The UPF lecturers distinguished with an Advanced Grant are Gustavo Deco, in the field of psychology and neuroscience, Ricard Solé in collaboration with Francesc Posas, and Roderic Guigó, a researcher at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, in the field of life sciences. In the same field, Andrea Cerutti, who is linked to the UPF group as a researcher at the IMIM Foundation, has also received the award.

The European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants recognize and support the work of European researchers who are considered international leaders in their respective research fields.

The demand for grants among the European scientific community increases every year, and this year the success rate was 13%, i.e. the ERC selected 294 of the 2,284 proposals presented to receive funding.

Of the 294 European researchers selected, seven work in Catalonia (out of a total of fifteen in Spain). In addition to the four researchers from the UPF group mentioned above, the other researchers receiving grants are Modesto Orozco, Angel Rodríguez Nebreda and Cayetano Gonzalez, who are all members of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) in Barcelona.

The total budget for supporting the innovative research projects selected in the fourth call of the ERC is 3.5 billion euros, with an average of around 2.5 million euros per project for five years.

Projects that will be supported in the future

Gustavo Deco, director of the Center of Brain and Cognition, the group recently approved by UPF as a Specific Research Center, is the lead researcher in the project Dystructure: The Dynamical and Structural Basis of Human Mind Complexity: Segregation and Integration of Information and Processing in the Brain.

This project falls within the areas of expertise that the group has been working on in recent years, and its main objective is to understand the underlying mechanisms behind the main functions of the brain, both when the brain is at rest and when it is active.

Gustavo Deco is Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and an ICREA researcher in the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF.

The Center of Brain and Cognition was established in order to become a highly influential international leader in scientific excellence for the interaction between cognition and the brain, in both the scientific and social spheres, and to make progresstowards an understanding how experience influences the brain's structure and function by means of computational and experimental research.

Ricard Solé, ICREA researcher in the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences (CEXS) is the lead researcher in the project SYNCOM: Distributed Computation in Synthetic Consortia, which will be undertaken jointly with the participation of Francesc Posas, professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the CEXS and co-lead researcher.

The project will explore the potential of devices built by cell engineering in the decision-making process. Various types of cells will be modified in programmable multicellular chips able to respond to external stimuli (chemicals, pharmaceuticals, signals and others).

According to Solé, "by incorporating microfluids we hope to achieve a great deal of flexibility in the possible designs for future applications in biomedicine and bioengineering."

In the four calls announced by the European Research Council to date, the UPF group has received twenty-six grants - thirteen Advanced Grants for senior researchers and thirteen Starting Grants for young researchers who have begun research careers of excellence thanks to this international recognition.