The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the awarding of 400 Starting Grants to young scientists and scholars across Europe. Totalling €628 million this year, the grants support early-career researchers (who have up to seven years’ experience after their PhDs) showing great promise and an excellent research proposal. These projects span all disciplines of research, from medicine and physics, to social sciences and humanities.

The application process for ERC Starting Grants is highly competitive: this year, around 15% of applications were successful, with 400 researchers across Europe and other territories receiving awards out of 2,696 proposals. Female researchers were awarded around 43% of grants, an increase from 39% in 2022.

It is part of our mission to give early-career talent the independence to pursue ambitious curiosity-driven research that can shape our future. In this latest round of Starting Grants, we saw one of the highest shares of female grantees to date, which I hope will continue to rise. Congratulations to all winners and good luck on your path to discovery.

ERC President Professor Maria Leptin

Four researchers in the University of Oxford’s Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division have been awarded these major European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants, part of the Horizon Europe programme.

Dr Tom Rainforth is Senior Research Fellow in Machine Learning in the Department of Statistics, and head of the RainML Research Lab. His work centres on foundational and methodological problems in machine learning, with a particular focus on data-efficient approaches and intelligent data acquisition.

Dr Rainforth said: ‘Advances in machine learning have transformed our ability to utilize data. But far less progress has been made on intelligently acquiring such data in the first place. Consequently, though data-driven approaches are now ubiquitous across science and industry, hand-crafted and heuristic approaches are typically still the norm for data acquisition itself.’ Using the ERC Starting Grant, Dr Rainforth will address this shortfall by developing principled quantitative methods for data acquisition. In particular, this work will construct adaptive algorithms that utilise previously gathered data to guide future data acquisition. To achieve this, Dr Rainforth intends to leverage ideas from experimental design, information theory, machine learning, and Bayesian statistics. 

This grant will provide me and my group with an amazing platform to make significant advances in the crucial, but underexplored, research area of data acquisition. This will hopefully produce research with substantial wide-reaching impact in domains as diverse as interactive surveys and virtual assistants, to laboratory experiments and psychology trials. I would like to thank everybody who has helped make this application successful, from my wife Sophie for her unwavering support, to my amazing DPhil students and wonderful colleagues who helped me tremendously with the application process.

Dr Tom Rainforth

Find out more about the other awardees.

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