ERC Starting Grant for Dr Gerrit Poelarends

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a Starting Grant to Dr G.J. Poelarends of the department of Pharmaceutical Biology. The ERC Starting Grant is a prestigious European research grant for individual researchers conducting innovative research. Poelarends has been awarded EUR 2 million, which will enable him to appoint five assistants for a period of five years.

Poelarends’ research concentrates on the development of new enzymes that can be used to manufacture drugs. These new enzymes, tautomerases, have extraordinary catalytic properties due to their unique structure.

Together with the ERC Starting Grants awarded to Prof. Andreas Herrmann, Prof. Amina Helmi and Dr Andrey Baryshev, the number of grants received by the University of Groningen has risen to four. This is the highest number of ERC Starting Grants awarded to a Dutch university in the last series.