ERC starting grant for a neurobiologist at INCI

The European Research Council (ERC) has just announced (January 2022) the winners of the Starting Fellowships, which provide significant funding for young researchers' projects. In 2021, the ERC has selected 397 scientists in Europe to receive a Starting Fellowship, worth a total of € 619 million from the new Horizon Europe framework program. The Council received 4 016 applications, a success rate of 9.9%.

This funding is intended to support frontier research projects of up to 5 years duration and with a budget of € 1.5 million. It is aimed at scientists who obtained their PhD between 2 and 7 years ago. Starting grants are the first type of European funding available to young researchers, before Consolidator grants (up to €2 million and 7 to 12 years after the PhD) and Advanced grants (up to €2.5 million, for established researchers).

Among the winners is Antoine Valera, a neurobiologist at the Institute of Cellular and Integrative Neurosciences (INCI, a CNRS research unit in partnership with Unistra) for the CereCode research project, 'Neuronal computation and population dynamics in cerebellar nuclei during motor behaviour'.

The cerebellum is a key brain structure for movement coordination and motor learning. Computations performed in the cerebellum are channelled through a small output structure, the deep cerebellar nuclei. CereCode, a five-year research project, will provide a better understanding of the neural code in the deep nuclei of the cerebellum, and how populations of neurons in this structure code information during different movements. The technological barrier that limited the study of this structure will be overcome with a new 3D imaging tool using 2-photon acousto-optic lens imaging, developed by Antoine Valera during his post-doctorate in London.