Speech to the European Parliament's ITRE Committee

ERC President Professor Maria Leptin
Exchange of views at the European Parliament's ITRE Committee, Brussels

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Dear ITRE Chair Dr. Bușoi, Distinguished Members of the European Parliament, Ladies and gentlemen,

I am pleased to be invited here today for this exchange of views.

I know that my predecessor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon spoke with you on several occasions.
And I know that he was very impressed by your understanding of research and innovation and very grateful for your support at critical moments.
And I see that we must again thank you for your support for research and innovation during the recent negotiations on the annual budget.
So: thank you!

I have now been President of the ERC for just over a year, and I think it is traditional for a new President to set out their own priorities. But I have been clear from the start that my aim is to try to preserve and strengthen the ERC as it is. The ERC is a fantastic organization with fantastic aims and a fantastic staff. And after my first year of getting to know the ERC from the inside I am even more convinced that this is true.

As you know, the European Research Council is based on a simple idea. We support the best researchers to work in Europe on their best ideas. The sole criterion for selection is scientific excellence.

This approach is critical to the success of the ERC and we have no intention of changing this principle. It has been our clear strategy ever since the day the ERC was launched 15 years ago.
But that does not mean we are complacent. In my view, any organisation that wishes to represent excellence must be permanently self-critical and must continuously evolve. Times change. There are always things that can be improved. So I am personally open to pragmatic changes to the way we do things.

The most important issue is to maintain the high quality of the ERC's selection process. This is the core of the ERC's excellence, something that cannot be taken for granted. Every year, we need to keep persuading high-level scientists from around the world to serve on our panels. These people are very much in demand and we need over 1,000 of them every year just for the panels, with another 6,000 as remote reviewers needed to provide specialised reviews of individual proposals. Can we organise this effort better? Are there tools we can use to find and allocate reviewers to proposals? Can we use dynamic panels instead of the current structure? These are things that we are looking at.

The ERC Scientific Council has also been following the current debate on reforming research assessment. The Council set up a Task Force on Research Assessment, and as chair of the Task Force I was very clear that we should not start from a position that the ERC's evaluation processes were untouchable. In my view, many of the demands being made in regard to research assessment, particularly those from the younger generation, are legitimate.

So we have looked at what is being proposed by others and at our own processes with an open mind. We have looked at how we define "scientific excellence". And we have looked at the guidance we provide to applicants and what information we ask them to provide to us and in what form. We have looked at the various steps of our evaluation process and how our panels are briefed. As I've said, for the assessment of research proposals, the scientific excellence will remain the sole criterion for evaluation. But the Scientific Council is looking for ways in which contributions such as services to the research community can be taken into account.

We aim to reach some conclusions at our next meeting in December, and we will make our thinking and outcomes public. This is a very important topic with wide implications and we want to take our time and get this right.

These example show that we are open to evolving our practices while sticking to our principles.
And the main reason to stick to our principles is that our principles work. In 2007, many people saw it as a gamble to set up a pan-European frontier research funder. But now, over 15 years later I think that the ERC has proved itself.

We have now funded over 12,000 top researchers since the ERC's creation in 2007. The ERC grantees are of 87 different nationalities and are hosted at over 900 research institutions across the EU and Associated Countries. These ERC Principal Investigators have also employed over 80,000 other researchers, mainly PhD candidates and postdocs in their teams. And these teams are extremely international with 18% originally from outside the European Research Area. So the ERC is helping to train the next generation of excellent scientists and to attract them to Europe from all over the world.

Between them, our ERC grantees have won 12 Nobel Prizes, 6 Fields Medals, 11 Wolf Prizes and many other prizes.
They have produced over 200,000 articles published in scientific journals. And these publications by ERC funded scientists are seven times more likely than average to be in the top 1% most cited category! This is one measure of excellence, and it puts ERC at the very top of all major funding agencies worldwide.

It is difficult to choose examples from such a large body of excellent work, there are so many. For example, this year's Nobel Prize in Physics went to Professors Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger, both funded by the European Research Council (ERC) - as well as John F. Clauser. Aspect and Zeilinger conducted groundbreaking experiments in the 80s and 90s using entangled light particles, photons. These and other experiments confirm that quantum mechanics is correct. But this work also paved the way for quantum computers, quantum networks and quantum encrypted communication [1], all used for important purposes today. This is a perfect example of how frontier research opens up the possibility of new applications and technologies which would have been inconceivable before. There is no doubting the quality of the science that our grantees are producing in every field of knowledge including the social sciences and humanities. I will give you more examples of projects that have had an impact on society, but let me also remind you that research is primarily about fulfilling human curiosity. While many projects may end up having an impact in the future, others simply satisfy our curiosity, such as the image of the black hole that recently made the front pages of international newspapers, or the knowledge about our own ancestry from the analysis of ancient DNA - as rewarded by another Nobel Prize to an ERC grantee this year. We all, as citizens, marvel at these achievements and enjoy these discoveries, and as funders we can and should use our funds to enable them.

But it gets better because it turns out that if you fund some of the best scientists in the world then extraordinary things tend to happen.

ERC grantees are far from ivory tower academics. For example, our grantees have applied for over 2,200 patents and other IPRs such as trademarks, and have founded or co-founded over 400 start-up companies. Earlier this year, the European Innovation Council (EIC) announced the winners of its new "Transition" funding scheme. And twenty-five out of 42 awarded proposals stem from ERC-funded research! The funding will help validate the technologies in real-world settings and build the business case to bring the innovations to market.

And we also have a large and growing body and evidence for the relevance and impact of our grantees work. For example, a recent in-depth analysis looked at the contribution of EU research funding to COVID-19 related research. This analysis showed that EU research funding has contributed to about 3,000 research papers on COVID-19. As you would expect a large number of these papers were funded by the EU's health research budget (808 papers). But the second highest number of relevant papers came from ERC projects (607 papers) chosen in a completely bottom-up way. And I don't need to remind you that the Pfizer vaccine was developed by the ERC grantee Uğur Şahin, who was able to repurpose his ERC- funded work on mRNA vaccines against cancer.
Climate change is another example. A different study showed similar results for the 2,500 EU funded publications referenced in the four reports of the sixth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment cycle. 854 of these publications came from ERC projects. Again, chosen in a completely bottom-up way.

The ERC has just published its own analysis of all projects it funded under Horizon 2020. A series of fact sheets show the diversity of the research we have funded with projects in many emerging areas of science (available on the ERC website). But this analysis also showed that 34% of the analysed ERC projects are likely to contribute to health policies, including in cancer, brain and research into the human mind. One in ten projects addressed problems linked to the digital transition, half of which were in the area of artificial intelligence. And, 14% were found to be relevant to climate policies and green solutions.

Not only do we see that ERC grantees push the frontiers of knowledge, but the study also highlights that this knowledge is actively contributing to political priorities.

I think we can safely refute the view that you have to tell researchers what to do because otherwise they will never get down to practical matters. Nothing is further from the truth!

My message to policy makers is: trust researchers and give them the means to pursue their best ideas! That's the best investment we can make in our future. And I hope that we can continue to rely on you to support this great European success story!

[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2022/summary