UofG researchers awarded €4m by the European Research Council
Published: 8 January 2020
Dr Marios Philiastides awarded multi million pound grant by the European Research Council (ERC).
Dr Marios Philiastides at the University’s Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, has been awarded €2m over five years to launch the Dynamic Network Reconstruction of Human Perceptual and Reward Learning via Multimodal Data Fusion (DyNeRfusion).
He is among 301 top scientists and scholars across Europe who are winners of the European Research Council’s latest Consolidator Grant competition. Funding for these researchers, part of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, is worth in total €600 million. With this support, the new grantees will have a chance to build up their teams and have far-reaching impact.
Dr Philiastides work will focus on how our brains learn to optimise our decisions through training and past experiences, using state-of-the-art brain imaging (fusion of EEG and fMRI) and mathematical modelling of human behaviour.
Dr Marios Philiastides said: “I am honoured and delighted to receive such a significant award from the European Research Council. Our team will be working to uncover the processes by which the human brain learns – through trial and error – to make better predictions and plan future actions.
“Consider learning to inspect a noisy x-ray image to issue an accurate diagnosis or learning to choose between different stock options to maximize your financial returns. These seemingly disparate learning scenarios have thus far been studied in isolation. Our main aim is to develop a unified framework for understanding the neurobiological processes underlying learning and decision making across different domains.”
The neuroscience team hopes their work will help inform future developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence and more specifically, how recent incarnations of artificial neural networks could learn to deal with an ever-increasing number of “big data” applications.
The ERC Consolidator Grants
The ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded to outstanding researchers of any nationality and age, with at least seven and up to twelve years of experience after PhD, and a scientific track record showing great promise. Research must be conducted in a public or private research organisation located in one of the EU Member States or Associated Countries. The funding (average of €2 million per grant), is provided for up to five years and mostly covers the employment of researchers and other staff to consolidate the grantees' teams.
About the ERC
The European Research Council, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premiere European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. Every year, it selects and funds the very best, creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based in Europe. It offers four core grant schemes: Starting, Consolidator, Advanced and Synergy Grants. With its additional Proof of Concept grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees to bridge the gap between grantees' pioneering research and early phases of its commercialisation. To date, the ERC has funded more than 9,000 top researchers at various stages of their careers, and over 50,000 postdocs, PhD students and other staff working in their research teams.
First published: 8 January 2020