but also to bring people from the Pacific, descendants of the people who made these artefacts, who often have extraordinary knowledge of them. We've been able to create dialogues between academic researchers, curators, community members, contemporary Pacific artists and others. Those dialogues have resulted in publications, exhibitions, new artworks. I'm Clive Oppenheimer. I'm Professor of Volcanology in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. I was involved as a partner of an ERC project led by a colleague at the University of Orleans and the focus of the project was to understand how volcanoes erupt, why they erupt in particular ways, whether they're violent or whether they're more passive. The key to that was studying the gases that are dissolved in molten rock that fuels volcanoes. We linked together some field observations and some analytical work of rock samples collected at volcanoes with also numerical models of the physics and chemistry of how magmas, how molten rock rises up through the crust to erupt at the surface. The ERC grant was absolutely crucial in providing resource for human resource of being able to recruit a PhD student and also some postdocs. In particular, I had a PhD student I supervised here in Cambridge who came on field work to Antarctica with me on several occasions where we collected some very, very detailed observations of an active volcano looking at the gases that come out of it and looking at the behaviour of its lava lake. There are a number of things that came out of it. One is that this former PhD student is now a postdoc, very successful, and applying what he studied as a PhD student, it was a wonderful interaction with the colleagues in France. I spent some time in Orleans where we had an opportunity to really discuss in detail what it was we were trying to do and also to enable that meeting of minds between a geologist myself and a physicist, the PI of this project and also some wonderful facilities in France that we don't have here, a state-of-the-art laboratory doing experimental work on simulating volcanic processes in the laboratory. Also, we've got some fabulous research outputs from it. We made some really remarkable and, for me, very surprising observations of the behaviour of this volcano. Even though we worked on a remote volcano in Antarctica, it gave us a generic understanding pertinent to volcanism worldwide and these are very essential fundamental processes that we find on all volcanoes. Okay, so I'm Ruth Cameron and I'm in the Material Science Department. My ERC grant is to make three-dimensional environments for regenerative medicine. What the grant has enabled us to do with that is to work with specialists across a range of fields and we've got three applications that we're working with on the ERC grant. So we're working with cardiac patches. So the idea there is to create a structure that will deliver stem cells to the heart after a heart attack, which would enable the heart to regenerate itself. We're using it in breast cancer research and we're also using them in bioreactors to create blood platelets from blood donations. It's enabled us to put a really coordinated programme of research together to enable us to work with the specialists in a really cross-disciplinary way. So rather than having individual short projects, we've really been able to put things together in a much more systematic and coordinated way that's enabled us really to get this base technology absolutely tied down. And that has meant that we've really got a platform technology that is already something that we can begin to look at other clinical targets for. So beyond the original scope of the grant. Okay, so I'm Professor Chris Jiggins here in the Zoology Department and we study butterflies in order to understand the process of evolution and how genomes evolve but also trying to relate what happens in the jungles of South America with what happens in the genomes of these butterflies. And the project is about understanding how the genomes of species diverge through the process of speciation. So speciation is the formation of new species. It was what inspired Darwin, the big question that Darwin was interested in resolving. And nowadays people are very interested in how that process of the formation of new species affects the genomes of those butterflies as they evolve, not just butterflies but of any organisms as they evolve into new species. What was exciting about the ERC project really was trying to bring together an understanding of what's happening in the genomes. So there's processes like recombination and mutation and those processes happening in the genomes of the butterflies with what's happening with the butterflies and their behavior. So we go out to South and Central America and we study how these butterflies behave and we bring them into cages in Panama and we do crossing experiments and we can look at how the genetic basis for the things that make species different. So in other words, how they prefer to choose mates and what their ecology is. So my name is Deborah Sziaszki, I am the reader at the Institute of Astronomy and Cabli Institute for Cosmology here in Cambridge and I'm working in theoretical and numerical cosmology and galaxy formation. I have won the starting grant for ERC a couple of years ago and the main topic of this grant was