 Good morning. Welcome everyone. It's a pleasure to open up this event or any event having to do with ERC for that matter. The European Research Council has been nothing short of a blessing for this university and I would say for the entire Catalan system. Its objectives resonate with ours and the nature of its grants, much as what we want to have here, which is internationally recognized people capable of assembling strong teams to do frontier research. So in other words, people who can play in the champions league of research. And our success in this program as far has been more than good. Catalan universities have secured over half of the ERC grants that have come to Spain and that's a very impressive fit given how small we are. So we want to keep that momentum going and events such as this one are part of that effort. So if this session here today helps us get one more ERC grant, it will have been worthwhile. So as far as these events go, it's hard to imagine a better program than the one we have in store for you today. Few speakers but they're all top-notch. We're going to first of all hear from one of the vice presidents of the ERC, our own Nuria Sebastián. Thank you, Nuria, for your generosity every time we call upon you. We also have the pleasure of hosting Alejandro Martín Hope Day, who I just found out speaks fluent Spanish. So, Alejandro, bienvenido, gracias por estar aquí. Then after the break we're going to hear from two of our own grantees. We're going to have Professor Serena Osareti who holds the Consolidator grant and Professor Martín Overtaumeo who has enjoyed the starting grant and has now just recently received an ERC proof of concept and I suppose that's the one he's going to be talking about. And finally we're going to hear from Mr. Rodíguez who hasn't arrived yet, our national contact point. I'm from Cristina Borreas, Beninguda, from the Catalan government. So much of things to be said and not too much time so let's go ahead start and to kick things off we had the good fortune of having here with us the officer in charge of research for the Catalan government, Francesco Virada, director general de recerca, Beninguda, gracias por el ingüe. And the man. Gracias, Ángel. Good morning. Well, I prepare a short presentation for you. I suppose that I suppose that the vast majority of you knows the few pieces of information I will share with you but I think it's good to explain at least our point of view about the Catalan ERD system and how the ERC program affects it. I will share with you basically three things. A very short view of the Catalan ERD system, the impact of the ERC program in this system and our challenges and opportunities for the future. Just in a snapshot, this is our Catalan system. We are 12 universities, we are in one of them, the UPF, more than 1600 research groups, recognized research groups, more than 25,000 researchers. This is new and I'm very glad to show it. More than 250 in spin-offs, practically 9,000 in innovative firms, 61, sorry, 64 research centers, 43 just from the Catalan government, 21 from the CIC in Catalonia, practically 1,000 degrees and masters, 250,000 students. And 10% of them international students. As you will see in the future, our main focus in our strategy is more innovation, of course, maintaining the research excellence and more internationalization. I think this is the key point that we have in mind. For an Apple user, this is very difficult. In a snapshot again, our policies. You see here, SUR, SUR is the Secretariat of Universities and Research. We define the institutions and we fund the institutions to earn this system. Here we have the director of Agaur, Jordi Mas, that is doing a lot of things, supporting groups, supporting calls in the area of internationalization, et cetera. We have the Fundació Catalana for La Racerca here. That its main mission is the dissemination of what we are doing in science, in research to our Catalan society. And we have our, probably our star program that is ICRIA. But I think in some way we can consider a kind of Catalan University that now has more than 250 awardees or grantees and that demonstrates that is the best investment we ever had in research in this country. Which is our model? Our model is here. It's very easy to say. It's very difficult to do. But our model basically has one principle. This is stability. This model without political stability is not possible to maintain. And thanks God, in the last 30 years, independently of the political party in the power, the system has been maintained quite a lot. With tools, excellence in internationalization and with three key issues that are money, people and institutions. And we have a lot of money. So money, for the moment, basically public funding. We will see that in the future we are looking for private money, too. Talent attraction and retention. Not just attraction. We need to retain all the good people that we are attracting every year. And reinforcing of our institutions. Basically universities, but research centers and large infrastructures, too. As you know, and this is something that doesn't appear in the first slide, we have three large infrastructures here in Catalonia. One is the Synchrotron. Another one is the supercomputer. And another one is the center for genomic analysis. These three big infrastructures are not just for Catalonia, are for Catalonia and the rest of Spain. And we constantly are looking for competitiveness, openness and flexibility. This is very important. We are trying to do, in real terms, to be competitive, to be open and to be flexible. And sometimes it's difficult because in all the areas there are people that would prefer to live in a more secure way. And competitive openness and flexibility is not very secure. But the future of our system must be based on this. And let me compare some numbers, especially for the people outside Catalonia, that demonstrate the strength of our system. These numbers are in comparison with Spain, with the Spanish state. And more or less what we do is what we achieve is to be more competitive. So the more competitive the call is, the better results we have. And this is a fact. These are just numbers. The people that know me that I always speak about facts, about numbers. Not ideas. It is very good to speak about ideas. But the point is this. I don't tell you all the details, but we will agree with us that the ERC grants are the most competitive grants in Europe. We have 52% of Spain. And some years ago the Spanish government decided that the most excellent research institutions would be a work with the Severe Ochoa level. That was a Nobel Prize that we had in the old times. And 44% of the Severe Ochoa centers are located in Catalonia. And et cetera, et cetera. This is just with 16% of population. And if we compare with Europe, more or less the same can be applied. We are 1.2% of the European population. We received 2.4% of the Seven Framework Programme funds. Now we are at 2.6% of Horizon 2020 that all of you know that is very much competitive, that was the Seven Framework Programme. 3% of papers, 3.2% of ERC grantees. And when we compare our universities without temporization, we are not in the best places. But when we compare universities in the under 50 years list, we are in a very good position. And one of the universities that help us in a very good position is just this one. Now let's speak about which are the numbers of the ERC here from the very beginning. I ask for all the numbers. I think it's good to have the complete photo of ERC grantees in Catalonia from the very beginning that was in 2007. That's correct. So till now we got 223 ERC grantees. By the way, I would like to ask you who of you are ERC grantees? Can you? Just two persons? So all of you are looking for the next ERC color. That's good. So you are potential ERC grantees. Good. It's difficult to say in English, but Santo Tomás was the first person that made a clear distinction between potencia and acto. It's very interesting. One thing is the potential of this acto. So let's hope that you transform the potencia in the acto. It would be good for all of us. So these are the numbers. We have just two synergy grantees, but the rest were very well positioned. And this is a temporal classification of all the grantees. You can see that till 2014 has been practically a growing number. In 2015, I don't know what happened because the number of ERC's positions increased from 2014 to 2015. But in 2015, maybe, I cannot tell you why. Probably, but this is not a fact. This is just a supposition. Probably, as you can see, the diminution is here. It's in the starting grantees. Probably because some of these starting grantees now are consolidating or advance and we are looking for new starting grantees. I hope the majority of you are looking for a starting grantees. That's correct. Because you are very young people. So next year, I hope the numbers will increase again. And just by coincidence, which is very interesting, we have practically the same percentage by knowledge field that Europe has. It's nothing interesting to see. Because in Europe, in the whole European research area, physics and genetic has 46%, and we are 46%. Life science 33, and we are 31. And social science and humanities 21, and we are 23. It's practically the same distribution. And if we look the numbers by institution, we can see that just eight institutions in Catalonia account for 60% of grantees, Tilcray, and these are the institutions that have four or more grantees. University, research center, university, university, circle, circle, circle, circle, circle, university, circle, circle, circle. This is a large infrastructure. The CIC, sorry, CIC and CERCA. So basically, you can see that are the universities and the CERCA centers, basically. And I don't know if it's just a coincidence, but you are the best by far. I suppose because the meetings are always here. And the money we attract, I understand that the key issue is knowledge, but money is not bad. And the money we attract is more or less 350 billion, so exactly 348. And let's compare again, first we can compare with Spain. 