Guidance for Imperial applicants

Make sure you are a supported candidate.  You must have Head of Department approval to submit an ERC proposal. The HoD needs to consider the Host Institution Obligations in giving this approval to the Faculty to produce the Host Institution letter of support. Factor this discussion and approval into your proposal planning.

Ensure you can satisfy the minimum time commitment (50% for Starting Grant, 40% for Consolidator, 30% for Advanced and Synergy). You can increase this percentage but the ERC expects this to be a relatively constant percentage over the duration of your grant. Conversely, do not over-commit yourself in the hope that an increased time commitment will increase your chances of success.

Whether you request a matching percentage of your salary from the ERC to cover your time, or instead claim funds for less than the percentage of time you will spend on the ERC project, is for you and your Head of Department to decide. You must still however devote the minimum % time mandated by the grant type (recorded in timesheets), regardless of how much or little of this you claim as salary.

Watch the ERC’s helpful YouTube videos.

For the grant type you are interested in, read essential documents: the Work Programme for the call year you are applying for (e.g., ERC 202* Work Programme); Information for Applicants for the grant type (e.g. Information for Applicants for Starting and Consolidator Grants 202*).

Consult the ERC Guide for Peer Reviewers, which is available on the ERC page for the grant you are interested in.

Consult the ERC Evaluation Panels. Panel member names are published after the competition closes. The Panel members usually rotate every other year; review the panel membership for the grant type two years prior to the year of the call you are applying for (e.g., 2022 for a 2024 call). If you are in doubt about panel scope, consult the ERC’s Previously funded Projects from your chosen Panel to assess what has been successful

First, remember that the ERC Starting, Consolidator, or Advanced grant is not intended to support a research collaboration between organisations.  (The ERC Synergy supports a collaboration between Principal Investigators, who may be based at different Host Institutions). It is about the PI and his or her team carrying out the project, rather than multiple organisations working independently. Funded team members outside of the Host Institution are permitted, but the project leadership and scientific decision-making must solely rest with the PI.

Discuss your project concept with trusted peers and mentors within your Department for their feedback on your scientific and technical approach, the innovation aspects, and the ground-breaking nature of the project. Ensure your research idea is truly innovative and high-risk/high-gain with the potential for transforming your field. If your project is something a UK Research Council might fund, then it is usually unlikely to be sufficiently risky or beyond the state-of-the-art to interest the ERC. Think about which of your peers would most likely constructively criticise your plans and address the weaknesses they might identify in your concepts and approaches.

Consider the added value and rationale for applying for ERC funding. Put yourself in the ERC shoes: it has scarce resources and receives numerous excellent proposals.  What arguments would you make in favour of it funding your project over others, and this year, vs next.

Have you pushed the Project idea to the limit? Consider whether there is anything you have left out of the Project design and whether you would have done anything else with extra time or budget.

Ask existing ERC grant-holders in your Department or Faculty for feedback on your application or their experience.

Take into account the actual available GBP (£) budget when planning the scope of your project. Your Department research facilitator can advise on how the maximum Euro € funding converts to GBP, following the College's Policies for Funding in a Foreign Currency.

Add the Research Services Manager/ Joint Research Office Head of Pre-Award for your Faculty as 'Main Contact’ so they can acess the proposal details and edit administrative content for Imperial:

• Faculty of Engineering: Mr Shaun Power s.p.power@imperial.ac.uk 
• Faculty of Medicine: Ms Harriet Hallas h.hallas@imperial.ac.uk 
• Faculty of Natural Sciences: Ms Brooke Alasya b.alasya@imperial.ac.uk 
• The Business School: Dr David Wilson david.wilson@imperial.ac.uk 

Review the Guide to Horizon Europe Part A proposal form.pdf for advice on completing any Ethics Table and Security questions.

Describe and justify the resources in the text box (Section C. Resources) under the budget table. The budget table and description of resources will be made available to the experts evaluating the proposal. This section has a maximum character limit so do not leave this drafting until the last minute. See section 2.3 of the applicable Information for Applicants for ERC guidance on the description of resources. Your Research Services Team will wish to review this section prior to submission, please give them enough time to do so before the submission deadline. Consult the handy internal "Horizon Europe Golden Rules for Pre-Award" for cost eligibility on specific items (staff, equipment....).

If you need to attach a copy of your PhD certificate (Starting and Consolidator only), remember to: provide an English translation if the certificate is not in English; if your certificate does not show the “defence” date, you must also submit a letter/document from your PhD awarding university setting out the defence date. This might take some time to get, so if you haven’t already asked that university, please do so at an early stage of proposal planning.

