Kevin Foster is among the Oxford academics awarded European Research Council Advanced Grants for cutting-edge research

The ERC Advanced Grants competition, part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, is one of the most prestigious and competitive funding schemes in the EU. It gives senior researchers the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs.

Our Professorial Fellow in Microbiology, Professor Kevin Foster, is the Chair of Microbiology at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology. His work focuses on the microbial communities that live on us and all around us, including the human gut microbiome. These communities contain many evolving and interacting species, which has made them notoriously difficult to understand and predict. Using the ERC Advanced Grant, he will tackle this complexity by focusing on something that unifies all microbial communities: metabolism and the need of microbes to harvest nutrients. By bridging metabolism and ecology, the goal is to predict how particular sets of species will behave in combination and establish the principles needed to rationally manipulate our own microbiomes.

Many congratulations to Professor Foster and all recipients of these prestigious awards. This year, the competition attracted 2,534 proposals, which were reviewed by panels of internationally renowned researchers. Only 281 (11 %) of proposals were selected for funding.

President of the European Research Council, Professor Maria Leptin said: ‘Congratulations to the new grant winners! Much of this pioneering research will contribute to solving some of the most pressing challenges we face - social, economic and environmental, etc.’