ERC Starting Grant Winners

ERC awards the most important grants to researchers in Europe. For young researchers (2-7 years after PhD), the ERC has Starting Grants. The goal for these starting grants is for these young researchers to start their own group and line of research. This year results have been published (here) and of course, I checked which of these grants are related to medical imaging. There were 3329 applications and 287 researchers were successful. The ERC grants are divided in three big areas: 1) Physical Sciences and Engineering, 2) Life Sciences, 3) Social Sciences and Humanities. Medical imaging fits in Life Sciences and more concretely in LS7 - Diagnostic tools. There were 8 starting grants related to Medical Imaging:

Daniela Thorwarth, Erlangen University, Germany - Biologically individualized, model-based  radiotherapy on the basis of multi-parametric molecular tumour profiling.

Julien Valette, CEA, France - Exploring brain intracellular space using diffusion-weighted NMR spectroscopy in vivo

Galia Blum, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel - Protease Activated X-Ray Contrast Agents for 

Molecular Imaging of Vulnerable Atherosclerotic Plaques and Cancer Development using Spectral CT.

Rachel Katz-Brull, Hadassah Medical Organization, Israel - Citicoline and deoxyglucose as new molecular imaging probes of DNP hyperpolarized MRI for cancer and neuroimaging

Niv Papo, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel - Developing Multispecific Biological Agents that
Target Tumor Neovasculature for Cancer Imaging and Therapy

Francesco Ricci, University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy - Nature-inspired theranostic nanodevices for tumor imaging, early diagnosis and targeted drug-release

Mangala Srinivas, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands - Clinical ultrasound platform for the quantitative and longitudinal imaging of theranostics and cellular therapy

Jaco Zwanenburg, University Medical Centre, Utrecht, The Netherlands - Towards understanding cerebral small vessel disease: Innovative, MRI-based, functional markers to discover the terra incognita between large vessels and macroscopic brain lesions

Congratulations to all the winners! But I still have a favorite grant and therefore, one of the papers related to that grant can be read here:

Daniela Thorwarth, Susanne-Martina Eschmann, Frank Paulsen, Markus Alber. (2006). Hypoxia Dose Painting by Numbers: A Planning Study International Journal of Radiation Oncology * Biology * Physics DOI: 10.1016/j.ijrobp.2006.11.061

Europe PubMed Central

Yesterday, I have discovered the Europe PubMed Central webpage. This is the European version of the PubMed Central. You can find articles and abstracts, but that you already can find online with Google Scholar. What interested me in this webpage is that you find out more about projects and grants funded in Europe in the tool Grant Lookup. In a time of crisis, not only we want to know how our money is being spent, but also find places where our research might be also important in a time where researchers are the new nomads...

European Month of the Brain

Today starts the European Month of the Brain. I certainly hoped that this information would have been publicized much more. I only come to this information by chance. Let's hope we hear more about this during this month!

"Brain research in Europe needs a decisive effort. We must invest more, define clearer and more innovative research and healthcare strategies, and better coordinate national efforts. We therefore decided to make May 2013 the European Month of the Brain - a full month packed with events and activities to make decision-makers, stakeholders, the media and the public aware of the successes achieved and the challenges still laying ahead for brain research."



The main webpage is here and links about funding are also very useful.