VU Researchers Prof. M. Šimėnas and Prof. P. Pausch Awarded ERC Funding Worth Millions

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the award of Starting Grants to the most talented early-career researchers. The prestigious funding has been awarded to two representatives of Vilnius University (VU) –Dr Patrick Pausch, a Research Professor from the Life Sciences Center European Molecular Biology Laboratory Partnership Institute (LSC-EMBL, PI), and Dr Mantas Šimėnas, Professor from the Faculty of Physics (FP).

The research group led by Prof. Šimėnas has been awarded EUR 2.5 million over five years for the innovative project ‘Strongly Enhanced Sensitivity EPR through Bimodal Resonators and Quantum-Limited Amplifiers(Strong-ESPRESSO)’.

Šimėnas’s research aims to reduce the time required for EPR experiments by a factor of several thousand and to translate these improvements into the study of new systems. The researcher had previously been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships grant, which allowed him to improve the sensitivity of the EPR tool several hundred times.

The EUR 1.5 million grant will enable the research team led by Prof. Pausch to implement the ground-breaking research pro ject ‘Jumbo Phages in Translational Enzyme Research’ (JUPITER). Over the next five years, the researcher and his team from the LSC-EMBL PI at VU will study jumbo phages – a class of large, bacteria-infecting viruses. The team will analyse their uncharacterised genes and potential applications in biotechnology.

In 2022, Prof. P. Pausch became one of the recipients of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) Installation Grant. The ERC Funding will allow him to continue his innovative work.

The total amount of ERC Starting Grants awarded is EUR 780 million. The funding, which a total of 3,500 candidates competed for, is allocated to 494 researchers for five years. To date, the only ERC Starting Grant in Lithuania has been awarded to Dr Stephen Knox Jones, a researcher from the LSC at VU.