Dr Enrico Dall’Ara from the University’s School of Medicine and Population Health was selected among 308 researchers across Europe for this year’s ERC Consolidator Grants. The prestigious ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded up to €2 million for a period of 5 years.
Dr Dall’Ara is a Senior Lecturer in Musculoskeletal Multiscale Imaging and the Research Director of the Insigneo Institute Computational Modelling in Medicine research theme.
His research project, ‘Virtual Mouse and Human Twins for optimising treatments for Osteoporosis’ aims to develop and validate the first inter-species virtual twin to predict bone adaptation over time in patients given information from animal studies, using our mechanistic knowledge of the complex physical phenomena that occur during bone remodelling. This in silico approach will be used to prescreen combined pharmacological and biomechanical treatments for osteoporosis, reducing the number of animal experiments, the number of clinical trials, and the time to market of new interventions against Osteoporosis.
Dr Dall’Ara said: “I am thrilled to have been selected for an ERC Consolidator grant. This will be a big step change for myself and my research team. I am grateful to the ERC as it will allow me to work on a research project I genuinely believe in and that has the potential of revolutionising how we test new treatments for osteoporosis and beyond.
A big thank you to past and current team members and collaborators who have helped shape the ideas around this ambitious project!“
Totalling €627 million this year, the grants enable recipients to consolidate their independence by establishing their own research teams to pursue their most promising scientific ideas. The projects span all disciplines of research, from medicine and physics, to social sciences and humanities.
President of the European Research Council Professor Maria Leptin said: “The new Consolidator Grant winners represent some of the best of European research. It is disappointing that we cannot support every deserving project simply due to budget constraints; around 100 proposals identified as excellent in our rigorous evaluation will be left unfunded. Can Europe afford to let such talent go unrealised? We need to collectively advocate for increased investment in research and innovation. Our shared goal must be to ensure that no brilliant idea goes unfunded in Europe, and no promising career is left unfulfilled.”
The recipients of the ERC grants will carry out their projects at universities and research centres in 22 EU Member States and other countries associated with Horizon Europe.
