Thursday, November 15, 2012

Landed the ‘big one’

I’m delighted to say I’ve been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Investigator award for my project ‘The Programmable City’, receiving €2.3m over 5 years.  The awards are tagged ‘Europe’s most prestigious grants’ and they’re highly competitive - only 3 or 4 awards per year have been made to date with respect to the SH3 panel (Environment and Society, to which I applied) across the 39 eligible countries.  Since 2008 only 6 such awards have been made across all disciplines/panels to researchers in Ireland.  In other words, I’m really fortunate to be receiving one of the awards.  It will buy me out on a 0.5 basis from my present duties as well as funding two 5 year postdocs, two 4 year postdocs, four 4 year PhD students, one replacement lecturer, and 0.5 admin.  The research institute I run has now secured two such grants: a starting award to Sean O’Riain and an advanced award for myself, which is a great achievement.  The two grants are complementary to an extent so hopefully we can build a really strong team of researchers in the coming years.  I’m now hoping to step to the side from my head of department duties from next August (which I’ll have done for 11 years) to concentrate on delivering the new project as well as continuing my work on existing funded projects.  Really looking forward to it. 

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratularions, Rob.

Stuart Elden said...

Congratulations Rob - always great to hear when one of the good guys gets these things.

Anonymous said...

Well done, Rob! I'm very, very happy for you!

Untenured said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ugo Rossi said...

well done Rob. The topic sounds very interesting. Keep us updated about the project in the coming months.

Rob Kitchin said...

Thanks, all. Looking forward to starting this sometime next year.

Unknown said...

The tireless pursuit of knowledge always deserves recognition. I'm glad to see you're getting it. Congratulations, Rob.

pattinase (abbott) said...

Great news, Rob. I am sure it is well earned!