52% of all Spanish grantees are here in Catalonia. And the best percentage in comparison is in the proof of concept, 75% of the whole of Spain. And if we compare with the European research area, it's 3.2%. With, again, with proof of concept and synergy, but synergy being true is difficult to make as statistics. The proof of concept, we are more than 8% of the European proof of concept. I think it's exceptional. And this is very important for us because, as I said, one of our key strategies for the future is transform into innovation what we are doing in research. So this country has, I dare to say it, has a worldwide level research level, but not innovation level. The problem we have all of us in Europe, because the classical gap between research and innovation of course than America and all Japanese. But here in Catalonia, this gap is even huge. So in comparative terms, we have very good research, but we need, and this is our obsession in the next future, to transform this research into innovation. Because we are perfectly aware that if we want to create social value and economical value, we need to transform research into innovation. So if not, we can go to some new definition of research that some days ago a friend of mine told me, that I have to say in Spanish because I don't know exactly the meaning in English. She said, R and D, so E más D, más E. That means Investigación Desarrollo y Estantería. So how do you say Estantería in English? Shelf, exactly. So it will be R and S. More information. This is the total number of ERC guarantees divided by million inhabitants. And this would be the position of Catalonia considering population. So after Netherlands will be the first country into the European Union to receive by million inhabitants ERCs. As you can see here, this is the EU average. And this would be, this is Spain here, and this would be Spain without Catalonia. Without Spain, no, these are numbers. Spain would be between Greece and Hungary. And another way to show you the information is more than 25 grantees per million inhabitants. Just these three, four countries, because here we have Israel, Israel, Netherlands, Switzerland and Catalonia would have in this first place. Okay, and just to finish, and sorry because maybe I speak too much, just a few words about our challenges and opportunities. Basically, we have two challenges. One of them is consolidate and expand our research excellence. And second one is, as I said several times in my talk, this knowledge and technology we can say into economical and societal benefits so to innovate at the end. In the first objective, at the end, the sentence that we try to repeat every day is to keep the key policies that account for the good results of universities and research institutions. So we need to keep, and if it's possible to enhance, but at least to keep. And how, with three things that we are already doing, public funding, talent attraction and institutional strengthening, and one thing that we need to do much, much, much more in the future is to private funding leverage. The opinion of this government is that the future of the research future in our country depends of the good collaboration between the public and the private. It's not possible to compete in the world just with public money in research. It's not possible. If you go to any ranking that you can imagine, you always will see there the private money. And if we speak just about Europe, as you know some years ago, the European Union said that the objective was 2% of GDP invested in research. Here we are at 1.5%, still not at 2%. But more important, the European Union said that one third of this must be public and two thirds of this must be private. And here in Catalonia we are more or less 50 per 50-50. So the effort that the public sector is doing in research is practically the effort that Europe is asking for. The real problem we have is in the private sector. We need to insist constantly on it. And when I mean private investment, I mean primary investment in private companies, but private investment in public research centers too. And I mean not just investment, I mean donation too. So here we are at UPF. For example, all the people say, no, it's a harbor. Harbour is a very good university. It's first in the world, yes, very good. Harbour has an endowment of $36,000 million. $36,000 million. So imagine what the UPF would do with this money. And this money is private. So it's critical for our future, I insist, to reach a good agreement between the public and the private sector to enhance our research level. Okay, and to transform knowledge into societal benefits, so to innovate, we basically are doing three things. To affect in skills, to affect in incentives, basically tax incentives, and to affect in funding. These are things that we can do as a government. Small things, but they are in the good direction. So we are fully aware that we cannot do big steps, but our obligation is to go in the right direction. And we are doing something new from the last three years that is the industrial PhDs. Our people that are doing their PhD in an industrial firm now have more than 250 projects. We are trying to include in the lowest deductions for investments in research. This is not easy, because there are another part of the government that says be careful, because there are less taxes and less possibilities to do things. But we are including every year some small improvement. Now this year is a deduction for the Business Angels investments in start-ups. And after we have our start program related to innovation is what we call seed product and market, a low-productive market, that this year we multiply by three the investment. The first year was 1.2 million euros. This year will be more than 3 million euros. And this is a way to try to help our universities and research centers to transform their knowledge into intellectual property, protected intellectual property, license, companies, and so on and so on. Okay, and that's all. Let me finish with this graph again, our data, I know that maybe we are not in the back track, because as I said several times, we are looking for innovation. The key ERC tool for innovation is the ERC proof-of-concept. And these numbers are absolute numbers. In absolute numbers we have 41 proof-of-concepts compared with countries with much more population. And in relative values we are far far in the ERC proof-of-concept area, the first in Europe. So maybe thanks to ERC we will achieve to walk this way quickly to transform research in innovation. And that's all, thank you very much. Maybe after, if you want, we can answer some questions or whatever. Thank you. Well, first of all, I'm going to give my talk in English, but feel free to... Actually, I'm very pleased to be here today because this is my home university. And it's also a great pleasure being here today, not as a professor at this university, but as a vice president of the ERC. My presentation is going to give a quick overview about what is the scientific council of the ERC and what do we do. We have a few of the basic ideas that we try to materialize in the different schools. Al-Ratouli, yes, yes, yes. Okay, so the European Research Council is part of Horizon 2020, it's part of the Excellence Biller, and its goal is to fund frontier research. Sometimes you hear that the ERC funds basic research, this is not true, we are very happy to fund engineering or any kind of applied project, as long as it is really frontier and transformative, etc. The other feature that is very different from the rest of the framework program, except for the Marie Curie, is that it's an individual based, so it doesn't require to have a team covering different countries, and it's just one single person. And the other specific property is that the whole ERC, the different calls, the distribution of money, everything is under the direct responsibility of the scientific council. We even design the forms with the assistance of the agency, but we even decide how many questions and how the experts they should respond to the questions. We are supported by the Executive Agency, that you will have the pleasure of listening to Alejandro later. And there's only one criterion to get an ERC grant, that is excellence. The budget. So this is a figure that as a member of the council, I feel a bit uneasy about, as you can see, people say that we have doubled, virtually doubled the budget. Well, but we started with zero. So the first years it was really, really, the amount of time it was extremely tiny, and actually the first three years of the Horizon 2020, our budget has been lower than what it was at the end of FP7. Okay, this is a bit of a summary of the story, because the whole ERC is very, very new. Everything started in 2004, where there was the European Council agreed that there was a need of a research, a funding research based solely on excellence. Then the scientific council met in 2005 for the first time, and in 2007 it was the first call, that in terms of the organization was a real challenge because the number of applications was extremely high and the amount of money was extremely low and it was really the first call. Then 2009 and 10, things were starting to be a bit more normal, the ERC's review for the first time, sometime 2009 was the first 1,000 ERC grantees were funded, and nowadays it's just moving fast to 2015. We have celebrated last year the 5,000 grantees, and next year it's going to be celebrated the 10th anniversary of the functioning of the ERC. So the ERC is the structure, there is the scientific council that is composed by 21 members plus a president, and out of them there were three vice presidents, and I am one of them. The board is composed by the president, the three vice presidents and the director of the agency, and we have an external steering committee that is our interface with the commission. So these are the 22 members of the council, and we are 22, and there's something that I have been told, because it will never coincide, one of us with Brexit and others, but the idea is that it will not match the number of countries in the union so that we are not there representing Spain, I am not there representing Spain, we're not there representing our own country, we're representing our discipline. So the idea is that we should cover the whole spectrum of knowledge and we are there not to defend the proposals from Spain, but to defend in my case the proposals coming from psychology or part of the social sciences and as being the vice president of the humanities. We established the overall strategy, the work programs, methods and procedures for peer review and proposal evaluation, and actually anything virtually is our own responsibility, even the code of conduct and trying to avoid the conflict of interest between the evaluators and the applicants. So I said what's special, I think that there are different things, one is a very special thing is that it's individual, the only restriction anyone can apply from anywhere in the world, the only restriction is that the grant has to be carried out so the researcher has to work in a European country, from the EU or an associated country. Also differences is that the peer review is done in what I, those of you who are used to a peer review by in journals is extremely similar. So in a journal you have the editor and then the editor selects and the editorial board and then the editor selects the best experts from all over the world who hear shit things, are the best in deciding about whether the paper is publishable or not. We do the same. So we have a panel that cover, a panel member that cover in a general way the discipline and then the panel member, they will ask experts from all over the world to evaluate the proposal. So that means that we hope that we will be able to engage the best researchers and the best experts in our evaluation. Scientific quality is the only criterion. All fields of science and knowledge are eligible. And another thing is that it's very attractive and it's significant, it's flexible, it's up to five years under full control