Research project "SEMICYCLE" awarded an ERC Starting Grant 2022.

The ERC Starting Grant funding is highly competitive and aimed at excellent young scientists to enable them to realize revolutionary and ambitious ideas on topics of high relevance. In the Starting Grants 2022 round, out of 2932 proposals received, 408 projects were funded, of which only 27 in Italian institutions.

The SEMICYCLE project I proposed was selected for being funded under the Starting Grants 2022 program of the European Research Council (ERC) for a total of 1.5 million euros. The project, which will take place at the Institute for Genetic and Biomedical Research (IRGB) of the National Research Council located in Cagliari - Sardinia, is aimed at understanding the interactions between female sex hormones and the microbiota for efficient personalized medicine in cardiometabolic disorders in women: in particular, it responds to the need to improve knowledge on the biological mechanisms responsible for these pathologies, which today represent one of the main causes of female mortality.

In addition to the Cnr-Irgb research group (formed by me and five other researchers, two of whom will be recruited specifically for the project), staff from the Burlo-Garofolo  Hospital in Trieste and the Groningen Microbiome Center of the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands will collaborate on this project