The ERC Starting Grant is evaluated in two steps. The important strategic point is that the two steps do not ask the proposal to do exactly the same job.
At Step 1, panel members assess Part I together with the CV and Track Record. At Step 2, the complete proposal is assessed with input from panel members and remote reviewers, followed by the interview. Excellence is the sole evaluation criterion. The project is assessed primarily for its ground-breaking nature and ambition, while the PI is assessed for intellectual capacity, creativity and the scientific expertise needed to execute the programme.
Official sources: ERC Starting Grant, ERC evaluation process webinar.
Step 1 is a selection on scientific promise
Step 1 is the point at which the proposal must establish that the scientific idea deserves full evaluation.
Panel members see Part I and the CV/Track Record. They do not rely on Part II to rescue a weak scientific case. The five pages of Part I therefore need to make the central question, the field-level importance, the novelty of the idea and the intended advance easy to understand.
My practical interpretation is simple:
At Step 1, the reviewer should understand why this question is important before they need the details of how every experiment will be run.
A technically careful proposal can still fail if the intellectual reason for funding it is not visible.
Step 2 tests the complete research programme
Proposals retained from Step 1 move to a full evaluation.
The complete scientific proposal is assessed, including Part II, the resources and the rest of the application. Remote reviewers can add specialist expertise. The panel then interviews the PI before reaching the final decision.
This is where methodology, work plan, feasibility, resources, dependencies and risk handling become central.
The question changes from:
Is this a sufficiently important and original scientific idea?
into:
Can this PI lead a rigorous programme capable of producing interpretable answers to that question?
Panel members and remote reviewers play different roles
ERC panel members are established scientists and scholars selected by the ERC Scientific Council. They collectively cover the breadth of the panel and act as expert generalists across the proposals assigned to them.
At Step 2, external remote reviewers may provide more specialised scientific expertise.
This has an important writing consequence.
Part I should be intelligible to excellent scientists who understand the field broadly but may not work on your exact sub-problem. Part II can support greater technical depth because specialist expertise enters more strongly at Step 2.
That does not mean simplifying the science. It means making the scientific logic visible before introducing every technical detail.
The interview pool is deliberately limited
ERC panels can conduct a maximum of 44 interviews at Step 2 in a given evaluation. This is a practical limit on what a panel can interview within the available time.
As a result, a proposal can be judged excellent at Step 1 yet still not be invited if it falls below the interview cut-off within the panel. The current process includes an "A not invited" outcome for this situation.
That makes Step 1 highly competitive even among strong proposals.
The lesson is not to make the proposal louder. The lesson is to make the scientific value easier to see.
What reviewers need to understand quickly
A reviewer should be able to answer these questions after reading Part I:
- What is the central scientific question?
- Why does the question matter to the field?
- What prevents the field from answering it today?
- What is new about the proposed concept or hypothesis?
- Why is the potential payoff larger than an incremental improvement?
- Why is this PI ready to lead the programme?
If any of these answers require reconstruction from several pages of text, the proposal is asking the reviewer to do part of the author's job.
Evaluation is not a keyword-matching exercise
Applicants sometimes write as if success depends on mirroring a call text or including every fashionable concept.
ERC is investigator-driven frontier research. The proposal is not scored against a thematic policy checklist in the way many collaborative Horizon Europe proposals are.
The scientific case needs coherence. A proposal that includes AI, interdisciplinarity, sustainability, data science and a large team without a clear central question is not made stronger by the number of modern terms it contains.
The proposal needs one scientific spine.
Ground-breaking nature and ambition are not the same as complexity
A proposal can be complex and still be incremental.
A cleaner way to think about ERC ambition is to ask how far the project moves the field intellectually.
- Does it test a new explanation?
- Does it challenge an accepted limit?
- Does it make a previously inaccessible measurement possible?
- Does it establish a framework that changes how a problem is approached?
- Does it open a new class of questions?
The project should not be difficult merely because many things need to happen. It should be difficult because the scientific question is worth answering and the answer is not known.
The PI is evaluated in relation to career stage
The ERC does not expect a Starting Grant applicant to look like an Advanced Grant applicant.
The panel assesses the PI in relation to career stage and considers whether the applicant has demonstrated the scientific expertise, creativity and independence needed to execute the proposed programme.
This is why the CV and Track Record should explain contribution rather than relying on publication count alone.
A useful question is:
Does the record make it credible that this researcher can now lead this particular programme?
That is more important than attempting to look senior for the sake of it.
How I would prepare for the evaluation process
I would prepare the proposal in the same order in which scientific confidence needs to be built.
First: make the scientific question unavoidable
The reader should understand the problem and why it matters.
Second: make the conceptual leap visible
State what is new. A figure can help if it compresses the logic better than prose.
Third: show the programme is capable of discriminating between outcomes
This belongs primarily in Part II.
Fourth: make the PI-project fit explicit
The CV should support the programme rather than sit beside it as an unrelated list of achievements.
Fifth: prepare for the interview while writing
If you cannot explain the project in a short presentation and defend its assumptions under questioning, parts of the proposal may still be conceptually unresolved.
A proposal should survive more than one reading style
Different reviewers will enter the proposal differently.
One may start from the abstract and figures. Another may inspect the objectives first. A specialist may go directly to methodology. A panel member may focus initially on the big idea.
The proposal should remain coherent under all of these reading paths.
That is one reason I prefer strong conceptual figures, explicit scientific questions and objectives written around knowledge rather than activities. They create stable anchors across the document.
Current 2027 timeline
The ERC's published timeframe for Starting Grant 2027 indicates:
- interview invitations: February/March 2027;
- Step 1 results for non-retained applicants: April/May 2027;
- Step 2 interviews: from the end of May to mid-June 2027;
- Step 2 results: August 2027.
These dates are preliminary and may change. Use the official ERC timeframe page for updates.
Official source: ERC Starting Grant 2027 evaluation timeframe.
Final point
The evaluation process rewards clarity because scientific judgement has to happen under limited time and across many excellent applications.
My preferred test is:
Can a strong scientist understand the question, the intellectual leap and the possible change to the field without having to excavate them from the proposal?
If yes, the proposal is giving the panel a fair chance to evaluate the science you actually want them to see.