ERC President’s speech on excellence and boosting frontier research in Romania

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Minister Dimian, Rector Costoiu, Professor Cîmpeanu, Academicians, colleagues, friends,

Thank you very much for inviting me to Bucharest and thank you to Politehnica University for hosting us today.

I am very glad to be here, not only because this is an important event for the ERC, but because the question we are discussing is the right one, how do we boost frontier research in Romania?

Not how do we distribute money more evenly. Not how do we make success look more balanced on a spreadsheet. But how do we make sure that excellent researchers, wherever they are in Europe, have the conditions they need to do their best work.

That distinction matters.

The ERC was created with a simple idea. Europe needed a funding body that would support the most ambitious research, in all fields, chosen by researchers themselves, and selected only on the basis of scientific excellence. No thematic priorities. No geographical quotas. No political steering of scientific questions.

That principle is sometimes uncomfortable. It means we do not decide in advance where the grants should go. We do not "correct" the outcome after the evaluation. We do not lower the bar for anyone.

But it is also the reason the ERC is trusted. It is why researchers across the world recognise an ERC grant as a mark of quality.

So let me say what the ERC can do and is doing.

We fund individual researchers and their teams. We give them time, money and freedom to pursue difficult questions. Since 2007, the ERC has supported thousands of researchers and projects across Europe. These projects have produced new knowledge, trained young scientists, generated patents, start-ups and sometimes whole new research directions.

But the ERC is not only a funder of projects. It is also a standard-setter. It shows what competitive, international, peer-reviewed funding can look like when it is kept independent and focused on quality.

For countries that are currently less successful in ERC calls, we can do several practical things. First, we do not see that the ERC panels are biased against applicants from Romania or anywhere else. I know the ERC very well, having served as a panel member for the Advanced and Synergy Grant calls before becoming President. ERC has carried out several analyses to capture possible bias based on nationality in its evaluation system, and the result is always the same: no proof of bias.

The ERC Scientific Council spends a lot of time trying to ensure that the ERC peer review evaluation process can identify scientific excellence irrespective of the gender, age, nationality, or institution of the Principal Investigator and other potential biases. We have always been clear that we want to focus on the quality of the proposals and not the reputation of the applicants or their host institutions.So what do we do?

We provide better information. We work with National Contact Points. We support mentoring. We help promising applicants spend time with ERC-funded teams through the Visiting Research Fellows programme. We work through the Ambassadors for the ERC, including here in Romania.

These things matter. Preparing an ERC proposal is not a bureaucratic exercise. It is an intellectual exercise. It forces a researcher to ask, what is the big question, why does it matter, why am I the right person to answer it, and why now?

Good mentoring can help. Experienced peers can help. Strong institutions can help. And we have seen in several countries that well-designed support can improve performance.

But there is also something the ERC cannot do.

We cannot substitute for a strong national research system. We cannot make a university internationally competitive if the national rules prevent it from hiring, rewarding and retaining excellent people. We cannot create stable research careers where national systems make them precarious. We cannot build laboratories, doctoral schools and research cultures from Brussels alone.

This brings me to the second point, what Romania needs to do.

Romania has real assets. It has strong educational traditions. It has talented researchers. It has people abroad who may be willing to return, or at least to reconnect, if the conditions are serious. It has institutions and fields where excellence is already visible. And it has examples here today of researchers who have competed successfully at European level.

But talent is not enough.

Research systems are built through steady choices. They need predictable funding. They need autonomy for universities and research institutions and open, international recruitment. They need proper support for young researchers and evaluation systems that reward quality rather than quantity, ambition rather than safe production.

They also need patience. A country cannot decide in one year to be excellent and expect the results in the next ERC call. This is slow work. But it is not mysterious work.

Some countries have improved because they treated ERC participation not as a lottery, but as part of research policy. They identified strong candidates early, gave them serious mentoring and funded excellent proposals that narrowly missed ERC funding. They used national money and European funds to build the conditions around talented people. They made success visible, so that one grant could become a signal to others: this can be done from here.

The third point is politically harder, but I think it is essential.

It is tempting for every country to look at the EU research budget and ask: how much do we pay in, and how much do we get back?

I understand why people ask that. Public money is scarce. Governments are accountable to their citizens. But for research, this is the wrong way to think.

Research is not a closed national transaction. Knowledge does not stop at a border. A discovery made in any one country can be used by researchers, doctors, companies and citizens across Europe. Students trained in one country collaborate with teams in another. Scientists, suppliers, start-ups and industrial users move through the Single Market.

Romania's own recent economic history shows this very clearly. Like Poland and several other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Romania has grown partly by being connected to a wider European economy. By attracting investment, joining supply chains, adopting technologies, raising standards, and giving its firms and citizens access to a much larger market. Much of the knowledge that made this possible was not produced only in Romania. It came through companies, universities, infrastructure, regulation, skilled people and industrial links across Europe.

So, when Europe funds excellent frontier research, the benefit is not confined to the host country. Of course, the host institution gains and the local ecosystem gains. But the knowledge enters a European system. It becomes part of the common stock from which others can draw.

This is not an argument for Romania to accept low participation. Quite the opposite. Romania should want more ERC grantees, more competitive institutions, more excellent applications, more Romanian researchers shaping European science.

But it is an argument against a narrow "juste retour" view of research funding. If Romania supports a stronger ERC budget, it is not simply being generous to countries that currently win more grants. It is investing in the European knowledge base of which Romania is part.

And the stronger that European knowledge base is, the more valuable it becomes for Romania to be connected to it.

There is a further point. The answer to unequal ERC success is not to reduce the emphasis on excellence. That would help no one. It would reduce the value of the grant, reduce trust in the system, and reduce the quality of the science Europe needs.

The answer is to widen the capacity to compete. That means European action and national action working together.

The ERC can open doors, provide models, offer support, and fund excellence where panels find it. Romania can build the conditions that allow more of its researchers to walk through those doors successfully.

That is the partnership we need.

So, my message today is a practical one.

Use the ERC, learn from it, challenge your institutions with it. Support your best researchers before they apply and support them again if they come close. Make it easier for excellent people to build ambitious groups here. Create the conditions in which young researchers believe they can do world-class work in Romania.

And at the same time, support a stronger European research budget, because Romania's future does not depend only on research done within Romania. It depends on being part of a Europe that discovers more, understands more, and turns knowledge into capacity.

That is what frontier research is for. Not prestige for its own sake. Not grants as trophies. But the freedom to ask questions whose answers may change what all of us can do.

Thank you.