of the principal investigator. Being myself a grantee, I must tell you that it's like this. It's very flexible. So if you are good and lucky enough to get one of these grants, it means that you will be able to work in any topic that you have chosen and you will have a financial autonomy because the amount of money is significant. And something that is very, very important is that the grant doesn't belong to the host institution, but it belongs to the grantee. So most of the grants, at least in the Spanish granting system, are host institutions. So if one day you want to move to a different university, then you have to negotiate with your host institution the fate of your original grant. This is not the case for the ERC. So if you have an ERC grant and your host institution is not offering you what you think you deserve, and then you can go around and try to find another institution who offers you a better means. And actually some host institutions are actively active on these, trying to gain for their own host institution the best researchers. And the other thing is it attracts a lot of recognition and for the young ones, it means also usually stability. This is what I was telling you before that here you see in yellow the budget during the framework, the framework program, and then this is the budget in the horizon 2020 and it's true that we doubled, virtually doubled, but the truth is that we have been going down in the first years of the framework, of the new framework program. I will go very quickly on this because I think that today you and most of you already know that we have these three different trucks, the start in the consolidated and the advanced grants and the idea is to allow to everybody to compete with people who are more or less at your same level of your scientific career. And then there's the proof of concept. The proof of concept is a relatively tiny amount of money. Well, it's actually if you have an ERC grant it's a really, really tiny amount of money that it's only people who have an ERC grant can compete. And the goal of the proof of concept was to show that it's not true that excellent researchers they are not interested in doing transfer or transfer of knowledge and innovation but that if you give them the chance then they can develop the best idea. So the idea of the proof of concept is putting a little small amount of money and to boost the capacity of innovation of our excellent grantees but it's very important that these are people who got an ERC grant and the ERC grant usually had nothing to do with innovation it's really the knowledge, it's the fundamental knowledge upon which later you can develop innovation because as we all know without the fundamental knowledge there's nothing to translate if you have nothing. So the scientific quality aims for excellence as a sole criterion and there are two different dimensions that will be evaluated your research project and the principal investigator this is something that later will be further developed and here it's going to be more of the same that it was presented in the previous talk but just to give you an idea the success rate on the FP7 and in the starting 2016 where Spain stands in comparison of the rest the whole country is 7% and these are the funded projects by a country of host institution and again Spain is more or less in 360 by domain also Spain is not different from the rest in terms of the proportions that were already mentioned in the previous talk and this is again the same information split it by call and by domain and it's not that anything has substantially changed there are fluctuations in different years because in a particular year if you think the numbers are relatively small for instance in if you see here the number of grants in the starting run in 2015 in LF was one well next year you double because you go to two so when you are in small numbers these are really small fluctuations that the landscape is relatively stable so this is a bit the same that it was shown before except that I have split it by type of call and I have something specific about my university is that we are extremely successful at the advance grant because 11 if we don't count the proof set that actually are on top of the other grants it's a bit less than half of the grant I think that it's a bit odd so here you can see more or less it should be one third one not true two thirds if you are starting and consolidators and then one third for the advance grant here you have the same per different regions and the Spanish landscape I think that some regions are really performing extremely poorly and it's to be concerned that one of the largest I think it's the largest region in Europe that is Castile Leon has one starting grant and Murcia has one one consolidator one advance and it doesn't have to do a lot with how rich you are if you go to the Balearic Islands now I don't find them exactly I don't find them because they have none so and this is one of the wealthiest regions in the country so it has to do much more with the kind of policy it's not only the amount of money that it's being put but also how the money is being allocated and in this respect it's clear that in Catalonia the money has been put so to foster the excellence that is what the ERC is showing okay the proof of concept Spain is doing very well I have my own views also why Spain Spanish researchers are so interested in applying for such a relatively small amount of money but if you think how much money we get in Plan Nacional €150,000 sounds like a real fortune so maybe all of a sudden we are becoming extremely interested in innovation or maybe we are desperate to get money from any source and then maybe this is behind maybe it's everything but a bit skeptical about why all of a sudden this is also another very interesting slide because people say oh my god the UK they get so many grants and this is because they can speak in English and this is their native language and this is why they have an advantage well it's not it's because their system is so attractive that you get people from all over the world who want to go to work there so if you see the number of grants it's really huge but then if you see so here you have that in blue is a foreigners that non-UK people that got an ERC in the UK and it's huge so actually it's 50% as compared with the UK actually there are not many, there are not more UK nationals with an ERC grant than German nationals with an ERC grant so it's more or less the same number however look who's the country that's losing more research as the men country that's losing more research is precisely Germany and all that I think that it reflects clearly the properties of the research system in Italy being the second one I think that they're not going to go into details but there are different reasons why Germany is losing and Italy is losing so many researches but to me what it clearly shows that is the UK is not more successful because they can speak in English as their native language look at Switzerland they are so successful because they're able to attract many foreigners but these are the ERC money they offer other things but so do the Germans and they lose plenty so money is not everything money is a lot but it's not everything so here you have by the top institutions hosting ERC grantees there are no Spanish or Catalan institutions in the top we should go up to 47 grants, real grants I would say because the proof of concept is kind of a parasite you need to have the other ones and this is the Utrecht and Israel Institute of Technology and the Spanish to see this is the different category because these are the research organizations that are really huge like the Sénérés or the Max Plan society these are totally different this is why they are separated in here but so then a bit of the daily life of a member of the scientific council we are quite busy and we are organized in standing committees and in working groups and the standing committees we deal with the conflict of interest and research integrity so anytime that there is a problem that someone may have done something that shouldn't have been done research and is brought to our knowledge we launch an investigation and we also establish the rules by which for instance a panel member may be or not in conflict of interest with a particular proposal and the other standing committee is the committee of panels and is the one that is in charge of organizing the life of the panels who is going to be invited and also analyzing whether some panels needs to be restructured or not then we have a working group that were set up to deal with specific problems and one of them is the gender balance the year I see from the very beginning was a member of the council by the fact that women are not there are not as many applicants as one should expect considering that we are a 50% of the world population and then there was also little that we can do outside because this is not our realm but our realm is that evaluation so we are very concerned that women are not discriminated in the evaluation process and we monitor whether the percentage of women applying is equivalent to the percentage of women obtaining a grant and we have set up different procedures and when I was an applicant I was I didn't get my grant on the first time actually I got it in the third time so insist and I was concerned because every year that I applied the forms changed and I was like oh my god they just do it and you know they have nothing else to do these guys at the council I was not a member of the council of course and they just wanted me to waste my time changing the forms and actually it was because it was trying to not discriminate women because it was the analysis the way some information was presented might favor more men than women so this is something that is constantly being monitored another working group is an open access an open access both at first it was on publications and then it was an open data this for some field is not an issue but for other fields it is an issue particularly for the social sciences and humanities open data can be a really really problem if the commission finally decides to have it mandatory and actually has already been decided mandatory for all projects in the union if you don't even have a repository and you don't have standards then it makes no sense to have the open data so we have a working group working on this the other working group is on strengthening interest nationalization the ERC as you as I have said was a very young it's very young and many people in the world didn't know so we spread the word that the ERC existed because we wanted to attract to Europe the best researchers all over the world so there's a specific work working on that the other working group is the widening participation widening participation actually is targeted at low performing countries it's true that the not all the countries are equally successful although there's a slight I can't remember if I have it but there's almost a perfect correlation between the amount of money that putting into research and a number