The European Research Council (ERC) announced today the names of the successful applicants for the prestigious ERC Starting Grant scheme. A total of 408 young scientific talents will share a total of €636 million in funding. Such significant investment will enable excellent researchers at the start of their scientific careers to launch their own projects, set up teams, and realise their promising ideas. Elżbieta Drążkiewicz from the Institute of Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, v. v. i. succeeded with the project on conspiracy theories among the 2932 submitted proposals.

E. Drążkiewicz’s project, Conflicts over conspiracy theories, aims to analyse the growing tensions related to conspiracy theories in Europe. It seeks to understand how these conflicts are influenced by social contexts and how they develop in different European settings.

So far, two ERC grants have been awarded to research in Slovakia under the ERC Starting Grant and ERC Proof of Concept Grant schemes. The holder of both grants was nanobiotechnologist Ján Tkáč from the Institute of Chemistry of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, v. v. i.

Applying for ERC calls is preceded by several months of detailed project preparation, which is then subjected to rigorous evaluation. In Slovakia, the Horizon National Office assists the scientific community with the demanding process. Institutional support in applying for prestigious European grants is also available to researchers at the SAS, who can use the services of the EU Project Support Office established at the SAS Office.

Elżbieta Drążkiewicz holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge. She is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, v. v. i., and occasionally teaches at the University of Vienna. In 2014-2016 she was a Maria Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Maynooth University in Ireland, where she also held the position of Associate Professor. Her current research focuses on conspiracy theories. She is the Principal Investigator of the CHASE REDACT project, which analyses how digitalisation shapes the form, content, and consequences of conspiracy theories, and the leader of the APVV PanTruth project, which analyses the conspiracy environment in the Visegrad Four countries. In addition to research on conflicts over truth, Dr. Drążkiewicz also researches democratic participation and the world of NGOs. She is the author of Institutionalized Dreams: the art of foreign aid management (Berghahn, 2020). 

Published on 22.11.2022. This article is taken from the official website of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. The author of the article is Katarína Gáliková.