“The ERC Advanced Grant is one of the European Union’s most prestigious research funding schemes and recognizes outstanding scientific excellence. It is a major success for Hamburg as a research hub that two more ERC Grants have been awarded to UKE. These projects continue UKE’s impressive track record in attracting highly competitive ERC funding and demonstrate the exceptional strength of neuroscience research in Hamburg. My sincere congratulations to everyone involved,” says Maryam Blumenthal, Hamburg’s Senator for Science, Research and Equal Opportunities.

“I am delighted that the European Research Council has once again recognized two highly promising research projects at UKE. This continued support strengthens our efforts in neuroscience, one of our key research priorities, and we are deeply grateful for it. My congratulations go to the outstanding researchers who have received these prestigious awards,” says Prof. Dr. Blanche Schwappach-Pignataro, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Member of the UKE Executive Board.

How do people use cognitive information to predict others’ behaviour?

Prof. Dr. Cristina Becchio, Head of the Cognition, Motion and Neuroscience Laboratory at the Department of Neurology, has been awarded funding for her project Cracking the Kinematic Code (KINCODE).

The project investigates whether and how people access and use cognitive information during social interactions to predict the behavior of others. Its overarching goal is to uncover the fundamental principles underlying kinematic coding — the mapping between mental states and movement kinematics.

To achieve this, KINCODE will establish a unified experimental and computational framework to examine how information is encoded into movement and subsequently decoded by observers. The project will also investigate how matches and mismatches between encoding and decoding influence successful information transfer in both neurotypical individuals and people with autism spectrum disorder.

The ERC Advanced Grant provides €2.5 million in funding, of which approximately €2.2 million will be awarded to UKE. The project is carried out in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Didier Stricker from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).

Understanding the neural circuits of emotion recognition

Prof. Dr. Stefano Panzeri, from the UKE’s Center for Molecular Neurobiology Hamburg (ZMNH), has also been recognized through an ERC Advanced Grant. He is a project partner in Circuits of Emotion Recognition (EmotionalBrainS), led by Prof. Francesco Papaleo at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa, Italy.

The project aims to uncover the neural mechanisms underlying emotion recognition. The researchers expect that these findings will substantially improve our understanding of how individuals interact with one another and clarify the role of the socio-emotional brain in both health and disease.

The overall project receives approximately €3 million in ERC funding, of which around €225,000 will support the research conducted at UKE.

ERC supports frontier research across disciplines

ERC Grants are part of the European Union’s Horizon Europe framework programme, which funds both frontier research and application-oriented research across a wide range of disciplines.

The European Research Council (ERC) offers several funding schemes, including the ERC Starting Grant for early-career researchers, the ERC Consolidator Grant for mid-career scientists, and the ERC Advanced Grant for established research leaders.

Over the past years, researchers at UKE have been awarded a total of 40 ERC Grants.

Translated into English by Elena Reiriz Martínez/BCOS