of ERC grants that the country gets but yet there are some countries where the tradition in writing grants and in working in a competitive environment is not so well established and so the idea is that there's a working group trying to enhance the participation and the practices in research across Europe another working group is the group in innovation and relations with industry this is the group that got the idea of creating the proof of concept and then another one is the last one is the key performance indicators the funding fathers of the ERC they sold the idea that we were to the commission that look guys you're going to find something new something different something that has never been funded is extraordinary and now we have to find a way of proving because it's different and it's extraordinary and it has never been done what are the indicators to show that the ERC is successful or is not successful so we have a group working trying to identify the success and this is really really really difficult sometimes fundamental discoveries are the they are recognized they become general knowledge many many years after so maybe now we have an ERC grantee who's making a fundamental discovery but this discovery has no applications has no the scientific community is not prepared for it and maybe it will be silent for 10 15 20 years and then there will be a boost and actually there is plenty of discoveries showing that this is the case the general theory of the relativity is basic for the GPS the solar panels are based on discoveries that happened 114 years ago so if the ERC is really funding the future how can we measure that we are indeed funding the future so this is a very difficult task but we are trying to do it then okay we'll go quickly because this is more simple as explanation of what I have said and so this is the the proof of concept is also something that is extremely successful and a couple of weeks ago I was I was giving a presentation at and actually it was on innovation and I was puzzled because I didn't expect that but some people in the audience they said that the ERC should not be funded the proof of concept and I was surprised because this is a highly successful research center in terms of of proof of concept and the IGFOR is one of the centers that it has more the innovation very close so and I must say that this is this tension because we want to show you have to remember that the proof of concept is a way of showing that funding, fundamental research, pays and it can pay relatively quickly but also we don't expect all of our projects to be able to generate immediate gains and yet they have to be funded because they thought that the goal of the ERC is to fund a fundamental research and that someone else should fund the proof of concept I was defending saying that there all is only 20 million euros that we are putting into there and then I saw that's 10 consolidated data grants okay yes but I was surprised because I didn't expect this to be erased in that particular context I expected it in other places but not there to me it was a surprise I was well I mean know what I think that it's interesting because that means that the research community understand what the ERC is the ERC is there to make the big discoveries of the future and then we can allocate a small amount of money to show and to push the researchers those who can make the step into innovation quickly but yet the main business is the other one okay this is the the idea of the proof of concept is precisely in the devalorization process funding at the beginning so any idea any new application or something that can be commercialized or it can be some societal impact at the beginning it has a negative balance because you are putting money for the grant and then this is what is known is the value of death because you have made a discovery you have a good idea at this time where you have to develop the transformation funding angel investors finding someone who will be able to put the money you are still in the negative part and then a few of them will become successful something that is important is the proof of concept is not evaluated scientifically the scientific part is the ERC here the is much more on how to commercialize on how to make it societal impact because it is not only about making money it is also about caring about the population and the society and this is what the proof of concept sometimes people are mistaken and they think that this is to get more money for another experiment and this is not the case so actually some of the proof of concept have been extremely successful and here you have a few of them through the proof of concept we keep on creating working groups that means that we keep on putting more workload on our shoulders and some of them as on the synergy grant the synergy grant disappeared at the end of the seventh framework program because of lack of money success rate was ridiculously small and although we would very much have the proof of the synergy again on track right now it would be totally impossible because the budget is flat even less than what we had at the end of Horizon 2020 then there's another one on interdisciplinary grant interdisciplinary grants have it's a small but systematic 5-10% less success 5% the 5% less success less successful than non-interdisciplinary interdisciplinary is measured about how many panels you take which is unfair because some panels are very interdisciplinary already but this is the way we measure it and so we are trying to understand why the interdisciplinary projects are 5% less successful than those that only ticked one panel then we have another working group that is a science behind the project the ERC gives very interesting information about what are the topics of the future so we have some data showing that the starting grantees and the advanced grantees for the consolidated we don't have that many data but they say starting and consolidated grantees they prefer to work on topics that are not the same than the advanced grantees sometimes okay so there's some mismatch okay so the ERC is a very young institution we think that after nine years considering there's only nine years it can be said that it's a success story just figures and facts I also like facts we have 7% of articles among the 100% most cited scientific journals so we should have 1% but we have 7% so we have 7 times more top-sided papers than what is on average we have now I can say 6 novel prices because I think that the slide is not being updated but yesterday the novel laureate in chemistry is a double ERC grantee and we have 5 war prices and 3 field medals and also another important thing is that 2 thirds of our budget goes to fund the young researchers so it's 64% of the grants they go for early career researchers up to now there is 6,000 projects funded and 40,000 researchers and experts employed in the ERC teams so if you want more information and I think that you need to be in this room for a few more hours and you will be able to hear more presentations and also have the pleasure of listening to the national contact point thank you very much Do you have questions? Questions? Questions? Sir, I have a question Can you raise your... because I cannot localize on synergy grants so how is the discussion can you tell us a little bit more about are they coming in the future something will come in the future if we have enough money I mean I'm just trying to look for the slide this one so we are in the 2017 call the upcoming one the amount of money is basically the same in 2013 we don't want another call because it's time and money of everybody of the agency who needs to organize it's a very complicated evaluation system and we don't want hundreds of researchers in Europe wasting their time because they come with extremely excellent proposals but there is no money to fund them 2018 2019 it doesn't go up a lot but maybe we can find more money or maybe we get less money because maybe the commission decides that they need money for the refugee crisis and then we lose money so we're aiming we wish but we want to launch the call until with the figures that Alejandro and others can make estimates about more or less the number of proposals so until we can reach a decent a decent 10%, 15% success rate 1% success rate nobody wants this so this is what I can tell you I wish I could know more maybe there are more questions because I think Alejandro's presentation will also focus on the okay good morning I'm going to try and move fast I'll try and do this in like 15-20 minutes I want to be sort of very concrete what I want to talk a little bit about is in some sense to help this vast majority of people who don't have a ERC ground here which is I think everybody is 3 or so in their application so I will tell you a little bit about how the evaluation works so you can understand how to write your proposal, what to expect, how to pitch it and I'll give you a few tips now it's such a wide topic area that of course a tip for history will not be the tip for mathematics so I can't get into that level of detail only sort of generalities in fact that's one of the characteristics of the ERC is that we cover everything and this is a real challenge and in that sense the panels have a lot of autonomy so you will see that the evaluation criteria are rather general sometimes we get questions like how many nature papers should I have should I have one or should I have three or four and of course these questions don't make sense in the ERC because you could be working in history politics, math, whatever so you have to look at yourself in the world in which you work another question we always get is am I competitive how many publications do I need to get a grant the best thing is to look on our ERC website we have all grantees listed and published, you can look in by panel what is your panel and then like that you can see the sort of level anyway that was a bit of a long introduction so I'll talk a little bit about how does the evaluation work a few proposed tips in a general sense and some sources of further information I want to go backwards by hitting this so you've seen this slide already and in fact most of you know this I would say 95% of our money goes in the top three blocks one of the nice things of the ERC is evaluation methodology is essentially the same across the top you could nearly say that we have one scheme and not three schemes along the top we recently had some people from the welcome trust visit us and they handle less money than we do they work in the UK so they think they're very low bureaucracy but they have 65 schemes in the welcome trust I would argue that we have one scheme so this is one of the characteristics of the ERC we keep things simple and we keep things flexible so for example who can apply this is actually I think a rather striking slide when I worked in schemes of the commission before the ERC this was nearly unthinkable so we're just looking for excellent researchers of any nationality any age any current working place in the world and on any topic you'll fit in somewhere along