Yimon Aye and Madhavi Krishnan awarded ERC Advanced Grants
Congratulations to Professors Yimon Aye and Madhavi Krishnan, who are among seven researchers at the University of Oxford who have been awarded Advanced Grants from the European Research Council, each worth up to €2.5 million over a period of five years.
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. 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."
Prof Yimon Aye
Prof Aye’s project aims to develop technologies that can map with unprecedented resolution in living organisms the bioactivity of small molecules called immunometabolites. These chemical signals have poorly-described signalling behaviours, but are believed to have important functions in fine-tuning locale-specific immune responses. Decoding their cell-specific signalling activities could open up new opportunities for precision therapies. Through collaborating with clinicians at Oxford and elsewhere, Prof Aye aims to access clinical samples and unique disease models, to help translate new insights directly towards healthcare advances.
Prof Aye said: "This prestigious funding support will help us drive our new vision at Oxford with great momentum. Credit goes to numerous former and present team members whose enormous efforts crucially helped the lab to build paradigmatic foundations in the field. We look forward to unravelling complex problems through our project."
Prof Madhavi Krishnan
It is a well-known principle that like charges repel, whether positive or negative. However, experiments on like-charged matter suspended in liquids have frequently reported the opposite: attraction, rather than repulsion. This puzzling phenomenon remained an open question for decades. Recent work by Prof Krishnan identified solvent molecules at the interface between the charged object and the surrounding fluid as the key players driving this seemingly anomalous interaction. Her ERC project aims to explore the origins and consequences of counterintuitive long-range forces between objects in solution. Given that much of chemistry—and essentially all of biology—unfolds in fluid environments, this work could hold profound implications for a range of fields.
Prof Krishnan said: "I am deeply heartened by the community’s intellectual support for blue-sky science that pushes beyond long-standing, entrenched paradigms. As is often the case, real-world impacts soon follow."
Further information about the 2025 ERC Advanced Grants recipients can be found on the ERC website.
