Zhengming Chen, Richard Peto Professor of Epidemiology at Oxford Population Health has been awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). The award is one of fourteen awarded to University of Oxford researchers 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. A record of 3,329 proposals was submitted to this funding round, with 9.6% of proposals being selected for funding.
President of the European Research Council, Professor Maria Leptin, said: ‘The new Advanced Grant projects demonstrate the creativity, ambition and intellectual boldness that frontier research requires. The ERC’s role is to support researchers who are asking difficult scientific questions and want to venture into unexplored territory in pursuit of new knowledge. Congratulations to all our new grantees.’
Professor Chen’s project will bring together population biobank data from more than 1.15 million people in East Asia, Europe and Latin America to study how body fat affects health. It will look beyond weight alone to better understand different types of obesity, why some people develop metabolic diseases even at a healthy weight, and how these patterns may vary across ancestries and populations. By combining large-scale genetic, clinical and molecular datasets available in the China Kadoorie Biobank, the UK Biobank and the Mexico City Prospective Cohort Study, Professor Chen aims to characterise disease burden associated with obesity, uncover the biological mechanisms behind obesity and identify new targets for more precise prevention and treatment.
Professor Chen said: ‘This ERC advanced grant provides a unique opportunity to transform our understanding of how adiposity influences human health across diverse populations. The scale, diversity, and depth of the data available are unprecedented and the evidence generated will inform disease prevention worldwide.’
The full list of ERC Advanced Grant winners can be found on the ERC website.