ERC starting grant

casestudy

 My long-term vision

• Integrate clinical and fundamental research
• Create novel diagnostic tools based on fundamental knowledge
• Form bridge between researchers with complementary expertise

Modeling

Experiment

Clinical

I want to link basic research with clinical research to actually improve the health of patients.

Nele Vandersickel

Experience in all three areas!

ERC starting grant: 2020

SMARTHEART

Combination of two research fields: network theory

&

cardiac arrhythmia

Created a new diagnostic tool to determine automatically the source and location of cardiac arrhythmia based on network theory

Research proposal:

• Past the state of art: bring something new
• Yet already demonstrate the proof of principle: however not too much <-> incremental research
• Think about interdisciplinary projects (usually people really like that). Make sure you have expertise for both fields
• Speak to your audience: E.g. clinical audience? make proposal clinical and not too complicated specifically in B1
• Make proposal one unity
• Read the evaluation criteria!
• High/Risk high gain
• Important subject
• Name many plans B in case plan A does not work

Own excellence

• I switched research field: was able to be successful in both of them
• Write small biography to demonstrate what you did so far
  (e.g. I have a very strange CV)
• Show scientific independence: publish as last author!
• Demonstrated the ability to conduct ground-breaking research
• Required scientific expertise and capacity to successfully
  execute the project

General comments

• Start in time: it took me 7 month to write 1st proposal
• 1 month to redo proposal
• Reuse your proposal in case you do not obtain ERC for other applications (e.g. B1 fits in research proposal to become professor)
• I used my proposal to write many papers already.