European Research Council President Steps Down

The founding president of the European Research Council, Fotis C. Kafatos, announced he will give up his position at the agency. Established in 2005, the ERC has a $10 billion budget over six years (2007–2013) for supporting research and investigators in Europe based solely on scientific merit, not on politics, economics, or geography.

Kafatos leaves the scientific arm of the ERC as the agency responds to a report released last summer that slammed the executive arm of the ERC for an "obsolete" management style that caused "conflict and frustration" and was too closely tied to the European Commission. Kafatos, who was previously director-general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, will move to Imperial College, London, to "devote more time to my research laboratory," where he studies immunogenetics, he wrote in a statement.

Kafotos will be remembered for "really getting the ERC going," and for "defending and explaining" the need for the ERC to the European Commission and other stakeholders, says Ernst Ludwig Winnacker, former secretary-general for the ERC and currently secretary general of the Human Frontier Science Program, an international support program for research and training at the frontier of the life sciences.

Scientific strategy and methodology for the ERC is developed by the Scientific Council, which is led by the ERC president and is independent of the European Commission. The day-to-day administration of the funding is left to the executive arm, which is part of the European Commission. Having part of ERC closely tied to a political body is something the independent review committee last year called "the original sin," because it prevents ERC from being entirely autonomous from the commission and its politics.

The next ERC president, who will be elected from the members of the Scientific Council, will need to continue pushing for more independence of ERC from the European Commission, Winnacker notes.