Programme · In preparation for the 2027 European calls

One programme, four applications.

Residua is preparing a coordinated bid for European research funding on two streams that do not compete for eligibility: three individual ERC Starting Grants, each a single-investigator frontier project in its own discipline, and JUSTHERITAGE-AI, a Horizon Europe Cluster 2 consortium. The three grants generate distinct frontier methods; the consortium is where those methods meet a shared European problem.

Discuss collaboration Funding context

The through-line

Responsible AI, material evidence, and justice

Across all four applications, one commitment recurs: that artificial intelligence, used as an auditable instrument rather than an oracle, can make the evidence behind consequential claims, about the past, about difference, and about who bears environmental harm, more transparent, more contestable, and fairer.

Residua's three co-directors work both individually and as a team. Each project stands on its own scientific merits, led by one co-director in their home discipline; read together, they express one intellectual programme: Gazmend Elezi's archaeometry supplies a deep-time evidence layer, Oscar J. Mayorga's computational methods supply an accountability engine, and Daniel Y. Zipp's fieldwork supplies an account of how rules are enforced or evaded. The projects are presented here on equal footing.

The four applications

Three frontier grants and one consortium

Public summaries of projects in preparation. Detailed methods, case selection, and partner agreements are being finalised ahead of submission.

ERC Starting GrantPanel SH3

Measuring race in data

Quantitative social science treats racial and ethnic categories as inputs to be measured. This project reconceives them as artefacts to be audited, and builds the first meta-science of racial and ethnic measurement: a systematic account of how much of what we take to be knowledge about ethno-racial inequality is an artefact of measurement and analytic choice rather than of the social world. It treats AI annotation of race as a measurement instrument to be validated, and uses Europe's colour-blind and race-conscious statistical regimes as a natural comparison.

Lead Oscar J. Mayorga · Sociology & computational methods

ERC Starting GrantPanel SH6

COMBA — Computational Biomolecular Archaeology

Biomolecular archaeology can now recover extraordinarily rich molecular information, but interpretation still leans on material-specific traditions and expert assessment, so integration is hard, results are difficult to reproduce, and uncertainty is rarely quantified. COMBA builds an integrated computational framework that combines biomolecular evidence, archaeological expertise, transparent modelling, and explicit uncertainty analysis to reconstruct ancient human behaviour, and develops and validates it on the circulation of Selenicë bitumen across the Adriatic in the Neolithic and Bronze Age. The result is a transferable framework and a new, high-resolution history of one of Europe's oldest documented exchange networks.

Lead Gazmend Elezi · Archaeology & analytical chemistry

ERC Starting GrantPanel SH2

The local environmental state

Environmental law is written at the top and enforced at the bottom, by inspectors and mid-tier officials who exercise discretion far from the ministries that write the rules. This project builds the first comparative ethnography of the local environmental state: a mechanism-level account of how frontline officials implement or quietly defeat environmental law, grounded in direct observation. It extends street-level bureaucracy theory to environmental regulation, and compares a high-capacity authoritarian setting with a European one, so that the mechanics of non-enforcement can be distinguished from the political system they occur in.

Lead Daniel Y. Zipp · Environmental governance & ethnography

Horizon EuropeCluster 2

JUSTHERITAGE-AI

The coordinated consortium project. JUSTHERITAGE-AI asks how cultural heritage, environmental evidence, community knowledge, and responsible AI can be combined to trace the connections that bind Europe's landscapes across place and time, and to support fairer, more transparent decisions about development where those shared inheritances are under pressure. The lower Vjosa valley anchors a European comparative network. Heritage is treated as living tradition; AI as an instrument that must serve communities. Residua is the coordinator and host.

Leads all three directors, with European partners

The signature landscape

The lower Vjosa valley

One place ties the archaeometry grant to the consortium. Selenicë is a distinctive natural bitumen source whose material was traded across the Adriatic from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age, a connection spanning roughly seven millennia. The same deposit is today a working opencast mine, in the valley of the Vjosa, often called the last wild river in Europe and the subject of a major national-park campaign.

Deep-time European connection and present-day environmental harm sit in a single landscape. That is why it anchors both Gazmend Elezi's frontier archaeometry and the consortium's justice-and-accountability work.

The three pillars of the consortium

Evidence — archaeology, environmental chemistry, remote sensing, and community knowledge, led by biomarker-and-isotope archaeometry.
Justice — who bears harm, loss, and exclusion, through environmental-governance and access-to-justice analysis.
Accountability — interpretable, auditable AI for monitoring, impact-assessment review, and participation, under the EU AI Act and community-controlled data governance.

Why a portfolio

Separate bids, one programme

No eligibility clash

ERC and Horizon collaborative calls are separate streams, so each director can lead a Starting Grant and take part in the consortium at the same time. Each backs one ERC bid this cycle.

Frontier first, then scale

Drafting the Starting Grants first sharpens each scientific core before it is scaled, so the consortium inherits three well-defended frontier arguments rather than assembling them from scratch.

One host throughout

Residua Research Institute, a Netherlands stichting, is the host for all four applications and the coordinator of the consortium, resourced with dedicated management support.

Collaborate on the programme

We are building partnerships with universities, laboratories, heritage authorities, and communities across Europe.

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