This is the single most important section of your proposal. You need to convince the Step 1 evaluators of the brilliance of your project so that they put you through to the full evaluation at Step 2. Most panels are wide-ranging in scope: you must therefore aim the synopsis a at a generalist audience. Consider how you would describe your project in terms that a non-expert would easily understand together with conveying your enthusiasm for it. It may help to imagine doing this verbally in the first instance. Think of how to convince the evaluators to favour your application rather than one in their own field. You need to sell the innovation and potential far-reaching and revolutionary impacts of your project convincingly to reach the Step 2 of the evaluation. Watch the ERC’s helpful video on the Part B1 for ideas of what to cover.

The CV and Track Record should include personal details, education, key qualifications, current position(s) and relevant previous positions, a list of up to ten research outputs that demonstrate how the applicant has advanced knowledge in their field, with an emphasis on more recent achievements, and a list of selected examples of significant peer recognition. A short explanation of the significance of the selected outputs, the role of the applicant in producing each of them, and how they demonstrate the applicant’s capacity to successfully carry out their proposed project may be included, as well as a short explanation of the importance of the listed examples of significant peer recognition. The applicant may also include relevant additional information on career breaks, diverse career paths, and life events, as well as any particularly noteworthy contributions to the research community. These will provide context to the evaluation panels when assessing the Principal Investigator’s research achievements and peer recognition in relation to their career stage. Watch the ERC’s helpful video on the Part B1 for ideas of what to cover.

First watch the ERC’s helpful video on the Part B2. Part B2 will only be evaluated if you reach Step 2 of the evaluation. It will then be evaluated by experts in your field (typically two to five). Include enough detail to convince them that your approach is not only feasible, but the best choice to achieve your aims, i.e. don’t simply state you will be using method x but explain why you have also considered and rejected methods y and z.  This point links with the need for a detailed risk assessment of your plans.

Remember the Step 2 evaluators will also evaluate your Part B1, Budget and its justification and your time commitment.  Therefore, although you should start B2 with an expanded version of the beginning of B1, i.e., a summary of your innovative aims and the huge impact you hope to achieve on your field, don’t do a complete copy of B1 into B2. B1 and B2 are written for different audiences and thus there should be no need to copy chunks of text. It is of course acceptable to copy and paste a little text and a few diagrams from B1 into B2 but exercise caution.

Seek the input of your peers on the technical content of B2.

Keep the headings and their order from the B2 template (Section a. State-of-the-art and objectives; Section b. Methodology; Funding ID); it is acceptable to add further sub-headings of your own.

Remember to include as much detail as possible of your planned methodology. Show clearly that not only have you had a brilliant research idea, but you have also carefully considered exactly how best you will aim to deliver the resulting research project.

Include a detailed Gantt chart for project planning and a PERT diagram to illustrate how the different components or challenges of your project form an integrated whole.

Ensure you have a detailed risk assessment in case your original ideas do not go as planned and include decision points in the planning where you may change the focus or emphasis of your project depending on your initial results.  Remember that ERC proposals must be high-risk/high-gain – ‘safe’ ideas will not be successful.

Make it clear that ethical considerations are an integral part of your project planning and not simply an ‘add-on’ or afterthought at the end.

Highlight the multidisciplinary nature of your project and team (if appropriate) and explain the background and skills of each team member. Ensure your team profile meets the requirements of the Project.

Don’t forget you must aim to meet the Commission’s requirements for gender balance in the implementation of the action.

State how you will manage your team (e.g., number and frequency of individual and team meetings) and how you plan to ensure the research integrity of all team members.  Do not ignore this aspect or assume evaluators will take your adherence for granted.  See Imperial’s policies on research integrity for additional guidance.

Ensure you have the written consent to include any team member mentioned.

Remember to address Open Science requirements and appropriate management of the research data Please see the Model Grant Agreement provisions on Open Science, the Commission’s 2021 publication on Open Science and Imperial’s resources for open access and management of research data.

Although references do not count towards the page limit for B2, do not include pages of references which are not relevant. Include enough references to demonstrate your mastery of your research field, but do not include excessive references in B2 as this is not a literature review; the focus is your exciting, frontier research project.

If there is overlap with current funding applications state that you would decline the competing award in favour of the ERC award should you be successful in winning them both. One reason the ERC includes this table is to ensure that it isn’t double funding any research, so make it obvious there is no risk of this with your proposal. Consider, however, that if you can apply for overlapping funds elsewhere, this may be an indicator that your idea is not of a sufficiently frontier nature to be competitive for ERC funding.

Don’t forget to add a few summary sentences before the Funding ID table to highlight your previous successes in winning research funding, i.e. projects which have now finished. Or if you have had a role in research projects that your participation was not funded.