IMP ranks third in ERC grant application success rates

The selection of projects to be funded by the European Research Council (ERC) is highly competitive and acceptance rates have become a key indicator for research excellence. Latest data provided by the ERC for the years 2014-2018 rank the IMP third out of 172 institutes and first in Austria, with a remarkable success rate of 58 percent.

The European Research Council (ERC) was set up in 2007. Its mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields, on the basis of scientific excellence. The ERC’s five funding schemes are all highly competitive. When a scientist is awarded an ERC grant, this is not only an indicator of his or her personal science excellence, but also makes the host institute shine.

At the end of 2019, the ERC assessed the success rates of 172 European institutions that applied for ERC funding in calls in 2014-2018 and were hosting at least seven grants as of December 2019. All categories and grants considered, the IMP achieved a remarkable success rate of 58%, coming third after the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel (75%), and the Institute of Experimental Medicine in Budapest (64%). Within Austria, the IMP's acceptance rate is unsurpassed.

"This success confirms our strategy to focus entirely on scientific excellence in an international environment," says Jan-Michael Peters, scientific director of the IMP. At the same time, he added, the efforts of the City of Vienna to support the Vienna BioCenter and the initiatives of the Federal Government to strengthen basic research are reaffirmed, as are the considerable investments of the main sponsor Boehringer Ingelheim. With around 12 million euros in third-party funding per year, the IMP attracts an impressive amount of research funds to Vienna and contributes significantly to its visibility on the research map.

As of January 2020, 12 out of 16 IMP faculty members are ERC grantees, with several of them having won more than one grant.

Top 10: ERC grant application success rate 2014-2018 for institutes hosting at least seven main grants as of December 2019 (based on data provided by the ERC)

1. Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI), Basel, Switzerland - 75%    
2. Institute of Experimental Medicine, Budapest - 64%     
3. Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), Vienna, Austria - 58%
4. Institute of Science and Technology Austria - 49%
5. London Business School, UK - 47%
6. ICFO-Institute of Photonics Sciences, Barcelona, Spain - 40%
7. Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel - 38%
8. European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany - 37%
9. Champalimaud Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal - 36%
10. Francis Crick Institute, London, UK - 35%

Related Documents

• ERC Success Ranking 2014-2018 (pdf, 50 KB)