Kafatos Exits European Research Post

The founding president of the European Research Council, Fotis C. Kafatos, announced he will give up his position at the agency. Established in 2005, ERC currently has a $10 billion budget from 2007 to 2013 for supporting research and investigators in Europe based solely on scientific merit, not on politics, economics, or geography. Kafatos, who was previously director-general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, in Heidelberg, Germany, will return to Imperial College London to "devote more time to my research laboratory," where he studies immunogenetics, he wrote in a statement. Kafatos will be remembered for "really getting ERC going" and for "defending and explaining" the need for ERC to the European Commission and other stakeholders, says Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, former secretary-general for 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.