Cambridge delight to be ‘back inside the tent’ with £500m EU Horizon success

The pro-vice-chancellor for research at the University of Cambridge, Prof Sir John Aston, has spoken of the success of the EU Horizon scheme, which resumed last year after a three-year post-Brexit lockout.

The scheme – which has seen £500m worth of grants come in during the last 12 months alone – has historically proved incredibly productive for the Cambridge ecosystem.

Year on year, Cambridge is one of the top two UK recipients of European Research Council and Horizon funding. Nine Cambridge researchers are among the latest recipients of ERC Starting Grants announced in late 2024. Of 3,500 proposals reviewed by the ERC, only 14 per cent were selected for funding – Cambridge has the highest number of grants of any UK institution. According to the official European Commission data portal, in the call year of 2024 alone, Cambridge researchers were awarded ERC grants totalling €16m (starting grants, proof of concept, consolidator).

Projects include work to enhance battery energy efficiency systems, to analyse the evolution of transmissible cancers, and to strengthen cyber security for critical software systems and personal data.

Case studies include:

1) Professor Erwin Reisner, Professor of Energy and Sustainability, has a successful history of securing ERC and Horizon funding awards. His work focuses on the development of concepts to make fuels, chemicals and plastics from the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

2) Professor Albert Guillén i Fàbregas in the Department of Engineering was last year awarded an ERC Advanced Grant (Horizon) for his project Scaling and Concentration Laws in Information Theory. It means the ERC will continue to fund his research in information theory, which studies the mathematical aspects of data transmission and data compression.

3) Professor Beverley Glover in the Department of Plant Sciences and director of Cambridge University Botanic Garden, was last year awarded an ERC Advanced Grant (Horizon) for her project which explores how iridescent colour evolved repeatedly in different flowers and is expected to shed new light on evolution itself.

4) Professor Ian Henderson in the Department of Plant Sciences was last year awarded an ERC Advanced Grant (Horizon) for his project around how we adapt our crops to the changing climate.

5) Professor Paul Lane in the Department of Archaeology was last year awarded an ERC Advanced Grant (Horizon) for his project Landscape Historical Ecology and Archaeology of Ancient Pastoral Societies in Kenya. The research provides an opportunity to reconstruct how East Africa’s pastoralists responded to significant climate change in the past, and to draw lessons from these adaptations for responding to contemporary climate crises.

Sir John Aston, said that “it is really good that we are back inside the tent” and added: “Horizon is a really important research vehicle for us to do the best we can to work collaboratively across Europe.

“It’s a testament to the fact that our research at Cambridge is world-leading that we are able to secure funding like this. Science is all about collaboration and everyone benefits from being able to collaborate.”