Catarina Homem, group leader of the Proliferation and Fate Regulation of Stem Cells Lab received a prestigious European Research Council Grant in the value of 1.7 million euros to pursue her research into the regulation of neuronal stem cells. 

“We focus on how stem cells are regulated throughout development and how developmental progression, metabolism of the animal and the cell itself, influence stem cells proliferation and forming more differentiate cells.” Catarina Homem Lab uses the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model to study all of these questions. 

This highly competitive funding in the category of ERC Starting Grant will allow Catarina to develop her work for a period of five years and follow all the results without restrictions. “This will really allow me to pursue all my research questions without worrying about funding.”

The mission of the European Research Council (ERC) is to promote the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields. The aim is to recognise outstanding ideas in Europe conferring status and visibility to the best brains in all areas. The ERC Starting Grants is a category for talented early-career scientist who has already produced excellent supervised work and is ready to be a research leader. 

Catarina Homem holds a Gulbenkian PhD Programme in Biomedicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States of America. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna, Austria and, currently, is a Principal Investigator at CEDOC-NMS|FCM where she coordinates the Proliferation and Fate Regulation of Stem Cells Lab.

The press release can be found in the News Section here.