the top with these characteristics the only requirement is you have to have a letter of support from a host institution in any EU country or associated country that if you get the grant they will give you a position so this is very very flexible I doubt there are many more flexible funding schemes in the world so we have these three schemes starters consolidated advanced grants they more or less fit in this traditional picture of a career progression but what's very important is that we don't discriminate by age we discriminate by your academic experience in the latest starting grant 2016 call we just funded a starter who is 66 years old he's currently doing a postdoc and he's Portuguese and he's working on maps of the Mercator maps and this sort of stuff so it's a big big effort to not discriminate by age by gender or anything or national origin so you know that we have different maximum values 1.5 million for starting grant this is a very good amount of money for somebody at that point in their career 2 million for consolidated grants and 2.5 for advanced but in certain cases you can even increase it and the reason for this is because we know that there are different levels of costs if you're working on an experimental project then a theoretical project and also if you are moving to the EU from outside the EU you're going to have start up costs and also access to large facilities so if your project involves any of the three things listed at the top you can actually ask 500,000 extra in starting Consolidated 751 million in advance so these are really substantial amounts of money and one of the tips I'll give you later is don't think that this is automatic you have to explain it, you have to justify it we see plenty of proposals who in nearly one sentence say I want another 500,000 for major equipment and the panels won't just give it like that they need to understand the need and the requirement you don't have a right to it you only have a right to ask for it so what do I need to submit an ERC proposal obviously you've heard already we're looking for bright, original, exciting ideas you need to put it into a project they are relatively short the proposals five pages in a part one which I'll explain 15 pages in part two I've heard people who've said they've written this over a weekend this is a Spanish lady who works in Madrid so I can even give you her name other people say they've worked on it over for about a year but this lady said she had the idea for a long time and finally she wrote the whole proposal in one weekend so you need to get this letter of support from a host institution very important and then of course write your research proposal everything is web based everything is electronic based we try to keep our submission system as simple and flexible as possible the forms are actually a word template so you work in a word and you upload it there's very little that's in structured information and probably the most important thing here is respect the deadline one of the really strict requirements is to respect the deadline sometimes things arrive a second late and this is very very painful for us and for the applicant so we often say submit often and submit early what I mean by that is if you're working on something submit it 10 days ahead of time and keep working and then submit it 9 days ahead of time and keep working because we'll only go by the last submission any new submission overwrites the previous one and like that if in the last minute your computer crashes or your network of your university gets all messed up you'll have something which is only a day old there are plenty of people who don't do that and in the last minute they do their full submission something goes wrong and it's tragic so the submission system has two parts to it we call part A which is sort of the administrative forms I won't get into a lot of detail part A of course is your name and where you're working and a few numbers on your budget very very limited like two numbers total amount and it's very very limited budget down there then the annexes are important you need your host institution support letter which is a standard form and you'll find it online you can download it and it has some conditions in it I would say every single one of those conditions is in favor of you as a PI as a researcher it basically says that if you get the grant the host institution will provide you with space with lab, with independence with reliability so this all works in your favor but it's required if you're applying for the starting grant you need to have your PhD two to seven years past PhD in the prior two to seven years so we need a copy of your PhD and for COG we need that also so you upload a copy and we'll take a look at that and the certain conditions I'm going to explain you can also extend these periods from 2012 these are things like maternity, military service and we need some documentation to support that so these are important points I'll come back to them in a second then on the scientific side there are two parts this is what we call part B1 this is what's looked at in the first step of the evaluation which I'll explain to you and it's a five page summary of what you plan to do a two page CV part B2 which I'll explain to you only then is the what we call full and additional 15 pages of methodology budget breakdown resources is that looked at so in the first step which I'll explain to you only the first five pages are looked at this means it needs to be self-supporting it needs to attract the attention of people it needs to be a whole you can't rely in step one that they will see part B2 because they won't so when you have your proposal and idea ready we have broken down everything into 25 so this means that these panels are already very broad they also to some extent are rather arbitrary they are there to just facilitate the evaluation you find the one that best matches your research you may find that your research lies between two to indicate a second panel and we will make sure that in the evaluation process that we will find panel members from the other panel to look at your proposal as well and their reports will be sent to the primary panel for discussion and consideration there also are some things called descriptors that you asked to select they are more detailed and they help us in the finding of remote reviewers and also for these external members now in a few cases we will actually override your selection sometimes people make an outright mistake in their selection and we will not send it to your mistake we will actually use our brain and send it to the right one but this is always done in consultation with the panel chairs both the one that outgoing and the incoming so in the end there are very few transfers we do everything we can to select your choice so this is how the evaluation works it's a little bit like an interview process for a job in a company so we get typically about 2,500 applications per called deadline they come into step one we then divide them by panel and then we make the transfers if there are any clear mistakes and then we send them to the panel members of each panel to about 4 panel members of each panel the ones that have the closest match but remember these are people chosen ahead of time they are not specialists they are generalists you can look back at the names of the panel members of prior calls and you can see they are typically people of a very high scientific level but of course the chance is that they are going to be the specialists in the world in your research is pretty small so this means that the part B1 has to be understandable for somebody to appreciate the importance of what you're doing and the impact of what you're doing but I wouldn't get into the micro detail of the science so it's really a generalist look so your proposal is sent to these 4 panel members each proposal is sent to a different set of 4 and this is not all done remotely about 2 or 3 months later they come to Brussels and they have a panel meeting and typically a panel handles about 150 proposals and they will select from there about a third to go on to an interview so this is what I mean like a job you get all these CV's and then you select some that you think are the most attractive we tell the panel members to take risk we tell the panel members if you have a doubt bring the person to interview we do a lot of the work in the interviews by bringing people we fly people here from all over the world it doesn't matter where you're applying for we refund the travel costs it's actually an enormous enterprise in Brussels we spend millions of euros on the evaluation we interview 1600, 1700 people a year I remember one time again it was a welcome trust and they were very proud that they interviewed 60 people and I said well we interview 1600 so this is really on a different scale so the panel will select about one third of these people to come for an interview this is a very good news if you get such a letter and the other two thirds will get an evaluation back a review back the substance of the evaluation are the three or four reviews that's the substance the panel will also make a panel comment but you have to understand that at this point it's like going for a job the panel comment won't be detailed they will rely a lot on the remote panel member reviews and there is a lead reviewer there to make sure everything is taken care of so two thirds of the reviews will be of that sort if you get rejected in step one you can get either a B grade a B mark or a C mark if you get a B mark in step one you actually cannot submit the following year and the reason we've had to do this is because of the tremendous and relentless increase in demand for applications year after year it was drowning out the panel members okay and if you get a C you actually have to wait out two years if you get an A in step one well actually you don't get an A what you get is a letter telling you that you have been invited to an interview and you will get contacted with an approximate date and at that point the proposal is then sent to the full proposal now part B1 and B2 the whole thing will be sent to the panel members of the panel panel members of other panel if necessary but also to remote reviewers around the world for each call we deal with about 2,500 remote reviewers around the world so we don't have a database of reviewers our database is a world they can choose anybody they want in the whole world I can tell you that the application stage you can also indicate if you want people you don't want it sending to and we will do our best to respect that unless you pick out the four panel members who are exactly on your topic in the panel but within reason we will do our best to respect that and we don't put it into question so if you get called for an interview about two or three months later you will be called to Brussels and you will go in front of the panel and you will have some people here who have been through that and will explain it to you and you'll find your 12 or 13 panel members there typically you won't know the names of