Three Indian Scientists Win Prestigious European Research Council Grants
Three Indian scientists have received ERC grants in the highly competitive European Research Council Starting Grants programme. Supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme, these grants provide up to €1.5 million to each winner. The funding allows early-career scientists to build independent research teams and work on complex scientific challenges over five years.
Chosen from 3,474 proposals worldwide, Dr. Shreeya Shetye, Dr. Kaustubh Hakim, and Dr. Parth Chansoria are starting projects in astrophysics, planetary science, and regenerative medicine. Their achievements highlight both their individual skills and the growing scientific relationship between the European Union and India.
Funding Global Science
To see the importance of this milestone, it helps to understand how European research funding works. The European Research Council, established by the European Union in 2007, is the main European funding body for frontier research. Headed by Professor Maria Leptin and the Scientific Council, the organisation focuses on supporting researchers early in their careers. The Starting Grants are completely bottom-up, which means applicants can propose projects in any field without having to fit into predetermined themes.
In the most recent round, the European Research Council awarded nearly €780 million to 494 emerging scientists across Europe. The broader Horizon Europe programme runs from 2021 to 2027 with a budget of €93.5 billion and encourages researchers from any nationality to apply. The main requirement is that the funded work must take place at an eligible host institution in a European Union Member State or an associated country.
For international readers, seeing Indian researchers join European institutions in countries like Belgium and Switzerland shows a strong scientific connection. India is currently in negotiations to formally associate with the Horizon Europe programme. The success of these three scientists aligns well with shared priorities between the European Union and India in fields like space exploration, advanced materials, and fundamental physics.
Understanding Ageing Stars
Stars act as the universe's main factories. Throughout their lives, they create most of the chemical elements that eventually form new stars, planets, and the building blocks of life. However, the physical processes happening deep inside these stars are completely hidden from our telescopes.
Dr. Shreeya Shetye won an European Research Council Starting Grant for her project MERLIN, which stands for Magnetism, Evolution, and Rotation in Late-stage stellar Nucleosynthesis. Based at the Institute of Astronomy at KU Leuven in Belgium, her work looks closely at evolved stars approaching the end of their lifespans.
The MERLIN project will check whether the complex magnetic fields inside these older stars leave visible chemical marks on their surfaces. By reading these chemical signs, astrophysicists can learn about the hidden physical processes occurring deep inside the star.
Tracking Stellar Evolution
To do this, the MERLIN project will mix detailed observations of specific older stars with large amounts of data from major spectroscopic surveys. This combined method will help researchers understand how internal magnetism, the way the star rotates, and the mixing of materials affect the star's overall lifespan and its ability to produce heavy elements.
Dr. Shetye has a strong background for this work, having earned a joint doctoral degree from Université Libre de Bruxelles and KU Leuven.
She has developed an international career at institutions in Belgium and Switzerland, focusing specifically on the chemical evolution of stars. She notes that a star's surface chemistry holds important clues about its inner workings. "We cannot directly see what is happening deep inside a star, but its surface chemistry preserves clues about the physical processes operating within," Dr. Shetye explains. "With MERLIN, we want to use these chemical fingerprints to investigate whether magnetic fields influence internal mixing and the production of heavy elements in evolved stars".
Exploring Sub-Neptune Planets
Our solar system gives us one model of how planets form, but the rest of the Milky Way galaxy is quite different. The most common kind of planet in our galaxy is the sub-Neptune, which is larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. Even though they are very common in space, we do not have any sub-Neptunes in our own solar system, making them a puzzle for exoplanet researchers.
Planetary models indicate that these planets have thick hydrogen atmospheres covering deep oceans of molten rock. Scientists believe this molten layer sits on top of a solid rocky mantle and a dense iron core. Yet, reading the data coming from powerful instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope has been very hard.
Missing Planetary Data
This challenge happens because we lack basic laboratory data on how hydrogen, molten rock, and iron behave together under the extreme heat and pressure found deep inside these planets. Dr. Kaustubh Hakim plans to fill this gap with his project, ExoGeochem, which looks at the geochemical atmospheric signatures of sub-Neptune exoplanets. Hosted together by the Royal Observatory of Belgium and KU Leuven, ExoGeochem will produce the missing thermochemical data needed to understand these planets properly.
The research will use high-pressure laboratory tests alongside advanced quantum-mechanical simulations to see exactly how these planetary materials act under extreme pressure. The information from ExoGeochem will help researchers correctly interpret the atmospheric data currently gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope. It will also prepare scientists for data from future observatories like the Ariel space mission and the Extremely Large Telescope.
Dr. Hakim took an unusual path to exoplanet science. Born and educated in India, he started out as an electronics engineer and worked in banking before switching to astronomy. He then earned a master's degree in Belgium, finished his doctoral studies in the Netherlands, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Switzerland.
"Nearly half the planets in our galaxy are sub-Neptunes, and we still cannot say what they are made of," Dr. Hakim says. "For sub-Neptunes, the missing ingredient is thermochemical data: how hydrogen, rock and iron actually behave when they meet deep inside a planet. Providing these missing data is the key objective of ExoGeochem".
Healing Severe Muscle Injuries
Looking at human health, severe muscle injuries are a major challenge in medicine. These injuries often do not heal completely, leaving patients with permanent tissue damage and long-term physical problems. The usual way to help tissue heal involves using pre-made biological scaffolds. These structures are built to support new cells and guide the tissue as it regrows.
While this standard method works well in the lab, these pre-made, stiff structures are hard to fit into the complex and uneven shapes of traumatic injuries right inside a patient's body. To solve this problem, Dr. Parth Chansoria won European Research Council funding for his project, EchoPrint. Hosted at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, the project uses acoustic holography to quickly build biomimetic tissue grafts directly at the injury site.
Using Sound to Heal
Dr. Chansoria is working on a medical technique that uses new soft, biocompatible scaffold materials. These materials are made to react dynamically to overlapping ultrasound waves. Instead of building a stiff scaffold outside the body and trying to put it into an irregular wound, EchoPrint will let doctors inject the biocompatible material directly into the injured area.
By applying specific, overlapping ultrasound waves to that area, the sound energy will shape and set the soft material. Where the waves cross, they mold the material into fine, precise shapes right inside the patient. Dr. Chansoria's work will also include building the special ultrasound devices needed to do this without invasive surgery.
This technology will go through strict laboratory testing before moving on to animal trials, marking a big step forward for minimally invasive treatments. Dr. Chansoria holds multiple patents and runs a lab focused on biofabrication and tissue engineering. He previously worked as a Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow, showing a steady history of strong research.
Building EU-India Ties
The success of Dr. Shetye, Dr. Hakim, and Dr. Chansoria highlights the expanding scientific partnership between the European Union and India. Because the European Research Council judges proposals only on scientific excellence, the best researchers from anywhere in the world can work in European laboratories.
As the European Commission advances the goals of the Horizon Europe programme, international teamwork is a main part of the plan. These starting grants are an investment not just in three scientists, but in the future of international research.
With India currently working on its association with the Horizon Europe programme, the achievements of these Indian researchers show the potential for more shared discoveries in the years ahead. From studying how stars age to figuring out what exoplanets are made of, to healing bodies with sound, these projects represent important steps forward in science.
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