Professor Alex Scott awarded ERC Grant

Professor Alex Scott has been awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) grant.

The ERC Advanced Grants competition, part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, is one of the most 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 Scott’s project will develop new methods for understanding the structure of graphs and networks. It will ask how local patterns in large, complex networks can be identified, combined and interpreted to reveal global structure, even when the data are noisy or only approximate. The work will address long-standing mathematical problems such as the Erdős-Hajnal Conjecture and help lay the groundwork for coarse graph theory, a new field focused on the large-scale geometry of graphs.

Commenting on the award, Professor Scott said:

“I’m delighted that the ERC has decided to fund this project, showing their support for fundamental mathematical research. I am very excited to have the time and resources to pursue this work, alongside a team of talented students and postdocs.”