Hungarian Researcher Receives ERC Award

Dr. Edit Mátyus of the Chemistry Institute of the Eötvös Lóránd University (ELTE) in Budapest is the only Hungarian of the 408 recipients of this year’s European Research Council Starting Grants. Her project 'Theoretical developments for precision spectroscopy of polyatomic and polyelectronic molecules' won EUR 1.5 million support to be used in a period of five years.

As she explained to the ELTE website, "we deal with molecules, so I call myself a chemist. We are interested in the theoretical description of the molecules and we want to get the most accurate results. Experimental tools are evolving rapidly, so experiments provide us with increasingly detailed data sets. The problem is that right now, after a point, we do not understand what we are seeing. We would like to change this: we need to develop theoretical frameworks to interpret the data, and thus give a more detailed picture of the deepest structure of matter."

Starting Grants are awarded to early-career researchers of any nationality with two to seven years of experience since completion of the PhD (or equivalent degree) and a scientific track record showing great promise. The research must be conducted in a public or private research organisation located in one of the EU Member States or Associated Countries. The funding (maximum EUR 2.5 million per grant, including up to EUR one million to cover extraordinary costs) is provided for up to five years.

The highly-coveted ERC funding will help individual scientists and scholars to build their own teams and conduct pioneering research across all disciplines. As the European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, Carlos Moedas, put it, “to answer the most difficult challenges of our age, researchers need the freedom and conditions to follow their curiosity. This is what the EU provides via the European Research Council grants: an opportunity for outstanding scientists to pursue their most daring ideas.”