Tel Aviv University leads in ERC grants for 2026
The European Research Council announced the winners of the prestigious grant, and a leading academic institution in the country took first place thanks to breakthrough developments in the fields of medicine, physics, and artificial intelligence.
An extraordinary achievement for Israeli academia: Tel Aviv University leads this year in the number of wins for the prestigious ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council for 2026. The grant is intended for promising researchers at the beginning of their academic careers, with the goal of promoting breakthrough research in a variety of scientific fields.
The five winners from Tel Aviv University will develop projects at the forefront of science. Dr. Ran Finkelstein from the School of Physics and Astronomy is developing a new quantum processor based on trapped atoms. Dr. Sharon Fleischer is developing an innovative 'heart-on-a-chip' model with active biological clocks for studying heart diseases. Dr. Amit Vinograd will investigate how the brain creates and shapes emotional states, and Dr. Michael Chapman is combining pure mathematics with quantum information theory to solve open problems.
In the field of computer science and artificial intelligence, Dr. Or Zamir will examine the running times of algorithms for solving complex problems. His research explains:
"In his current research, for which he received the ERC grant, Dr. Zamir seeks to understand the exact running time required to solve difficult computational problems."
While classical complexity theory distinguishes mainly between problems that can be solved efficiently and those that are considered computationally difficult, the research seeks to sharpen the picture and determine how much algorithms for difficult problems can be accelerated, what the structure of their most difficult cases is, and whether the degree of difficulty of computational problems considered easy is equivalent to that of problems considered difficult.
