New president of the European Research Council

The European Commission appointed Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon as the next President of the European Research Council, the EU’s premier funding body for investigator-driven frontier research. Professor Bourguignon, a mathematician and French national, assumed his new role on January, 1 2014, replacing Professor Helga Nowotny. He is the first ERC President to be based in Brussels, in a new reinforced role where he devotes most of his time to the position. He joins the ERC at a significant stage in its further development, with a substantially increased seven-year budget of over 13 billion euro under Horizon 2020, the EU’s new programme for research and innovation.