all of them I've often heard comments by they are impressed by two things this is what is supposed to be impressed by the level of the people and the level of detail that the proposal was read at and I have some comments later but one of the objectives of the interview is to make sure that these are your ideas and it's your project interviews only take place for the younger people the advanced France don't have interviews it's just based on paper so at the end of step two typically 40% will get funded more or less and those will go on to get funded the panel works by giving an A to all the proposals they think should be funded even if there is not enough money if you get an A in step two you're ranked in order and we just go down the ranking list in the ERC we never change it and we fund these and if you get a B in step two you don't have any resubmission restrictions but it basically says from the panel to us even if you have money don't spend it on this proposal spend it on a proposal of another panel okay so that's a little bit an overview of the evaluation process these are the evaluation criteria they are kept at a high level because it's not the same in history in philosophy in math and in physics so these evaluation criteria are interpreted by the panel into their field so our panels are incredibly international I think they're probably this is probably the most international evaluation system maybe in the world here you have a distribution of panel members 2007 to 2014 EU countries associated countries but also international and there are even some which I don't know what it is, ZA CU and that's how international it is and this is just a panel member the remote reviewers is even more because it's done remotely so it's an incredibly international panel now the scientific council has always felt that they want to give an emphasis to young people this is a policy they spend about a third of the money in advance grants and two thirds of the money on starting in consolidator this is actually how the applications come in by age range and divided by type of call so you can see that the starting grants, the median age is about 34, these are the green ones for the advanced grant the median is the longest orange line is about 39 or so and then advanced grants are an incredibly long tail and they start all the way from 34 and all the way to 80 this was in 2015 so there's no age discrimination and I can tell you there are advanced grantees of 34 and 35 who get the grant now one of the things we always hear about is my god if I don't get it in my consolidator grant I won't be able to get it for 10 years that there's a big gap between starting consolidating and then advanced what we see that isn't the case the success rate is actually pretty fat there are applicants, there are funded that's the next slide the people funded in 2015 for those three calls you can see yes there is an emphasis on those funded in the younger years but that's where the applications were as well and here are the funded advanced grants all the way to 75 or so and starting at 38 so and what you see in the dotted line is a success rate so the applicants, the grants are divided by the applicants so you can see it's pretty flat we have a pretty flat success rate 8 from age 30 to age 60 so this idea that circulates around there that my god if I don't get it at 40 I won't get it until I'm 50 is not borne out by the results so this is facts, we've heard three times now that facts is what counts and these are facts so I said there is some reasons the eligibility window what we're trying to do our best through administrative rules is make a balance for people what's happened in their lives so the competition is fair so from maternity leave you can get an extension in starting and carb of 18 months per child the child can be before or after the PhD all you have to do is present proof that you have the child like a birth certificate and it's automatic so all you need to do is present how much time you've taken off and that time will be awarded to you as well military service you can get an extension for MDs we know the training period is very long especially for the residencies and medical training that time can be taken off and also caring for seriously ill family members and as long as you can properly justify these things there's actually no limit to what time so we're trying to do our best the other question that often comes up is these extensions I just mentioned there has been a fear that it could work against you that if you are for example a woman and you say I want an extension because I have two children that will blackball you and in fact we look at that and what you see here is a starting grant 2015 and it's basically what you see along the top this is a number of funded proposals male, female and here are the extension years and what are in dots are the success rates so in the purple dots the female extension is female success rate and what you see is that the success rate is pretty flat so the extension is working people request extension people get the extension and the success rate is maintained so this does not work against you in any manner in fact the panel members are not consulted on these extensions the extensions are given by the administration so it never goes through the panel members mind should I be giving this person an extension it's decided by us it's given to the panel this is in a box and now evaluate the proposal remember also the panel members are told to take into account how far along the window are the so they're not giving the same look at some of these two years past PhD is somebody who's 7 and we do see that pretty flat this is for consolidator again you'll see the same thing that there are plenty of awards in the extended window and the success rate is pretty flat it doesn't in any sense go down in the extension zone so the extensions work I wouldn't worry about that now I come to some tips and advice one of the things these panels are instructed to seek out high risk so be ambitious and be daring in part B1 you really have to grab the interest and attention of the readers and reviewers you have 5 pages you can't put a lot of detail they were looking for something ambitious it has to be credible with a CV you have of course but they're instructed to look out ambitious and exciting research remember that in step 1 only part B1 is seen by the panel members therefore it has to be self-contained and don't think that they're going to see any of your details of the methodology in B2 because they won't also you've got to pitch it to generalists in your field and not specialists now if you make it a step 2 now all the reviewers will get both B1 and B2 so don't simply repeat what you have in B1 and B2 they will get that as well so here you fill in your methodology you fill in the resources you need and whatever are the details so don't just duplicate if they don't get B2 on their own they get both together ok something that we see sometimes that is not positive especially in the young people starting and consolidated they sometimes put in other groups to make it look that they are more senior and we are told we tell the panel members that we're looking for PIs, individual investigators we're not looking for consortia we're looking for the person and his team or her team so don't add extra collaborators don't turn it into a consortium that is definitely not looked for any additional resources remember to explain credibly it's not automatic we are moving into open access for publications open access to publications is now obligatory from now on since the last year or so so do include the necessary resources and costs for that there's something that's also appearing which is open access to research data it is still an opt in you can opt in and it doesn't affect the evaluation the evaluators will not know if you have opted in so you don't need to opt in with the hope that will look good to the panel members panel members are not aware of this for the interviews you will hear people I think who went to interviews to give you first hand information so I think you definitely need to attract the attention of the panel members they have a heavy schedule they may be seeing 10 people in a day so definitely practice your interview typically an interview is a 10 minute presentation followed by 15 minutes of questions so the panels have some latitude to decide whether they want a 5 minute presentation or 10 most interviews involve a power point some panels don't want a power point I think it's typically the mathematicians so we allow the interview process to be adapted by culture one of the things they're looking for is that are these your ideas they're looking for how excited you are about the work how interested you are but they may come back with individual questions probing you for example questions from the remote reviewers that they had and they may ask you they don't expect you to have the answer to everything but they want to see that this is really your project and not somebody else's we know that the interviewees are very very nervous we see them in the elevators you can tell them immediately they're all white and they're all sweating so you just need to expect that and I think one of the best things is to practice ahead of time with senior people so with that I'm just going to tell you what the deadlines are this is the deadlines that are coming up is we have I think the next one is starting grant 18th of October 2016 then the consolidated on February in advance grant in August so you have plenty of deadlines ahead of you so the one in October is a little bit short and proof of concept you don't have to worry yet you have to worry about that later so again you can get more information online I think the slides will probably be circulated so you can look for some of these links we even have some Vimeo videos and that's everything I have a question on the interdisciplinary applications you said that in step two an application would be reviewed by other panel members from other panels and this means V2 I'm wondering if V1 is going to be the same thing so you are also going to be reviewed by we do send it to other panel members in both steps so even in step one if you indicate a second panel we will most likely send it to a panel member of that panel the only reason we would not do it if it's a mistake normally we will follow your indication the assignment of panel members is a rough is made by the scientific officer but is then checked with the panel chair so in general you will get an out of panel review both in step one and in step two I would like to ask if you block a potential reviewer whether the panel members see that because they might be friendships or it can be a member or the person might be even a member it's a very very good question so what we do is we let the panel chair know but not the panel member and we refer to it simply as a conflict of interest so to the panel member it just appears a conflict of interest we don't say that you have been excluded when there is a conflict of interest you don't see