With the Consolidator Grants, the ERC supports highly qualified scientists with several years of research experience and a promising scientific track-record. Today, the ERC announced the 349 laureates of the 2025 ERC Consolidator Grants, including Prof. Claudia Keller Valsecchi and Prof. Flavio Donato from the Biozentrum of the University of Basel.
ERC project: EMERGE
Animals show enormous diversity in traits, including differences between males and females. Claudia Keller Valsecchi has long been interested in sex differences and how organisms cope with having unequal numbers of sex chromosomes, which leads to imbalances in gene dosage.
In her ERC-funded project, she investigates the biological processes that compensate for these gene-dosage differences. By studying malaria mosquitoes alongside many other animal species, her research aims to uncover how and why such compensation mechanisms evolved, how they function, and why they are essential for survival in some species and contexts. The findings will provide new insights into gene regulation and the physiological differences between males and females – an aspect that has long remained understudied in both research and medicine.
Claudia Keller Valsecchi was recently appointed Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology at the Biozentrum. Previously, she led a research group at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Mainz.
ERC project: MALLEABLE MEMORY
Our memory helps us navigate life, but to learn from experience and adapt to change they must strike a careful balance: remaining stable while staying flexible enough to update in response to new information. Prof. Flavio Donato wants to explore how the brain manages this delicate balance between memory stability and malleability. What distinguishes a stable memory from a malleable one? What processes govern the updating of malleable memories, and what prevents updates in stable memories? The aim of the project is to uncover fundamental principles that regulate the stability/malleability balance, crucial for understanding learning, resilience, and memory-related disorders.
Flavio Donato has been an Assistant Professor of Neurobiology at the Biozentrum since 2019. In the same year, he was awarded a Starting Grant by the ERC.
EU frontier research grants to promote excellent scientists
The ERC Consolidator Grants are funded by the EU's Horizon Europe Programme for Research and Innovation. This research grant supports excellent and ambitious researchers that are consolidating their own independent research team to realize risky and high potential research projects. In the 2025 call, 3121 researchers from across Europe applied for a Consolidator Grant. Only 349 were successful in the ERC’s highly competitive selection procedure, among them four researchers from the University of Basel. Press release University of Basel
Contact: Communications, Katrin Bühler