ERC annualy awards Starting Grants to promising young researchers who have potential to become leaders in their respective fields. The grants are given to researchers with ambitious research projects expected to make a significant impact.
Ragnhild Hennum, Rector of the University of Oslo, is very pleased with the awards.
– ERC provides a critically important competitive platform for groundbreaking basic research, enabling our reserachers to contribute to solving tomorrow’s challenges. I am very pleased to note that UiO continues to succeed across a wide array of scientific diciplines, true to our identity as a comprehensive university.
Three out of 42 applications from UiO succeeded in the fierce European competition.
– The ability of young talents at UiO to excel in the Champions League of research is both impressing and motivating for all of us, says Hennum.
The winner projects
Placenta and long-term mental health
Laura Anne Wortinger at the Institute of Clinical Medicine will lead the project Impact of Placental Function on Transgenerational Mental Health.
A well-functioning placenta is essential for both maternal and offspring health, but its impact on long-term mental health outcomes remains largely unexplored. The project is an ambitious and conceptually novel effort to deliver the first cohesive biological framework of how placental function impacts intergenerational mental health, establishing the placenta as a central determinant of maternal and offspring mental health trajectories.
Food and pharmacy in medieval Northern Europe
Historian Claire Burridge will investigate how people in the Middle Ages thought about the relationship between food and health. She will look both at how particular foods were used in targeted ways, and more generally at what people were advised to eat to stay healthy.
The project Pharming Northern Europe: The Relationship between Food and Pharmacy, c. 800-1500 will provide new insight into the ways in which people in medieval Northern Europe thought about, and engaged with, food in relation to health and healing. The new project will be the first study of the relationship between food and pharmacy in Northern Europe in the period 800–1500.
The time period captures major political and cultural transitions throughout Northern Europe. The researchers will study both medical and non-medical texts to illuminate the relationship between food and pharmacy across the Middle Ages in theory and practice.
School disengagement
Rosa Cheesman at the Department of Psychology recieves funding for the project Inclusion and Belonging in Education: Life course Outcomes via Natural experiments and Genetics in Schools. It investigates school disengagement and how it impacts health, learning and inequality through life. By harnessing Norway’s unparalleled registers, surveys, and family-based genomic data, alongside international replication studies, Cheesman will deliver the first comprehensive and causal account of school disengagement.
UiO partner project
Sanne Boessenkool, Professor at Department of Biosciences, becomes a partner of the ERC project Past Seabirds of Northern Europe - Archaeological Perspectives of Decline.
The project will be lead by Bournemouth University and aims to reveal the long-term dynamics of human-seabird relationships and to identify past ecological and cultural tipping points to determine seabird resilience and change. Through collaboration with conservation practitioners and coastal communities, the researchers want to translate archaeological perspectives into actionable strategies, pioneering a new role for archaeology in building sustainable coexistence with nature.
ERC Starting Grant results in 2026
- ERC Starting Grants are awarded to promising researchers who completed their PhD between two and seven years ago.
- The European Research Council (ERC) grants the funds, consisting of up to 1.5 million euros for research projects lasting up to five years.
- UiO submitted a total of 42 applications for this year's ERC Starting Grants.
- In total, UiO's awards in Horizon Europe amount to around 190 million euros, with ERC grants comprising approximately 111 million euros.