European Research Council makes available around €5.5 million for basic research
For their visionary research projects, three top Goethe University researchers will receive European Research Council (ERC) funding for the next five years. Prof. Julian Garritzmann and Prof. Joel Thiago Klein will each receive an ERC Consolidator Grant – the former for his research into educational differences as a central axis of political conflicts, and the latter for his analysis of the contemporary relevance of Kant’s philosophy of law. Supported with an ERC Starting Grant, molecular biologist Dr. Hannah Uckelmann is working on non-genetic (epigenetic) changes to DNA in blood cells, which play an important role in the development of leukemia.
Goethe University President Prof. Enrico Schleiff points to the highly diverse nature of the projects supported by the new ERC grants: “I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to our three ERC awardees for their pioneering projects – which also showcase our university’s excellence in its wide scope and breadth: from political and social sciences to medicine. These ERC grant recipients are testimony to how relevant our basic research is to the current challenges of our time – whether with respect to investigating how education can divide our society, or why Kant’s philosophy continues to shape our current discussions on intergenerational justice and the distribution of goods, or for that matter how leukemias develop even though the proteins responsible for unbridled growth are not affected by mutations.”
Education is a key element of today’s “knowledge societies” and has many positive social and economic consequences, including economic growth and social advancement. This is why much hope has been placed in the massive expansion of education. At the same time, however, education has the potential to politically divide our societies and a political fault line is increasingly emerging between groups with different educational backgrounds – a divide that is gradually emerging as a central axis of political conflict.
Political scientist Julian Garritzmann examines this phenomenon as part of the project “POLEDUC – The Politics of the Latent Educational Cleavage”, which is now receiving around €2 million in ERC funding. The project focuses on three levels of these complex interrelationships: At the level of the individual, it uses surveys to determine the educational cleavage in political preferences and behavior, whereas at the superordinate level, it analyzes how party competition increasingly addresses different educational groups. Finally, at the macro level of policy-making, it examines why political decision-makers are increasingly responsive to better-educated citizens.
Julian Garritzmann is a professor of political science at Goethe University Frankfurt. His research focuses on the welfare state and education policy research, comparative political economy and political sociology. Following his university studies in Cologne and his doctorate in Konstanz, he researched and taught at Harvard University, Duke University, the University of Zurich and the European University Institute in Florence, among others. His research has been recognized with awards from the German Political Science Association, the Swiss Political Science Association and the American Political Science Association, amongst others.
Brazilian philosopher and Kant specialist Prof. Dr. Joel Thiago Klein will conduct research on Kant’s philosophy of law and its current relevance at Goethe University’s Faculty of Philosophy and History. Klein’s project – “LSR – LAW, STATE, REPUBLIC: An Interpretation and Defense of a Kantian Critical Reflective Constructivism” – is based on the premise that new perspectives arising from Kant’s philosophy of law can make a contribution to contemporary normative challenges in political philosophy, to the philosophy of law as well as to political and legal theory. These include, for example, demands placed on the ideal of the rule of law as well as the relationship between the principles of law, history and anthropology. In addition, Klein also outlines new considerations on the legitimacy of property, economic justice and intergenerational justice, cosmopolitanism, human rights and democracy.
Klein’s ERC project, which will receive some €2 million in funding, is part of the manifold research conducted on Kant at Goethe University Frankfurt; there are particularly noteworthy links to the work of renowned Kant researchers Prof. Dr. Marcus Willaschek and Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst.
Joel T. Klein is a professor of modern philosophy, ethics and political philosophy at the Federal University of Paraná (Brazil). He conducts research on Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy and on topics related to democracy, philosophy of law, philosophy of history and theories of justice.
After completing an undergraduate and a master’s degree in philosophy at the Federal University of Santa Maria (2008), Klein obtained his doctorate at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (2012), both in Brazil. He completed his postdoc at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München with an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (2018-2020), and was also a visiting scholar at Goethe University Frankfurt (2023).
Changes or mutations in the genetic code that lead to faulty proteins are not the sole cause of cancer. Given that they are passed on to the daughter cells during cell division, chemical changes in the DNA or the proteins around which the DNA is wound (histones) also influence the activity of genes and – in case errors occur here – can promote the development and growth of malignant cells. As part of her ERC project “EpiTransformers – Targeting epigenetic regulators during leukemia evolution”, Dr. Hannah Uckelmann investigates how such epigenetic changes can turn blood stem cells into leukemia cells. Uckelmann is particularly interested in understanding how cancer cells hijack transport pathways in the cells to switch on genes that promote cancer growth. Her aim is to improve our understanding of epigenetic processes and lay the foundation for new therapeutic approaches to cancer. The ERC Starting Grant comprises around €1.5 million.
Dr. Hannah Uckelmann heads a Max Eder junior research group at Frankfurt University Hospital’s Clinic for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. After graduating from Heidelberg University with a master’s degree in Molecular Biosciences, she completed her doctorate at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. Endowed with a postdoctoral fellowship, Uckelmann then moved to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and taught at Harvard Medical School. She returned to Germany in 2023 with funding from the Mildred Scheel Career Center Frankfurt. As part of the Max Eder Program, Deutsche Krebshilfe – the German Cancer Support Organization – in August 2024 started co-funding her research group, with the ERC Starting Grant funds to be made available in the course of 2025.
The European Research Council’s ERC Consolidator Grant supports excellent, promising researchers whose research group is in the consolidation phase. The grant seeks to enable them to expand their own research area and conduct visionary, basic research. With a funding volume of up to €2 million for five years, the Consolidator Grant is one of the European Union’s most highly endowed individual funding measures.
ERC Starting Grants support excellent researchers who want to build up their own research team in the first few years after their doctorate and establish themselves scientifically with a promising research project. The projects receive up to €1.5 million over a period of up to five years.
The European Research Council (ERC) is an institution set up by the European Commission to fund basic research.
