UK scientists finally granted EU funding post Brexit

50 UK-led research projects have won close to €80 million in funding through the EU’s Horizon programme. It is the first time since Brexit that UK institutions have been able to apply, and win, this kind of EU funding.

After the UK left the European Union, talks to regain associate membership to the EU’s €95 billion research programme, Horizon Europe, were delayed by strained UK-EU relations.

The UK also quibbled with Brussels over the participation fee. One EU official brushed off the idea that the British should get a reduction in the price as “Thatcher-style logic.”

The then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, and European Commission President, Ursula Von der Leyen, finally signed off on the terms last September. The UK agreed to pay around €2.4 billion a year to the EU for access to Horizon.

The UK hopes it will win enough grants to make that investment worthwhile.

Impact of Brexit on funding

The European Research Council (ERC) is responsible for overseeing a €16 billion slice of the EU’s Horizon fund. Before Brexit, the UK was frequently the largest recipient of ERC grants. This in turn was thought to have helped attract top scientists and academics from across Europe and the world to UK universities.

But during the three years after Brexit that the UK was out in the cold, UK academics warned that that talent was drifting away. Meanwhile, European researchers in Britain who won ERC grants were explicitly advised they would need to move to the EU or elsewhere to be eligible for the funding.

The European Research Council has just published the list of projects which will be funded with so-called ‘starter grants’ this year, valued at €780 million.

It is the first round of funding since the UK has re-joined and suggests Britain has some catching up to do. Germany has won funding for 98 projects, the Netherlands 51, pushing the UK into third place with 50. I’m told the British projects will receive close to €80 million.

The ERC says UK projects will not squeeze out bids from EU rivals because the UK is stumping up the extra cash.

“It’s a kind of pay as you go system”, Marcin Mońko from the European Research Council explained.

“The fact that we have more applicants from the United Kingdom, doesn’t mean that there’s competition for limited funds… because [British institutions] also come with additional funds from the UK government.”

The ERC received over 3,000 proposals for the 2024 starting grants, aimed at cutting edge research in life sciences, engineering, social science and humanities. After peer review, 494 projects have been selected.

Wide ranging projects

The titles of the projects are wide ranging. They are, by their very nature, specialist, and can sound frankly incomprehensible to layman ears, but these are projects which “can push the frontiers of our knowledge”, Marcin Mońko insists.

One of the four projects awarded funding at the University of Cambridge is to look back to the earliest galaxies and find out more about giant ‘population III’ stars.

University of Essex continues its work on “smashing stereotypes” with a social science funded project to consider “applied stereotypes, social networks, and self-fulfilling prophecies”.

At the University of Edinburgh, they will take forward development of “e-skins” for robots. The aim is to create “stretchable electronic skin”, a material which has “high-accuracy three-dimensional, full-geometry shape reconstruction and tactile sensing.”

The University of Edinburgh – “e-skin”

Other UK projects to win funding include analysing the “predictive power of tidal disruption” at the University of Birmingham, trying to understand anti-cancer immunity in gut microbiome at the University of Manchester and research into the “everyday politics of famine” at the University of Bath.

The European Research Council says recipients receive “true intellectual and financial autonomy for up to five years” and the grant increases the visibility of their work.

It comes with prestige, says Marcin Mońko. He welcomes the UK’s return to the fold. “I think it’s a win-win because the quality of science grows and the size of the pot grows as well.”