Eight ERC Synergy Grants for Helmholtz
A total of eight of the prestigious and highly endowed ERC Synergy Grants (combined nine participations) have been awarded to research teams at the Helmholtz Association. In contrast to the ERC individual grants, two to four partners work together on groundbreaking issues, new methods and techniques in the Synergy Grants. The funding amounts to up to 10 million euros for a period of up to six years. The ERC awarded a total of 48 grants.
The successful applicants and their projects at a glance:
- Noenne Prisle, DESY: Deciphering Droplet Chemistry
- Martina Seiffert, DKFZ: Evolutionary dynamics of ageing, cancer and the microenvironment
- Frank Westermann (Coordinator), DKFZ: Exploiting neuroblastoma evolution for early detection
- Matthew Zepf (Coordinator), GSI: Coherent Harmonic Focusing – Enabling Unprecedented Field Strengths
- Christph J. Brabec (Coordinator), Forschungszentrum Jülich: On-demand discovery by molecular ingenuity
- Pascal Friederich, KIT: On-demand discovery by molecular ingenuity
- Duncan Odom (Coordinator), DKFZ: Resolving sex chromosome control of development and homeostasis
- Thomas Lane, DESY: Structural Perturbations by Applied electRic-field Xtallography SPARX
- Nina Papavasiliou (Coordinator), DKFZ: Toward A Trypanosome-Informed Machine-Learning Framework for Bidirectional Antigen-Antibody Prediction.
List of all selected researchers
12.11.2026
