ERC Starting Grants
Three of the Institute's principals each prepare a single-investigator ERC Starting Grant for the 2027 call, evaluated solely on scientific excellence, across the social-sciences and humanities panels SH2, SH3, and SH6.
Funding & Partnerships
Residua is built to apply for and host major competitive research funding. The Institute is preparing a coordinated bid for European funding across two streams that do not compete for eligibility: three individual European Research Council Starting Grants for the 2027 call, and a Horizon Europe Cluster 2 consortium. Residua is the host institution for all four applications, and the coordinator of the consortium.
Target programmes
Three of the Institute's principals each prepare a single-investigator ERC Starting Grant for the 2027 call, evaluated solely on scientific excellence, across the social-sciences and humanities panels SH2, SH3, and SH6.
The Institute coordinates JUSTHERITAGE-AI, a collaborative Cluster 2 Research and Innovation Action, scored on excellence, impact, and implementation, and aligned with our open-science and data-management commitments.
Our work sits naturally within EU programmes on cultural heritage, on environmental justice, and on trustworthy, responsible artificial intelligence, including the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage.
The portfolio
The three Starting Grants generate distinct frontier methods and evidence, each in its own discipline; JUSTHERITAGE-AI is where those methods meet a shared European problem and scale into a policy-facing consortium. The four applications are presented here on equal footing.
An auditable meta-science of how racial and ethnic difference is measured across Europe's statistical regimes, treating AI annotation as a measurement instrument to be validated rather than trusted.
Lead: Oscar J. Mayorga
Computational biomolecular archaeology: a framework that integrates diverse molecular evidence with archaeological knowledge, transparent modelling, and quantified uncertainty to reconstruct ancient human behaviour, validated on the Selenicë bitumen network across the Adriatic.
Lead: Gazmend Elezi
A comparative ethnography of how frontline officials implement or quietly defeat environmental law, extending street-level bureaucracy theory to environmental regulation.
Lead: Daniel Y. Zipp
Responsible AI for environmental justice across Europe's shared cultural landscapes, with the lower Vjosa valley in Albania as the principal living laboratory. Residua as coordinator.
Leads: all three directors, with partners
Eligibility
The ERC and Horizon collaborative streams are separate, so a person can be a Starting Grant principal investigator and a JUSTHERITAGE-AI participant at once. A researcher may be principal investigator on only one ERC application per call year, so each of the three principals backs a Starting Grant this cycle. All three sit inside the ten-year post-PhD window for the 2027 Starting Grant call.
At a glance
Host & coordinator readiness
Establishing Residua as an operational Netherlands stichting, able to sign the ERC and Horizon commitments by submission, is a shared, load-bearing dependency for the whole strategy. For the consortium, the Institute pairs its own coordination with an experienced established partner and dedicated management support, so that the coordinator role does not rest on any one principal.
Foundations in place
Partnerships
Residua works through a network of universities, laboratories, heritage authorities, and communities. The consortium is built around genuine European fieldwork and laboratory partnerships, with candidate collaborators mapped from existing Cluster 2 heritage projects and from the École française d'Athènes and Strasbourg networks.
Named partners, including an Albanian host or faculty lead for the living-lab work and an environmental-law partner, are being developed and will be confirmed before submission.
Work with us