GoKawiilEuropean Research Council grant of €2M pushes InnoRenew scientist from lab to leadership
A researcher at Slovenia's InnoRenew Centre of Excellence describes winning a nearly €2 million European Research Council grant to develop self-repairing, UV-protective fungal-biofilm coatings for buildings. The five-year award, secured after a lengthy application and resubmission process, immediately reshaped the scope of her research group's work and her own daily responsibilities, shifting her focus from hands-on experiments toward managing people and projects.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
Large competitive grants like ERC awards often force early-career scientists into unplanned leadership roles, exposing a gap between doctoral training in experimentation and the managerial skills needed to run a funded lab. This account highlights a broader structural issue in academia: success in winning funding can create new demands that institutions rarely prepare researchers for.
- A nearly €2 million ERC grant will fund five years of research into fungal-biofilm building coatings.
- Winning major funding often forces scientists to shift from bench work to team leadership.
- Academic training rarely prepares researchers for the managerial demands that follow large grants.
Source: nature.com — Sandak, 2026-09-18
Published there as: “How research funding took me out of the lab and into leadership”
Read the original report → The summary and analysis above are GoKawiil's own, written from reporting by the source above. Facts and quotes belong to the original publisher.