The lion’s share of the grants has been awarded to research projects in Germany (62), followed by the UK (45) and France (41). Israel, Spain (both 24) and Italy (21) have also done better than the Netherlands this year, which ranked fourth back in 2021, 2020 and 2019.
Provisional
The ranking is provisional, because the grants for UK researchers are still pending. The laureates will only be able to begin spending their grants once the Brits sign a treaty safeguarding their participation in the Horizon Europe programme.
As an alternative, they may take their research grant to an institution in a country that is affiliated with Horizon Europe. Should they choose to decline the grant, other researchers who initially missed out could be awarded a grant after all. The same happened to some grants awarded in 2021, allowing the Netherlands to move up in the ranking to third place. Another contributing factor was the fact that Switzerland was no longer in the running.
Solidarity
The consolidator grants are comparable to the Dutch Research Council’s Vidi grants. This spring, Marcel Levi, chairperson of the Dutch Research Council, suggested that recipients should give back their Dutch grant if they also receive a European grant shortly after. “That would show solidarity with researchers who have missed out on a grant. In any event, we want to get that debate going.”
Some of the Dutch ERC grant winners were also the recipients of a Vidi grant, but that was several years ago.
Consolidator grants 2022
| Dutch Research Council institutes | 3 | ||
| VU Amsterdam | 2 | ||
| Leiden University | 2 | ||
| University of Groningen | 2 | ||
| Delft University of Technology | 2 | ||
| Utrecht University | 2 | ||
| Radboud University | 2 | ||
| Universiteit Twente | 1 | ||
| Radboud UMC | 1 | ||
| Tilburg University | 1 | ||
| Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) | 1 | ||
| Maastricht University | 1 | ||
| Total | 20 |
Source: ERC. Provisional grants list.
