The European Young Investigator (EURYI) Awards scheme was a prestigious research award designed to attract outstanding young scientists in all research fields to the European research landscape. It was set up by the European Heads of Research Councils (EuroHORCs) and the European Science Foundation together as a grant scheme for researchers from any country in the world to create their own research teams at research institutions in any country in

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...

participating in the scheme. Awards were worth up to 1.25 Million Euros, to be spent over a period of five years. It was meant to attract the strongest scientists, irrespective of age and gender. It had a two stage selection process. In a first step, the applications were assessed by the participating organisation from the proposed host country. The second selection step was carried out by the European Science Foundation, involving interviews in front of broadly-based international panels, and resulted in the final selection of awardees. The first 25 prizes were awarded on 26 August 2004 as the EURYI Awards 2005 during the

EuroScience EuroScience (the founding organisation of ESOF, EuroScience Open Forum) is a pan-European grassroots organisation for the support and promotion of science and technology in Europe. The membership of EuroScience consists of individuals interested in ...

Open Forum (ESOF) in Stockholm by the then president of the EuroHORCs, Professor

Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker (born 26 July 1941 in Frankfurt) is a German geneticist, biochemist and research manager. His main fields of research are virus/cell interaction, the mechanisms of gene expression in higher cells and prion diseases. He was ...

. The scheme was born out of the wish to allow the best researchers to build careers in Europe. The co-initiating institution EuroHORCS, founded in 1992 and dissolved in 2011 and succeeded by

Science Europe Science Europe is an association of major research funding organisations (RFOs) and research performing organisations (RPOs). It was established in October 2011 and is based in Brussels. The association facilitates co-operation among its member ...

, was an association of 18 research organisations from 15 European countries, all of which being members of the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been de ...

at the time expect Switzerland and

Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with a small portion on the Balkan Peninsula in ...

.. The EURYI Award was the blueprint for the much larger ERC Grant scheme, initiated in 2007 within the Seventh Framework Programme, with Professor Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, the initiator of the EURYI Award, being the ERC's first Secretary General. The EURYI Award 2007 was the last EURYI award granted, being replaced by the ERC scheme.

References

European science and technology awards {{Sci-award-stub