For Starting Grants, applicants should choose the ERC evaluation panel that best matches the proposed research.
The practical question is not simply where your current job title or publication history fits. It is:
Which panel is most likely to understand the central scientific breakthrough you are proposing?
ERC guidance also allows genuinely interdisciplinary proposals to indicate a secondary panel and use keywords from other panels where appropriate. The proposal remains discussed in the primary panel.
Official source: ERC guidance on evaluation panel choice
Choose for the proposed breakthrough
A physicist can submit a project whose decisive scientific contribution is computational. An engineer can propose work whose real breakthrough is biological. A social scientist can develop a method with substantial data-science content.
The panel should follow the proposal's central contribution.
Ask:
- What is the main scientific claim?
- Which community would immediately understand why that claim matters?
- Which panel contains the expertise most likely to evaluate the underlying question fairly?
- Where does the proposal's largest intellectual advance sit?
This is more useful than matching the panel to your department name.
Read the panel descriptors and keywords
Panel descriptors help applicants understand the scope of each ERC panel.
Use them actively.
Map:
- the central question;
- the key methods;
- the scientific system;
- the expected breakthrough;
against the relevant descriptors.
The proposal may span several descriptors, but there should usually be one clear centre of gravity.
Interdisciplinary does not mean "choose everything"
A project can be genuinely interdisciplinary and still need a primary panel.
The primary panel should be the place where the proposal's central scientific value is most legible.
A secondary panel can help signal that expertise from another domain may be needed.
Use that option when the second field is scientifically essential, not simply because the project mentions methods from another discipline.
For example, using machine learning does not automatically make an experimental physics proposal a computer-science proposal.
The question is where the breakthrough lies.
Panel choice should influence explanation, not scientific content
Do not distort the research to fit a panel.
Instead, make sure the proposal explains concepts at the right level for expert generalists in that panel at Step 1.
If your proposal sits near a boundary, define specialised terms early and show why the question matters in language the primary panel can evaluate.
This is particularly important in Part I, where panel members act as generalists and only see the five-page scientific proposal together with the CV and Track Record.
Do not chase perceived success rates
ERC guidance notes that panel budget allocation is proportional to the total budget requested in submitted proposals, with the aim of comparable success rates across panels.
Choosing a panel because it looks less crowded is therefore not a useful strategy.
Choose the scientific home of the proposal.
Use the title and abstract as a panel test
Give the title and short summary to a knowledgeable researcher outside your exact field.
Ask:
Which scientific community would you expect to review this?
If the answer differs strongly from your intended panel, inspect the proposal framing.
Sometimes the panel choice is wrong. Sometimes the scientific contribution is simply not visible enough.
Both are worth fixing early.
Consider reviewer expertise
At Step 2, external reviewers may add specialist expertise. The primary panel still matters because it owns the discussion and final evaluation.
That means the proposal must work at two levels:
- clear enough for the panel to understand the intellectual stakes;
- technically deep enough for specialists to assess the evidence and approach.
A good panel choice makes both levels easier.
A five-question panel test
- Where is the project's largest scientific breakthrough?
- Which panel would immediately understand why that breakthrough matters?
- Are the most relevant descriptors concentrated in one panel?
- Does a secondary panel add genuinely necessary expertise?
- Can Part I explain the project clearly to generalists in the primary panel?
The correct panel is the one that gives the central scientific question its most natural expert context.