An Irish researcher working on small marine organisms has won a prestigious grant from the European Research Council (ERC).
Dr. James Gahan, who will take up an associate professorship in chromosome biology at the University of Galway in 2024, is one of eight academics and researchers based in Ireland to be approved for the grant.
Dr James Gahan is currently a research fellow at the University of Oxford, and is also based at the Michael Sars Centre at the University of Bergen in Norway as a visiting researcher.
“My research focuses on the very earliest stages of animal evolution, namely how organisms went from being single-celled to being composed of many different types of cells with different functions,” Dr Gahan says.
“ To study this, I work on choanoflagellates, which are small marine organisms, and the closest living relatives to animals. The ERC starting grant is a huge moment for my research and career and will allow me to build a team working on these questions with the resources to do truly excellent science,” he says.
A total of 400 such starting grants, issued for five years by the ERC, have been approved across Europe for 2023.
The awards are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme.
They are designed to support “excellent principal investigators who have demonstrated the ground-breaking nature, ambition and feasibility of their research proposal and are at a stage in their career when they are starting their own independent research team or programme”.
Also approved at the University of Galway is Dr. Eoin McEvoy, an assistant professor in biomedical engineering, whose research work under the ERC starting grant will focus on uncovering why tumour growth is sensitive to physical pressure and overcoming related drug resistance.