Early-Career Researchers Awarded 2026 European Research Council Starting Grants

Four University of Oxford researchers have been awarded prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants, each worth €1.5 million over a period of up to five years. Two of the recipients are associated with Trinity College.

The ERC is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. Their Starting Grants, part of the Horizon Europe programme, are designed to support exceptional researchers at the beginning of their careers to develop ambitious ideas, build their own teams and establish their independence at a pivotal stage in their careers. This year, the scheme attracted a record 4,807 proposals, with just 421 (8.8%) of these being funded.

Associate Professor Alison Andrew (Department of Economics). 

Populations in low- and middle-income countries are aging fast, yet access to sizeable pensions is rare. Professor Andrew will use the ERC Starting Grant to study how people in low- and middle-income countries support themselves in old age through their own work and savings, through money and care from family, and through government programs and how these different sources of support fit together. The project combines detailed data on households across eleven countries with a large-scale field experiment built around the rollout of a new pension scheme for informal workers in rural Uganda. The findings will speak to the design of pension and social policies that protect older people while taking into account impacts on families.

“The ERC grant will give me the time, freedom and resources to explore questions that I think are both hugely important and really interesting. It will allow me to build a team to study how people in low- and middle-income countries support themselves in old age - how family support, savings, work and public pensions fit together - and what this means for designing policy as these countries age rapidly.”— Associate Professor Alison Andrew, Department of Economics

Dr Stephen Turton (Faculty of English)

Dr Turton will use his Starting Grant to create a digital edition of the letters of James A. H. Murray, the first chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1879 to 1915. Making the Dictionary would not have been possible without the information Murray received about words, their meanings and their origins from hundreds of scholars, authors and volunteers writing to him from around the world. The largest collection of these letters, over 7,000, is held by the Bodleian Library. The aim of Dr Turton’s project is to transcribe and publish the entire collection, using it to reconstruct and analyse Murray's global web of correspondence through commentaries, maps and network graphs.

“The Oxford English Dictionary remains a monumental work of human collaboration, and Murray's letters reveal the passion, tenacity and comradeship that first brought the dictionary into being. Getting to share the letters with the world through the Starting Grant is an immense privilege.”— Dr Stephen Turton, Faculty of English