Five UofG academics have been awarded prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants – the most that the University has ever been awarded in one round.

Professor Steve Brewster (College of Science and Engineering); Professor Adam Carter (College of Arts and Humanities); Professor Ruth Dukes and Professor Fergus McNeill (College of Social Sciences); and Professor Simon Hanslmayr (College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences), were all successful in the 2024 round of the competition, which is one of the most competitive funding schemes in the EU.

The funding, worth in total €721 million, will go to 281 leading researchers across Europe.

The Advanced Grant competition gives senior researchers the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs. The new grants are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme.

Professor Sir Anton Muscatelli, Principal and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Glasgow, said: “I am delighted to hear that all five colleagues who applied to the ERC Advanced Grants programme were successful. This is testament to the excellent quality of research being conducted across our four Colleges at Glasgow. I wish them and their teams every success.

“I’m very glad to see such a high level of ambition and interest in European funding, and I hope this encourages researchers from across all disciplines and at all career stages to consider applying to Horizon Europe over the coming years.”

Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation, said: “These ERC grants are our commitment to making Europe the world’s hub for excellent research. By supporting projects that have the potential to redefine whole fields, we are not just investing in science but in the future prosperity and resilience of our continent. In the next competition rounds, scientists moving to Europe will receive even greater support in setting up their labs and research teams here. This is part of our “Choose Europe for Science” initiative, designed to attract and retain the world’s top scientists.”

Professor Stephen Brewster - BodyElectric

BodyElectric will develop new tactile haptic technologies which use electrical stimulation of the skin to provide improved touch simulation for users of future generations of flexible devices. Current haptic technologies use bulky mechanical actuators which to enable devices like mobile phones and game controllers to simulate sensations of touch. Professor Brewster will investigate how tiny electric pulses applied to the skin through electrodes can be used instead to unlock richer, more detailed touch-based experiences that can be used in a wider array of products.

Professor Brewster, of the School of Computing Science, said: “Haptic technologies have made big advances in recent years, but they remain tied to unsustainable manufacturing processes which create a great deal of electronic waste. Our BodyElectric research will find new methods of enabling safe, comfortable multimodal interactions with unprecedented tactile sensation, using sustainable technologies printed on recyclable flexible surfaces to reduce the sector’s environment impact.”

Professor Adam Carter - KNOW-HOW

Knowing what is true is valuable, but practical knowledge - knowledge of how to do things - is equally critical. Having such ‘know-how’ enables us to succeed in action and achieve our goals. Currently, little consensus exists about the nature of know-how and what is involved in exercising it. These barriers hinder our ability to recognise and utilise know-how effectively.

‘KNOW-HOW: A new framework for theoretical and practical control across intelligence domains’, aims to make a major advance here by developing a comprehensive framework for understanding know-how and its place in a wider web of concepts we rely on to understand and describe intelligent behaviour. The project will put our understanding of know-how on a new footing, impacting academic research across disciplines.

Professor Carter, of the School of Humanities, said: "I am absolutely thrilled and deeply honoured to receive this Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. This funding provides me with a transformative opportunity to tackle in a sustained way a cluster of fundamental questions about what it takes to manifest knowledge and other intelligence states in action. I’m ready to get to work to launch, through this ERC KNOW-HOW grant, a truly ambitious and intellectually exciting research programme.”

Professor Ruth Dukes - LawAtWork

The LawAtWork project tests the hypothesis that widespread breach of employment rights may erode public faith in the rule of law. Studying employment law enforcement and compliance across Germany, Italy and the UK, it aims to create a sound and extensive evidence base explaining why employment rights are frequently breached in certain contexts and underpinning proposals for reform.

Professor Dukes, of the School of Law, said: “The funding from the European Research Council will allow me to investigate the consequences of widespread breach of employment rights - not only for the workers concerned but more generally for public faith in the rule of law and in the capacity of our democracies to hold powerful economic actors to account. Especially at a time when far right political parties are winning elections across Europe, this strikes me as a crucial link to establish. I’m delighted to have been awarded the grant and keen to get started."

Professor Simon Hanslmayr - MemoryIndex

Professor Simon Hanslmayr’s research looks at episodic memories and how the brain’s hippocampus uses two different groups of neurons to support memories in different ways. MemoryIndex seeks to answer fundamental questions of how these two types of neurons support memory, how or if they interact, where in the hippocampus they are, and whether we can artificially create them via electrical micro-stimulation. This latter part of the project could potentially pave the way for a memory prosthesis to reactivate memories in patients that would otherwise be lost.

Professor Hanslmayr, of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, said: “Getting this project is a huge honour and the result of over five years of hard work, supported by my collaborators and students, to whom I owe a lot. I am super excited to get started and optimistic that it will deliver fundamental insights for basic science as well as inspiring novel Neurotechnology to help patients with memory problems.”

Professor Fergus McNeill - Rehabilitation and Reintegration in Europe (RaRiE)

Until recently, the study of penal systems has focused mainly on their most severe or repressive features, but these systems often do great harm when aiming to do good, not least by expanding the scale, reach and intensity of penal control.

By examining evidence from three countries that are often considered ‘progressive’ (the Netherlands, Norway and Scotland), RaRiE will promote better understand whether and where rehabilitation lives up to its ideals, and to creatively, critically and comparatively interrogate its development and prospects, its coherences and contradictions, its rhetoric and its realities, its pitfalls and its possibilities.

Professor McNeill, of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, said: “I am so delighted to receive this grant. I’ve spent the last few decades trying to understand and improve rehabilitation and reintegration in one way or another. Building on everything I’ve learned in my previous work - from a huge range of collaborators past and present - we’ll be using creative and dialogical methods that allow our project participants to share the task of reimagining justice and how we can better deliver it. And we’ll build capacity while we do it, not just with new researchers, but in the communities of place, practice and interest that will be involved in Scotland, the Netherlands and Norway.”

First published: 17 June 2025

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