A new funding from Faculty of Medicine to support early career researchers

The new two-year Early Career Investigators funding has been granted to nine researchers at the Faculty of Medicine. Each of them receives €150.000 to support postdoc career development.

The Early Career Investigators funding is aimed for early career researchers working at the who fulfill the criteria of European Research Council’s application. The Faculty expects that the funded researchers will apply for ERC funding by 2020.

The highly competed, up to €1,5 million ERC Starting Grant is for promising young doctoral degree holders with under 7 years of postdoctoral research experience.

The Faculty of Medicine received 44 applications for the Early Career Investigators funding.

– With this funding instrument provided by the Faculty, we were able to identify ERC-eligible, top young researchers on our campus. This is the start of a very interesting project, where we are eager to follow up on the success of these researchers on their careers, says the Vice Dean Marjukka Myllärniemi from the Faculty of Medicine.

­– As the quality of the proposals was extremely high, we were unfortunately not able to fund all researchers that would have deserved funding. We are nevertheless hopeful, that some of these non-funded candidates could also apply for ERC funding.

Funded Early Career Investigators

Based on the evaluation of a six-member panel nominated by the Faculty of Medicine, the following nine researchers will receive the funding:



Environmental effects on embryonic development - molecular mechanisms and diagnostics of prenatal alcohol exposure



Discovering critical vulnerabilities in the tumor microenvironment of high grade serous ovarian cancer



Modeling congenital heart disease with patient derived induced pluripotent stem cells



Increased adipose tissue vascular leakage in obesity and its contribution to adipose tissue inflammation



Factors predicting response to targeted therapies and overcoming the resistance with novel combinations



Population ecology of the human gut microbiota



Fast functional profiling of patient samples in hypercholesterolemia



Lineage-specific transcription factors and oncogenic reprogramming of enhancer landscape during tumorigenesis



Novel prognostic factors and precision medicine targets in rare cancers

The €150.000 funding can be used for salaries, experimental costs, travel costs or any other research related costs that benefit the recipient’s independent research career at the Faculty of Medicine.