to study how galaxies and the supermassive black holes that we find in the center of these galaxies co-evolved together. Having an ERC award made a whole difference because I managed to attract a really competitive and internationally leading team which otherwise would have been almost impossible to get. So I could hire top-end postdocs, researchers in the field I'm working on. A very nice thing about the ERC awards, there are several but I would like to point out two. One is the time scales. So it gives you a little bit longer time because the awards are over five years to really build up the team and establish your research. The five years gives you time to expand and really tackle some of the major problems in astrophysics rather than doing some incremental research. So this is really fantastic. And I think the second thing that is really good, is not only support for staff and postdocs and students but it offers also support for accessing the facilities. So nowadays it's not all about only people working with you but having access in my particular case to the world-leading supercomputers and without the ERC grants this would have been very difficult. My name is Professor Simon Goldhill and I run an ERC senior grant project which is called The Bible and Antiquity in 19th Century Culture. And the reason why this project has been so important to me is that it's given me the unique opportunity to do a genuinely interdisciplinary collaborative project with the time and space it takes to make such interdisciplinarity work. This is a huge field. I've got eight postdocs and five professors working together for five years. We have a chance to trust each other, to learn each other's languages, to really explore the interface between topics as widely separated as classical philology, stained glass windows, or the deep sides of theology. Most importantly, the financial model offered by this sort of project enables us to do work that is 15 or 20 years ahead of the rest of the world. Britain in Europe is all the stronger for it. So this is a great opportunity to work with other people over a period of five years, which is something very unusual and very unique, and with a quite liberal framework. So you are able to change and shift your questions, to reform them, to reformulate them. It's not as if you are stuck with the questions of your initial hypothesis. Well, for me it means freedom above everything. You know, when you are constrained by both time and money, you cannot afford to take risks. So I think that for me, having the sea, it was that. Yes, I think risk-taking, which in science nowadays is difficult to get funding or something that is slightly risky. The potential, it potentiates the research you are doing. But I think that it also allowed the people, not just me, but the PhD students and the post-docs in the project, allow them the freedom to go their own lines. And so it becomes also a stepping point for their career. So in that sense it's unique. No other grant has done it. I think it allows you to do two things. And they seem conflicting in a way. So one thing is it allows you to set up a big project, very large grants, and you can put several people looking at different sides of a research question. And so you can have a sort of larger integrated project. So that's one thing that it allows you to do. But the second thing it allows you to do is to follow up on, you know, a speculative, let's say, long-shot sorts of research question. You know, real progress in research is made when researchers can tackle big, important questions, blue skies research. And the ERC is a real opportunity for, it's a program that invites researchers to submit ambitious blue skies imaginative research projects. And there aren't many other sources of funding that allow one to do that sort of thing. It's been an extraordinary fertile project and we wouldn't have been able to do that if we hadn't had European funding over a five-year period and sufficient funding to support a really strong group of post-doctoral research fellows who've brought different perspectives and expertise to the project. One of the great benefits of the ERC project was its scale. I mean it enabled purchase of some pieces of state-of-the-art equipment and X-ray tome graph. Also the team of post-docs and PhD students, we all work together with different skills, some doing computational modeling, some working in the laboratory, some doing the field work. And flexibility, the scale and the team that you can build and all of the people involved have gone on with their research careers in very productive ways. I think what's been really exciting for me has been putting together a team of people who are all working towards the same goal but have very different skills and expertise. It also just gives you the freedom to explore different areas a bit more of a long-term view of the project than you perhaps have from a standard three-year research grant. The result of having done this major project is that my own work has fundamentally changed. Not just in the subject area that I've been able to work more in the 19th century but just in the ability to explore the full scope of the sort of questions that I'm interested in and to have the full input of 12 wonderful colleagues. It's an extraordinary opportunity. Absolutely, it's been exceeded expectations.