The Swedish Foundations' Starting Grant

About the grant

The Swedish Foundations’ Starting Grant (SFSG) addresses prominent early career researchers based at host institutions in Sweden, who in tough competition scored among the best in the most recent European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant call yet narrowly missed out on a grant due to the limited available ERC funding.

 

With this call we want to support these researchers to pursue groundbreaking research and establish themselves, thereby giving them a head start for the next time they apply to the ERC.

 

 

About the European Research Council

The ERC was set up by the European Union in 2007 to encourage research of the highest quality across Europe. This is done through competitive calls that support investigator-driven frontier research in all fields. The sole evaluation criterion is scientific excellence and in their proposals, the applicants must demonstrate the ground-breaking nature, ambition and feasibility of the proposed projects. The ERC evaluation process is rigorous and regarded as one of the very best peer reviews.

 

Since 2007 ERC has funded more than 12,000 projects and over 10,000 researchers. ERC projects have so far led to over 2,200 patents and other intellectual propert rights (IPR) applications and ERC grantees founded or co-founded over 400 start-ups. More than 200,000 articles have been published in scientific journals.

 

Almost 2,700 applications were submitted in the ERC Starting Grant call 2023 and only 15 % were funded, 19 of these researchers were based at Swedish host institutions.