"Our goal is to understand the limits of what the vertebrate eye is capable of! By studying the eye of deep-sea fish, we can also learn many useful insights about the human eye" says CU's Zuzana Musilová  - awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator grant.

"We previously described rapid auxin speciation in the root of a model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Now we want to focus on this in other parts of plants, bringing us closer to practical applications," says Matyáš Fendrych from the Faculty of Science.

Biologist Petr Pyšek is the proud holder of the prestigious Czech Head award recognising his life’s work. He received the award in 2022 for the study of invasive organisms. “Invasive ecology is a field that examines how humans spread plants and animals around the world and guages their impact on nature,” he explains.

Having a publication in Nature or talking about your research on TV is not enough! What matters is the real societal impact, they emphasise at University College Dublin. Pavla Hubálková found out how research and science communication is approached there.

"One of the panel members made everybody chuckle during the interview when he said that I had cleverly designed a project on the joys of what most of us do most of the day," says Anežka Kuzmičová. She has won a prestigious ERC Starting Grant.

"We discovered a completely new type of immune cell that plays key roles in the immune system's response to microorganisms," says Jan Dobeš, who was invited with Jakub Abramson and colleagues to write a review article in Nature Review Immunology.

“Be a sponge – keep absorbing information from a broad perspective,” says Professor Albert Heck from Utrecht University. Heck is internationally recognised as one of the top pioneers in the use of mass spectrometry for large-scale protein research.

“Doing science these days is generally quite stressful - you're constantly writing grants or explaining in evaluation reports why it's not working out the way you thought it would,” warns molecular geneticist Eva Froňková from the Second Medical Faculty of Charles University.

The ERC grant competition is one of the most prestigious: top scientists regularly compete for funding. Those working at Czech institutions who receive top marks but fail to get backing, can receive "ERC CZ" funding from the Ministry of Education. 

“It is an unprecedented success,” says Martin Loebl, the head of the Department of Applied Mathematics at Charles University, regarding Hans Raj Tiwary. He has been awarded the Gödel Prize - one of the most prestigious awards in the field of computer science.