ERC awards U. Porto top researcher with a 2 million euro Consolidator Grant
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ERC provides long-term funding to support excellent investigators and their research teams to pursue groundbreaking, high-gain/high-risk research, and scientific excellence is the sole criterion on the basis of which European Research Council (ERC) grants are awarded.
For five years, Rita Covas will lead her research in the African savannah, with the goal of studying the relationships between species and the way they cooperate.
UP researcher Rita Covas will base her project on the behavioural study of the sociable weaver (Philetairus socius), which is a species of bird in the weaver family that is endemic to southern Africa. Their range is centred within the Northern Cape Province of South Africa. They build large compound community nests, a rarity among birds.
"Cooperation is intriguing, under the evolutionary viewpoint, as cooperation is beneficial to the group, but it brings costs to the collaborator, as an individual; however, cooperation is common in nature, and we are talking micro-organisms and human societies. Understanding what enables evolution and maintaining cooperation is a fundamental issue regarding evolutionary biology", explains Rita Covas.
"By studying these birds, we will test the hypothesis that the preference for more cooperative partners can lead to evolution and cooperation stability", the researcher concludes.
Rita Covas, is also Research Associate at the University of Cape Town, South Africa and this Consolidator Grant by the ERC acknowledges the work that she and her team have been developing for the past decade. Moreover, "the grant will allow hiring students, postdocs and technicians, and buying equipment, namely cameras, computers, a vehicle for the work field in South Africa and also all the general overheads of the project", concludes the UP alumna.
In total, the European Research Council has granted 301 Consolidator Grants this year, which amounts to approximately 600 million funding, allocated to scientists and top researchers, of 37 countries and institutions in 24 European countries.
It is worth mentioning that besides CIBIO-InBIO researcher, Rita Covas, the Consolidator grants have been awarded to Susana Coelho, former Biology student of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto (FCUP) and current researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), in France.
Since its inception, in 2007, the ERC's Consolidator Grants have already funded projects by circa 34 Portuguese scientists or foreign researchers working in Portugal.