anything from the panel for instance you can be a panel member and then there is someone from your host institution who is applying to that panel then you are in a position that is called the out of the room and it's so extreme that being myself a panel member when I was a panel member I didn't even know because there was someone in my university but from a totally different panel a different department that was in the evaluation process and I didn't know until the end of everything there was a list of the projects at the end of the final rank because I didn't see when the reviews were circulated among the members of the panel everything was removed so you don't know that you are in that position of the conflict of interest Hi, I had a question regarding the data you shown about the maternity leave and the stention I assume that you haven't got any other data about the success rate have you noticed any correlation about the presence of female members in the panel and how they react to female candidates this is one of the big issues according to the human resources strategy and so on we've looked at that in detail and we find that there is no correlation we actually have increased over the years the proportion of female panel members we want to reflect at a minimum in the panel the composition of that research field in something like mathematics where there are 10% math professors we're not going to get 60% female panel members but we want as a minimum to reflect what's going on in the field over the years the proportion of female panel members has gone up but we see no correlation the proportion of female panel members and the success rate of women and we've looked at this carefully the null hypothesis is the one that is successful can you say it? can you use the microphone please I mean no this is interesting because it has become an obsession for people I think in scientific human resources now as you said I'm working now with mathematicians and it's extremely hard maybe to create a panel for internal reviews and evaluation and on the other hand there are obviously data coming probably from companies you know the Institute by Google and providing lots of information on this apparently when you're working in the private sector it makes a big difference I don't know if the European Union has adopted these measures and if you say now that for instance you haven't seen any difference I don't know why we are also obsessed about this because in the implementation it's incredibly difficult to get 40% female panel members if you need senior members for an evaluation you tell if it's difficult this is I think that if it's extreme it's perverse because then what you have is that always the very same women are asked to be panel members or being in positions and that means that they don't have the time to do the research while their male peers are at the lab doing the job you are in this 40% having to be there all the time and something that also happens very often in the at least in the panels that I have been able to see is that quite often the thing that is on the projection is the acronym when they are discussing other projects and then the evaluation so the scientific officer tries to show the different opinions and the views so the panel can discuss and then they are with their own notes and then they say yes but he has not been able to answer it it's a she or just the other way around when she says this is a he a he a she so when you are in the discussion of where the project is the control of a particular effect is appropriate or not I have seen that so often that maybe it's a feature of the ERC that you are so much discussing the project that you lose the because the curriculum you can discuss it at a certain point facts how has it has there been any sign of internationalization this is something that is very important the chances of getting I don't know if there are statistics but the chances of getting an ERC grant if you have never moved from your home institution this is something that I have seen in the panel I don't know we have these statistics I haven't done them but maybe A1 so because they say well but this person has moved think that the ERC tries to fund young researchers to establish their own career if you have never moved from your PhD supervisor are we going the panel is willing to give 2 million euros 1.5 million euros to someone who furthermore wants to stay with a PhD supervisor that's competition is so tough everybody's that at step 2 and even at step 1 the projects that are being discussed that are so good that anything that looks bad that the panel you see that they clinch to it saying okay yeah okay so this one maybe is not an ERC grant so mobility is a plus coming back to the female thing I haven't seen it it's related to the previous question from what I know about I know that the University of Sheffield for instance there was a very big project studying implicit bias involving people from different like it was very interdisciplinary I mean women can practice can be victims of implicit bias in that we discriminate unconsciously whether and just like men do so having more women in a given panel is not going to particularly make a difference and I think that they have they've been working on suggestions for panels to try to minimize how biases may affect the evaluation of specific candidates because I mean there's quite a lot of research on that and so I just wanted to clarify because you did mention before that you try to see the relation between the percentage of women applicants and the women recipients and is it like on a pair like is it the same kind of percentage so that was I didn't quite get that data so that was the one question I had for you okay it has it was with a 5% an average he knows all the numbers he knows everything so yeah we always look at the success rate of males and females through the evaluation system and we have a gender working group and we're in constant feedback and we're constantly giving them data and we alter things in the evaluation like the forms to try to help in general in the physical sciences we see in quotes perfection what I mean by that is absolutely identical success rate there's a lower participation rate of females but there's no difference in success rate and in fact in social sciences we also see that much higher participation but very similar well we do see a difference and the gender working group is working on this is in the life sciences actually in step 1 and not in step 2 so the idea that you have a woman in front of you in the interview doesn't seem to be the issue there's something in step 1 the gender working group has been struggling with this for a long time we've actually altered the forms we insist that you can only list in starting grant your 5 most important publications so you don't go just by numbers there have been all sorts of changes but that is where we see an effect and we are constantly looking at it overall and we look at the whole evaluation everything put together the effect is very small but there is an effect in step 1 life sciences which we keep an eye on and we're trying to understand and we work on but it's not at the interview stage it's not when you have the presence of the male or the female in front of you I want to say something about the working group the working group has 50% men 50% women composition and it's not because we wanted it to be like this is because even the the male members of the council they also feel that this is not a female problem and to me when I saw that I thought oh my god I really like this council because this is not a female problem this is a problem of the society so the the composition is 50-50 without chasing them Hi I would like to have a bit more details about the justification of additional funding so what is adequate justification if you look at the forms they've now changed this little box for you to explain I think the best way to look at this is that you have 15 pages and you got to distribute your 15 pages in a reasonable manner so you have the whole budget which you have to explain and then additional amount I guess what I'm trying to say is people in the past who say I'm starting up a lab therefore I want 500,000 at one line that's not good enough I think you need to put it in proportion to the amount of money that you're asking additional compared to the rest of the budget so I would say minimum a paragraph or so you have some numbers if it affects the evaluation asking the additional amount that's a good question it's not negative if it's justified it's not negative so you say it's the opposite the null hypothesis is non-negative no we see a slightly higher success rate for larger proposals than smaller ones slightly but that depends on your field it depends on the field if you're a mathematician and you ask for these one million additional maybe you deserve it but you will probably need to explain the panel a lot much more than I know if you work in chemistry and they very quickly understand this is something that Alejandro said before and it's crucial everything is controlled by the panel members so they decide what are the standards they decide what is normal this is the way it should be and how about the rumor that it's mainly for coming from outside the EU what is the rumor and what is it the fact that people that come outside from the EU get more likely that additional funding they have a different category which is the mobility there are three categories three reasons, infrastructure extra equipment and arriving to the EU because of the grant you say that the ERC applicant must write the host institution that will host him or her my question is the prestige of the host institutions affects or is the same one or another institution the host institution is not evaluated there is nothing in the evaluation forms for the host institution one said that of course if you want to develop an extremely technical proposal and your host institution is an institution that has no tradition at all so the panel may raise some concerns about whether you will get the technical support that you need but it cannot be a killing argument because you can take the grant to anywhere so you can get a letter from a University of Cambridge and then go to I don't know South Bulgaria University because you are totally free to move it so this is why during the discussion if there is something very technical there may be some concerns but then it depends because perhaps this researcher is the one who develops the technique and you say he wants to go to that university or she wants to go to that university it doesn't matter because so it's not something that is evaluated but I'm not saying that it's never at all taken into consideration it depends on the context something you didn't ask about which probably you should have is what about language in the interview there's another thing that comes up this is some concern that it's in English and therefore that favors English people there are some countries like the big one north of here who are very concerned about that but we look at