09 December 2025
The European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant has been awarded to two researchers at Portuguese institutes in 2025: Juan Álvaro Gallego, neuroscientist at the Champalimaud Foundation (CF), and Ricardo Araújo, paleontologist at Instituto Superior Técnico from Técnico Lisboa. They will receive €2.1M and €2M, respectively, to advance their research projects.
Today, the European Research Council (ERC) announced the results of its latest Consolidator Grants call, the second level of this type of funding, for researchers with consolidated work in their fields. Two new life science projects in Portugal secured a combined total of €4.1M. These grants were awarded to Juan Álvaro Gallego, who recently joined the CF, and Ricardo Araújo from Instituto Superior Técnico / Centro de Recursos Naturais e Ambiente (CERENA) .
Across Europe, the ERC will distribute €728 million to 349 leading researchers. In the life sciences alone, 823 proposals were submitted and 93 were selected for funding, which represents a success rate of just 11.2%.
At the Champalimaud Foundation, Juan Gallego, will receive €2.1M over the next five years to develop his research project, SELECT, which aims to uncover the neural mechanisms underlying learning and execution of skilled movements. Juan recently joined the Centre for Restorative Neurotechnology, with affiliations in the Neuroscience of Disease Programme (NDP) and the Neuroscience Programme.
At Instituto Superior Técnico / CERENA, Ricardo Araújo, will receive €2M to study the evolutionary origin of endothermy (the ability to maintain a stable body temperature) in the lineage linking dinosaurs to birds. The DAEDALUS project proposes a methodology based on the inner ear to estimate body temperatures in extinct species.
SELECT aims to uncover how key brain regions enable us to learn, perform and adapt skilled reaching and grasping movements. Rather than studying regions in isolation, the project will record from and manipulate multiple areas simultaneously in mice as they learn challenging reaching and grasping tasks and later perform them as experts. SELECT will also test how the contributions of these areas change when expert mice adapt to new conditions such as altered feedback using virtual-reality perturbations. By combining theoretical models with recent experimental advances, the project will reveal how the contributions to motor control of key brain regions evolve across learning, execution and adaptation. Given the conservation of these brain structures in humans, results are expected to advance basic scientific understanding and support translational approaches to treat movement disorders such as stroke, spinal-cord injury and Parkinson’s disease with neurotechnologies.
"This grant will allow us to pursue exciting basic research at Champalimaud, including setting up a lab to perform ambitious mouse experiments, and hiring a brilliant team of scientists. I am very excited about it, not only because of what I hope we will learn about the brain, but also because it will help us advance the translational work with patients that I am setting up here along with my wonderful colleagues at NDP" – Juan Gallego, Group Leader at the CF.
Project DAEDALUS outlines a sophisticated research proposal aimed at determining the evolutionary origins of endothermy (warm-bloodedness) within the dinosaur-bird lineage, hypothesizing this shift occurred during the Triassic period. This pioneering methodology utilizes the thermo-motility index (TMI), a biophysical metric derived from the anatomy of the semicircular canals (SCCs) of the inner ear, to quantitatively estimate the body temperature of extinct species. To establish the TMI's accuracy, the project must overcome critical data deficiencies, including systematically recording and analyzing the actual head motion of modern tetrapods to validate biomechanical models. Furthermore, the team plans to expand knowledge of inner ear soft tissue by studying the scaling relationship between the bony and membranous labyrinths across diverse clades. Necessary biological data will also be gathered through the development of surgical protocols and a nanoviscometer to measure endolymph viscosity, a key factor in the index calculation. These laboratory and modeling efforts are complemented by targeted paleontological fieldwork in Triassic formations to obtain crucial fossil specimens from basal dinosaur groups.
“Trying to determine the temperature of a dinosaur using only fossils is like trying to guess the top speed of an old car just by looking at its rusty bodywork. The DAEDALUS Project proposes to reconstruct the engine (internal anatomy), analyze the fuel (endolymph viscosity), and see how the car behaved on the road (head movement) to find out how ‘hot’ the engine really ran.
The DAEDALUS project will not only be trying to read an old map (the fossils); it will be building an entirely new “lens” (with a nanoviscosimeter and using AI algorithms) that will allow the scientific community to see physiological details that, until now, were invisible to the naked eye." - Ricardo Araújo, Group Leader at the Técnico / CERENA.
ERC Research Grants are awarded by the European Research Council. Any researcher can apply, as long as they intend to develop their research in an institution within a European Union Member State or a Horizon Europe Associated Country. Without quotas by countries, areas or any other constraints, these grants are awarded based, solely and exclusively, on scientific excellence, with the merits of the project being paramount, and the capacity, creativity, and commitment of the applicant principal investigator taken into account.
To these values can be added initial support, for rehousing or scientific equipment.
Funding is for the development of projects over a period of five years and is allocated at three main levels, according to the seniority of the proposing researcher: ‘Starting’, for researchers two to seven years after their PhD, up to €1.5M; ‘Consolidator’, for researchers seven to twelve years after their PhD and funding of up to €2M; ‘Advanced’, for independent researchers, worth up to €2.5M. Funding for rehousing or scientific equipment, for example, may be provided in addition to these values, and added initial support may be available for rehousing or scientific equipment.
