Four researchers linked to Pompeu Fabra University have been selected by the European Research Council (ERC) to receive ERC Consolidator Grants, each endowed with two million euros. The purpose of these grants, within the framework of the EU Horizon Europe programme, is for researchers of excellence in the middle of their career to be able to consolidate their own research team or cutting-edge programme at the frontier of knowledge.

The people selected from UPF and the Centre for Research in International Economics, CREI (a research institute co-sponsored by UPF) and the projects they will undertake are: Macarena García González, a Ramón y Cajal researcher with the UPF Department of Communication and coordinator of the Youth, Society and Communication (JOVIS) research group, with the project “Literary reading, public libraries, young people, and even democracies, OPENLIB”; Libera Pisano, a lecturer in Modern Philosophy at the UPF Department of Humanities and a member of CERCCA and of the UPF Center for Vattimo’s Philosophy and Archives, with the project “Translation as a Philosophical Lens on German-Jewish Thought, PHIL-TRAGEN”.

The other two selected researchers are Gergely Neu, an ICREA research professor at the UPF Department of Economics and Business and a researcher with the Statistics Probability and Machine Learning Research Group, as leader of the project “Algorithmic Uncertainty Quantification for Learning and Decision Making, AuQUANT”, and Vladimir Asriyan, an ICREA research professor at the CREI, adjunct lecturer at the UPF Department of Economics and Business and Barcelona School of Economics (BSE) Affiliated Professor, spearheading “Firms, Frictions and Macroeconomy, MACFRIC”.

Out of a total of 26 grants obtained by research institutions in Spain, UPF is the centre that has achieved the most, with three

Out of a total of 26 grants obtained by research institutions in Spain, UPF is the centre that has achieved the most, with three, followed by the CSIC and Carlos III and Santiago de Compostela universities, with two each.  UPF and CREI, which jointly amass four grants, have been awarded more than half of the Consolidator Grants obtained by centres in Catalonia (7 in total).

The 2025 call for ERC Consolidator Grants, endowed with 728 million euros, has been one of the most competitive to date, with 3,121 applications submitted and 349 researchers selected (11.1% of total applications). The researchers are from 25 EU Member States and associated countries, including the UK (66 grants), Germany (58), the Netherlands (40) and Spain (26).  They come from Europe and other parts of the world and represent 44 different nationalities: German (48), Italian (37) and British (33) researchers stand out. Around 38% of the selected researchers are women.

Which four UPF and CREI projects have been selected?

In OPENLIB, Macarena García González will be investigating how literary reading contributes to the formation of more inclusive and democratic societies, from an innovative perspective. In her research, she will be examining the social reading practices of young people aged 10 to 13 years of multi-format texts, beyond the printed book, and the influence it has on their affectivity in the post-digital era. The project, which will begin in September 2026, will collaborate with networks of European public libraries. Its ultimate goal is to build a new conceptual framework on reading and democracy, at the intersection of literary studies, media studies and critical childhood studies.

With the project PHIL-TRAGEN, Libera Pisano sets out from a simple question: what if translation was not a mere technique or a bridge between languages, but the very place where philosophy takes place? And what if it were the place where a community thinks about itself and who it wants to be? The project reconstructs the central meaning that translation has had for many German-Jewish thinkers –from Mendelssohn to Benjamin: a way of reflecting philosophically, reinventing oneself and seeking new ways of belonging through a language that does not always feel like one’s own. In this process, women translators such as Bertha Pappenheim and Jenny Hirsch played a decisive, if largely forgotten, role. They offered forms of empowerment to other women, created support networks, and proposed an unprecedented figure of German Judaism. By recovering these stories, PHIL-TRAGEN questions the idea of a pure and unique belonging and considers plural identities, in movement, to rethink today what it means to live together beyond a single language and a single land.

The project AUQuant, led by Gergely Neu, takes into account that the evaluation of the uncertainty obtained by the predictions of large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) systems is crucial to understand their limitations and quality, especially when the systems are used in decision-making in real scenarios. Gergely Neu will be addressing this need by developing new methods with the aim of quantifying uncertainty, using a very recent and emerging methodology inherited from the field of statistical mathematics, known as “algorithmic statistics”. This research programme thus consists of building a general framework for Algorithmic Uncertainty Quantification (AUQuant), which uses mathematical algorithm theory methods to answer statistical questions related to AI systems. A significant part of the project will be dedicated to applying these new statistical tools in interactive learning situations.

Vladimir Asriyan, with his project titled MACFRIC, addresses a central economic matter: how scarce resources should be allocated among competing needs. Over the past two decades, economists and policymakers have increasingly acknowledged the critical role of market frictions preventing an efficient allocation of resources. This, in turn, has led to a flood of carefully crafted corrective policies. The project will analyse what investments or technologies companies can make or adopt to mitigate inefficiencies arising from market frictions. The aim of this proposal is to address this issue from multiple angles, using new conceptual frameworks, company-level data and quantitative models. It consists of two parts, each focusing on the inefficiencies arising from a specific friction: financial frictions and information frictions.