Bist Career week – Workshop: ERC Starting Grants

Stewe Bekk MSc is a grant advisor with 12 years of experience in handling and soliciting research projects at three top research Institutes in Barcelona: IDIBAPS, ICN2 and ICFO. For eight years he was the coordinator of the Pre-award unit at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), one of the most successful Spanish research institutes in the H2020 Framework Programme. In this role he oversaw the review of more than 1,000 scientific proposals targeting a range of local, national, European, and other international competitive research funding calls.

Stewe specifically helped to prepare and review over 60 ERC proposals during his time at ICFO, with one of the highest success rates in Europe for an institute of similar size. Thanks to this experience and track-record, Stewe has a comprehensive overview of the ERC programmes´ aim, focus, function and evaluation criteria. He now runs his own consultancy, BekkResearchSupport, which focuses on in-depth grant preparation services for the ERC calls and the physical sciences and engineering communities.

Malte Beringer, PhD, is a grant advisor, scientific editor and founder of SciencePoint, a consultancy providing tailored grant preparation services to the biomedical community. Malte holds a PhD in Biochemistry and has more than 15 years of professional experience in the molecular life sciences. During his successful career as a researcher in top-class laboratories at the University of Witten/Herdecke (Germany), The Wistar Institute, Philadelphia (USA) and at the CRG, Barcelona (Spain), he gained extensive hands-on experience in scientific writing and grant writing.

As a grant consultant, he applies this expertise to support individual scientists and institutions prepare competitive grant proposals. Since 2018, he has been focusing on the most prestigious of all European funding schemes, the European Research Council (ERC), while also supporting collaborative proposals within the H2020/HEurope and national funding programmes. Among his clients are world renowned scientists working at Max-Planck Institute (Germany), CNIO (Spain), HiTS (Germany), IMDEA Nanociencia (Spain), The Arctic University/EMBL Nordic Partnership (Norway) among others, and he has consulted clients from Belgium, Germany, Norway, Spain, UK and the US.