Trinity Fellow Professor Ewa Paluch receives ERC Synergy Grant

Trinity Fellow Professor Ewa Paluch of the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience has won a 2025 Synergy Grant from the European Research Council (ERC), one of five awarded to seven Cambridge academics.

Synergy Grants, part of the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, enable collaboration between researchers across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, bringing their combined expertise, skills and resources to tackle some of science’s toughest challenges.

This year’s grants total Euros 684 million to 66 research teams, bringing together 239 scientists across many disciplines.

Professor Paluch and Daniel St Johnston, Professor of Developmental Genetics in the Gurdon Institute and Department of Genetics, will partner with Professor Sara Wickström of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster.

The multidisciplinary team will investigate how cells build, maintain, and remodel their shapes. This is because every human cell has a distinctive shaped linked to its function – and cells often become misshaped in disease.

The team’s focus will be on the epithelia – the protective layers lining our organs – aiming to reveal how biology and physics come together to shape cells and tissues.

Lead Principal Investigator, Professor Paluch (pictured above) said jointly writing the grant application had been ‘extremely exciting.’

We come from different backgrounds but share a common interest in how cells and tissues acquire and maintain their shapes. Having the right shape is crucial for every part of our body, and it is also true at the cellular level.

In fact, cell shape is often used in medical diagnostics: defects in cellular shapes are a key feature pathologists look for when they assess a tissue biopsy for cancer or inflammatory disease.

Yet, we still have a very poor understanding of how cells control their shapes. This is in great part because the shape of a cell is the result of physical forces acting on the cell membrane. So understanding cell shape requires cross-disciplinary collaborative approaches at the interface of physics and biology.

Professor Paluch said the collaborative ERC Synergy grant provided an ideal framework for such cross-disciplinary studies.