European Research Council - Governance & Structure

Governance & Structure

The ERC is governed by the Scientific Council (ScC), consisting of 22 eminent European scientists and scholars, and supported operationally by the ERC Executive Agency (ERCEA), based in Brussels. The ScC is responsible for setting the ERC’s scientific strategy including establishing the annual ‘Ideas’ Work Programme and calls for proposals, designing the peer review systems, identifying the peer review experts, and communicating with the scientific community. The Scientific Council members were nominated by Commissioner Potočnik in July 2005 and worked intensively to define the key principles and scientific operating practices of the ERC in preparation for the start-up. Following its formal establishment, the Scientific Council reaffirmed the election of its Chair and ERC President, Professor Fotis Kafatos, and the two Vice-Chairs and ERC Vice-Presidents, Professor Helga Nowotny and Dr. Daniel Estève. After the resignation of Fotis Kafatos in February 2010, Helga Nowotny was elected President. Since March 2011, Vice-Presidents are Prof. Carl-Henrik Heldin and Prof. Pavel Exner.

The second pillar of the ERC, the ERC Executive Agency (ERCEA), is responsible for supporting the peer review process, implementing ERC strategy as set by the ScC, and executing all financial operations. The ERCEA is currently headed by its Director-ad-Interim, Pablo Amor. It employs some 350 staff of which more than 50 are PhD scientists.

To couple the two pillars and create an integrated institution, two integrative mechanisms were put in place:

1. The post of Secretary General (SG), selected by the ScC and located in Brussels, with the goal of interacting closely with the ERCEA. The first SG, the biochemist Prof. Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker was for 8 years the head of the largest national research agency in Europe, the German Research Foundation (DFG). The second SG was Prof. Andreu Mas-Colell, a distinguished scientist (Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences, Professor at Berkeley, at Harvard, and at Pompeu Fabra, and recipient of several honorary doctorates and numerous prestigious prizes and awards). The third and current Secretary General (since September 2011) is Prof. Donald Bruce Dingwell, Volcanologist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) and himself an ERC Advanced Grantee. It is widely recognized that all three Secretaries General have been instrumental in the success of the ERC to date, and have worked closely and fruitfully together with the two consecutive Directors-ad-Interim of the ERCEA, Dr. Jack Metthey and Pablo Amor.

1. The ERC Board consisting of the three ScC Chairs, the Director of the ERCEA and the Secretary General.

There is also a five-member ERCEA Steering Committee, chaired by the EC’s Director-General for Research Robert Jan Smits and including a distinguished external scientist (currently Catherine Cesarsky), a ScC member, and two senior EC officers.

During the first half of 2011, a Task Force chaired by Robert Jan Smits, decided to give further suggestions regarding the governance structure of the ERC in the next European Commission's Framework Programme (Horizon 2020), beginning with 2014. Inter alia, it was suggested to merge the positions of the President and of the Secretary General into a full-time employed President in Brussels.