Israeli researchers win a wave of EU Starting Grants, worth over $18 million, despite funding-climate friction

Eleven researchers across five Israeli institutions have been named winners of the European Research Council's Starting Grant, one of Europe's most competitive early-career research awards, in a round worth more than $18 million combined.

The winning teams span the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Technion, Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University and Ben-Gurion University, working across fields from cancer biology to computer science. Among the named recipients: Dr. Leeat Keren at the Weizmann Institute, who is combining custom imaging techniques with AI to map how proteins are distributed inside human tissue, work aimed at improving how cancer is understood at the cellular level; and Dr. Hagai Maron and Dr. Nir Hananya at the Technion, both working in computational and life-science research.

The ERC Starting Grant program funds early-career scientists pursuing high-risk, high-reward research, and is awarded through a highly selective, peer-reviewed competition open across the European Research Area and its associated countries. Winning eleven grants in a single round is a significant showing for Israel's research sector.

The result is notable partly because of the backdrop it arrives against: Israeli institutions have reported friction and uncertainty around EU research funding access tied to the broader political climate in Europe. A strong Starting Grant round does not resolve that structural tension, but it is a concrete data point that Israeli early-career research remains internationally competitive and continues to draw funding through Europe's most demanding peer-review process.

For readers who want to look past the headline: Starting Grant winners and their project abstracts are published by the ERC itself, and are a legitimate way to see, in the researchers' own words, what problem each grant is actually funding — rather than relying on a press summary alone.