Exeter Senior Research Fellow awarded European Research Council Starting Grant

Dr Georgia Isom, a Senior Research Fellow at Exeter College, has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) grant.  

The ERC, founded by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for frontier research. Its aim is to fund researchers across Europe to run creative projects. Governed by the Scientific Council, consisting of 22 eminent scientists and scholars, they set the ERC’s scientific strategy and have funded more than 16,000 projects since 2007.  

This September, the ERC has awarded 494 major starting grants to young scientists and scholars across all disciplines. The funding, which totals €780 million this year, will support the researchers at the early stages of their careers and allow them to launch their own projects and pursue their ideas.  

Dr Isom, a group leader at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, said “I am incredibly happy to be a recipient of an ERC Starting Grant, both because of its prestige and for the support it will provide for my junior research group.” Her research combines structural biology, biochemistry, and microbiology to study the molecular mechanisms by which bacteria build the cell envelope and protect themselves against antibiotics. With Antimicrobial resistant (AMR) micro-organisms a major threat to modern medicine, the ERC Starting Grant will fund new work to uncover how bacteria transport lipids to build this cell envelope, potentially revealing new drug targets to weaken these barriers. 

Dr Federica Gigante, a former Supernumerary Fellow of Exeter College, has also received an ERC Starting Grant. Her project focuses on the role of slavery in the transmission of things and knowledge from the Islamic world to Europe in the late 16th and 17th centuries. Dr Gigante commented “In the humanities, the ERC Starting Grant is unique in giving an early career researcher the opportunity to embark on an incredibly ambitious, disruptive, and risky project with an unparalleled level of intellectual freedom. I am thrilled at the prospect of starting this adventure.” 

With only 14% of applications successful, the ERC Starting Grants are highly competitive, and Exeter College wishes to congratulate Dr Isom and Dr Gigante on their achievements.