EU GRANTS:For the sort of blue-sky research that funding agencies steadfastly avoid an EU grant scheme - with €580 million to offer - is ready to help and Irish projects are tapping into it with success, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL

IF A RESEARCH scientist chanced upon a genie’s lamp and rubbed it, what would they wish for? It’s likely their desires would include having the freedom to work on big questions that interest them.

And that’s pretty much what a programme of “starter” awards from the European Research Council (ERC) offers – the chance to do frontier research and build up your team.

These grants are no small change, either. Under the most recent call, which set aside around €580 million for 427 early-career researchers, each grant could come in at up to €2 million over five years, usually funnelled into team salaries, consumables, travel expenses and buying out teaching time.

Such levels of funding for blue-skies research would be next to impossible to source at home. But Irish-based researchers have been winning ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grants since the programme started in 2007, with recent months seeing five Irish announcements in this category.

One of those recipients is Dr Laoise McNamara, a Science Foundation Ireland Stokes lecturer in biomedical engineering at NUI, Galway. Her project will be looking at the physical loads on cells that are needed for bone to develop, with a view to understanding how to protect our bones as we age and to develop ways of growing bone in a lab to help address injury or disease in patients.

“The goal of is to identify future research leaders and give them a significant amount of money early in their career to get them to start their labs and have a big team working on a research problem,” says McNamara, who stresses that frontier research is the target.

“Usually when applying for funding, you almost have to prove you can do it before you get the funding, but frontier research is very much blue-sky research that is high risk and high gain – you try to do something that’s very difficult but, if successful, would have a high impact for technology, healthcare or economic reasons.”

Getting support from the national purse for this kind of project could require the kind of track record young researchers have not yet built up, so the ERC offers another route to getting that work going here, she explains.

“The ERC is very forward thinking in that way,” she says. “One of the reasons is it wants to become competitive with the US in generating research and making big advances. And the ERC has a mission of keeping people who are highly skilled in Europe competitive.”

She describes the €1.5 million award as a “massive boost” and says that the funding will allow her to support salaries for a project team of biologists and engineers.

“Most of what I have brought in will be spent on training students and providing training for postdoctoral researchers, so people will have a position for four years,” says McNamara. “That’s a nice side, we are producing so many talented PhD researchers and it’s good to be able to provide them a career path.”

The potential health benefits of the project are manifold and ambitious, but that's the point, notes McNamara. "It really makes you shoot for the stars in a way you wouldn't normally feel you could."

The EU funding success for Irish projects comes at a time when the current European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science is Maire Geoghegan-Quinn.

"In the very tough economic circumstances people are facing at the moment, notably in Ireland but also elsewhere in Europe, it is part of my job in the European innovation portfolio to talk up the good things that are happening, as a contribution to showing that the real economy – the blossoming knowledge economy – has not gone away," she says.

"And ERC grants are definitely a very good thing for researchers, for universities and ultimately for hi-tech business and the economy."

Any notion that Commissioner Geoghegan-Quinn's appointment could be linked with Ireland's success in the awards is dismissed by Dr Graham Love, national delegate for the ERC in Ireland and director of policy and communications at Science Foundation Ireland, which supports applicants to the European scheme.

He points out that Ireland was winning the awards before she was appointed, and part of the reason for a slight hike in successful applications recently is that more people have been applying.

Another awards recipient has designs on the clinical side: Dr Daniel Kelly at Trinity College Dublin's school of engineering is looking at new adult stem cell-based therapies for treating damaged and diseased cartilage in the knee.

"Ultimately, these therapies should delay or hopefully overcome the need for total joint replacement prostheses," says Kelly, whose five-year grant of €1.5 million will support three PhD students and a postdoctoral researcher, as well as the cost of equipment and consumables.

"Besides funding the research, the award itself is important for other reasons," he adds. "It helps raise the profile of me and my lab internationally and that of the School of Engineering in Trinity College Dublin. The award will also help in future applications for research funding from agencies such as SFI, as success in international research funding competitions has become a formal evaluation criterion in the majority of their funding programmes."

Another Trinity scientist, Prof Jonathan Coleman from the school of physics and Crann, will use his ERC grant of €1.5 million to look at exfoliating inorganic compounds into nanosheets of different combinations of atoms.

"The beauty of these materials is that all the different combinations give nanosheets with different properties," he explains.

"Some are metals, some semiconductors, some insulators, some are good for energy generation or storage, others have super mechanical properties. However, to make use of these properties, you have to separate these nanosheets from their parent crystals – you have to unstack or exfoliate them."

Coleman has been making significant strides in this field, which is of relevance to industry, and the ERC grant will support three postgraduates and a post-doc as well as half of his salary, which will free up time from teaching to focus on the research, which he describes as being "near the edge of nanoscience".

"This is where most scientists want to be working, at the very limit of what is known," he says, noting that the work should generate high impact publications and a patent. "This is where science meets reality. The best outcome of all would be if this grant could lead to some economic return for the benefit of both this country and Europe in general."

And from the edge of nanoscience to an expansive look back through history – Dr Ron Pinhasi from University College Cork's school of archaeology will use his ERC grant to build up a picture of human health and distribution stretching back tens of thousands of years as we moved into Europe and took up farming.

"I just decided to try it," recalls Pinhasi of applying to the ERC. "The idea was to build a project exactly how I envision it to be, without any limitation, which is what I think the ERC wants to see.

"They want to see innovation and they centre it on one person who wants to do something. So the temptation was there."

An important support in the process was a mock interview run by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, according to Pinhasi.

The practice paid off because his real ERC interview was successful and he now has just shy of €1.1 million over the next four years to ask the big questions.

To look for answers, he is linking with Prof Dan Bradley and researchers in the UK and Germany to look at the morphology and ancient DNA of skeletal remains across Europe.

"What we are doing, if we get it right, is we are going to make Ireland a world-class research centre," says Pinhasi. "I hope that together we have the critical mass to build something sustainable and I think this is what ERC is hoping for – if they invest money it will become more long-term."

Another successful applicant was Dr Gavin Collins, who will be looking at "cold carbon catabolism of microbial communities underprinning a sustainable bioenergy and biorefinery economy" at NUI, Galway.

Overall, SFI's Graham Love views Ireland's performance in the starter category as respectable. "There's no doubt the younger cohort are hungrier and there are maybe fewer opportunities for them," he says.

But he would like to see stronger interest from third-level institutes and more established researchers in the ERC offerings.

"I don't think any unversity is letting go of that concept of blue-sky excellence – and they shouldn't," says Love. "And here's a way to do this where there are relatively few constraints."