all sorts of statistics and in fact in the interviews the nationals of that country do better on average in the interviews than the ones from the UK so we're constantly looking at these statistics we have no evidence that being native speaker of English has any any advantage for you actually they may add if you're a British all these understatements I was being a panel member sometimes it was another panel member say but this is not what we are we are saying and she said yes yes yes this is what you're saying say no no no we discovered the difference between the British and the continental so we didn't understand what she was saying and she was the only native speaker of English in the panel so sometimes these understatements and these things can be tricky and most of the panel members are not native speakers so we may not even notice that that was a mistake and as Alejandro was saying all candidates are shaking it doesn't matter your language but you shake there and you feel so sorry as a panel member for the candidate itself so you were saying before how important is mobility in getting an ERC but then mobility also has some drawbacks so sometimes it's more difficult for us to be PI of other projects before asking for an ERC and also it's more difficult to supervise officially PhD students so how are those things taken into account are there some numbers as far as I know there are no numbers but the panel we hope that the panels are instructed so before the evaluation every step there's a briefing of the panels and we tell them that they have to take into consideration the counter specificities this year I was sitting at one of the panels and there was clearly there was a project that was going to go into step 2 just like this everybody and then somebody said well look this candidate has never had a serious grant and I said well but it's an ERC it only had a tiny 30,000 grand blah blah and all these people were saying these were from the UK and Germany France and Netherlands and then someone said well yeah but maybe because this is coming from a particular university in Spain and maybe this is the regular average size and actually I thought I couldn't say anything because I remember that the council was sitting there but just as observers and I thought actually it's a pretty good funded project because the field was of humanities and then the panel realized the country and then they said clearly it's a step 2 so that the doubt was immediately gone whether the panels will actually do it this is something that we cannot control but we tell them that they have to and in general they do it wasn't so much about the country but it was more like if you were moving around it's difficult to be involved in projects because you don't have a B.I. for that institution because normally some of the grants go to the institution so you know that you are not going to be there in a year so you don't go for that we don't expect a starting entity to have been a B.I. of many projects I mean 2 years after your PhD I mean maybe 4 years after your PhD maybe but it's going to be at least show that you have been a master co-supervised a PhD at least that you have some ability to supervise the starting grants the other thing is the consolidated data if you are I don't know 10 years after your PhD and yet you have never been supervising a master of student giving you 10 million 2 million euros is a bit risky but for the starting starting depends on the countries for instance in the Netherlands you have the Vene Vidi Vici some countries you think that 5 years after your PhD if you are good you will likely have a grant so if you are moving then it's less likely so this is why explain very well your curriculum explain your history why you are where you are explain your choices why there were good choices if you think that the publication record is relatively low but of good quality point to this out and try to explain if you go to a panel that is very interdisciplinary then maybe some people expect that you will have a lot of publications but others expect that you have less publications which are different of course I mean explain that I work in a field that writing a paper just collecting the data is one year if you work I don't know observing penguins Antarctica it's gonna be a pain in the neck collecting the data so then I think that Alejandro made a very good consideration is look at the panel and the mock interviews have two different panels one for step one because there are general people who are well established but not from your own discipline the profile that you see in the panel to add the real experts and this is the right explain explain your life hi thank you very much for all information I have two questions I think maybe it's not here the place to do but I missed it the same I'm teacher of fine arts from the University of Barcelona when I was the same time I'm a robotic specialist on research and I have problem with the file because it's impossible to find something transversal with fine arts or arts new media arts and the same time technical, robotic and more programming question it is possible to find something between the file something I don't know and the other question is about publication because the most scientific papers but in the arts the fine arts is more exhibitions or galleries for example I work with some exhibitions in Argentina Chile, Japan Germany of course Spain Buenos Aires Amsterdam in the United States and is this the same time or is it an important in papers that exhibition for us or what can I do depends on the field if you work on museums because there are some projects on research and on museums papers have no meaning and some fields of engineering proceedings in some congresses are much more important or equally important as papers this is why in history and other fields in literature having a monograph in some specific series is the top so this is why the panel there is no such thing like how many papers or what is the number of citations it depends on the field in mathematics there are no citations there is no impact factor so it depends on the panel the panel is the one who we choose them because we think that they are extremely good experts and they know what is what has to be evaluated so if exhibitions is what is the measure of quality in your field exhibitions will count as a nature paper because there are no nature papers in your field not yet just a question about the importance and the kind of strategy you have to have when you choose the panel where your application is going to be sent so when you are working on something that is translational so I am working for a lab that is working on urinal disorders and trying to look for regenerative therapy so should we choose the neuroscience and urinal panel or the therapy panel or should we send it to both I would say look at the type of brands that each of them are from because some for instance in LS if you think of LS life sciences we have nine panels nine panels on biology and medicine so quite often people in LS they can apply to more than one if you think of PE and even SH the landscape then changes because you have a panel with all humanities except history all of them are in one panel so then there is no choice this panel is going to be very interdisciplinary they are going to be in a better position to evaluate proposals such as yours but we go bottom up so to me look at the proposals where are they founded on which panel on a practical point obviously indicate both panels to some extent you are asking which one to put first there is now a little box for you to explain why you are indicating two panels so clearly make it there what we found was in the past when we didn't have a box to explain many people put two panels say why don't I put another panel just in case you explain to me why you put two panels and the number of people choosing two panels went down and it was more serious so now actually the panels will see why you are doing this make your case very clearly there that would also help the chairs so the way the process works is that there is this initial panel chairs with all the chairs from all the panels and then they get to see the scientific offices they have prepared the allocation of projects and they have also identified projects that may belong to different panel this is the whole afternoon that you see all the chairs in the scientific offices going from one office to another office discussing okay are you taking this project and they say well yeah yeah yeah because in my panel I have the people who can read it better so this is the way it's changed so if you explain why maybe then the scientific officer him or herself can already decide that okay it's not LS1 but LS2 but you can also have another chance because when the chair sees the application together with the scientific officer then they will go and ask for a you said that but for an application to be changed from primary panel the two chairs have to agree so they both have to say yes this is not best for us and the other says well it's better for us and so they also then that's good because in the process is already flagged as something that was in between the last question it's about it's more about interdifficnality project and the process if I've got a bad evaluation of why is the sustainability project and I decide to submit a 3D what kind of possibilities do I have to be successful in my application in which cases in these special cases interdifficnality project will be successful now strictly speaking the redress is looking for formal mistakes in the process not putting into question the panel members and not reassessing the evaluation so if some formal mistake has been made for example budget cuts sometimes are made there was no justification for the spectrophotometer and there's a whole paragraph explaining then you will get it back something we will look at is if you've indicated two panels and we go back and see that no review was received from the other panel that may work but we're looking for formal mistakes we will not put into question the views of the panel members or the reviewers yes but if you in my case I strongly disagree with the evaluation nothing to do if there's a formal mistake yes and if there's no formal mistake scientific content but this is the same the Spanish system but this is everywhere because the whole system breaks down I mean then you can go I think that then you can go to court but the redress procedure is administration basically and you are lucky that they say there was no mobility and actually you said that there was mobility you have something but always look for something formal mistake because talks about the institution then you have a formal mistake a comment like this person will never make it because that institution is so bad no problem because we grant a person another institution yeah but they say that the publication record is not competitive enough blah blah blah very good Q&A very good questions very good answers so we're going to take a break now there's coffee outside, we'll start again at 12.20