6.5 million euros in Starting Grants awarded to Stockholm University
Three research projects hosted by Stockholm University have been awarded ERC Starting Grants by the European Research Council (ERC). In total, the grants amount to approximately 6.5 million euros for research in fields including economics, sociology and meteorology.
Maria Rugenstein, Rosa Weber and Jósef Sigurdsson have been awarded ERC Starting Grants by the European Research Council (ERC). Photo: Ken Caldeira, private and Johanna Säll
How does migration affect people’s opportunities to improve their lives? What shapes people’s economic success? Can we trust today’s climate models? These are research questions chosen by the European Research Council in 2026.
A total of 421 researchers across Europe have been awarded Starting Grants, including 22 in Sweden. In a highly competitive process, three of these grants have been awarded to researchers affiliated with Stockholm University, two of them will be conducted here.
Learn more about the research projects:
How does migration affect opportunities across generations?
The research project aims to improve our understanding of how migration influences social mobility in Europe and North America. By linking immigrants’ situation in the destination country with their family background at origin, the research will examine how factors such as religion, visible minority status and return migration affect people’s opportunities in life. The goal is to gain a better understanding of how advantages and disadvantages are passed on from one generation to the next.
Rosa Weber, Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Stockholm University
Project title: (Dis)advantage Across Countries and Generations: Intergenerational Social Mobility in Immigrant Families
Grant amount: €1,499,425
Read more about Rosa Weber’s research
What shapes people’s economic success?
This project studies how inherited traits and the environments in which people grow up jointly shape economic outcomes, and how the transmission of advantage changes as societies develop. A central question is whether supportive environments offset differences associated with inherited traits or amplify them.
The project also takes a long historical perspective, examining how economic development and structural change affect the persistence of advantages and opportunities for upward mobility. Together with collaborators, Sigurdsson will draw on rich historical and modern data from Iceland to study families and economic outcomes across many generations.
The broader aim is to understand the origins of economic success and identify the conditions that help people realize their potential and prevent disadvantages from compounding across generations.
Jósef Sigurdsson, Associate Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, Stockholm University
Project title: The Nature and Nurture of Economic Success
Grant amount: €1,496,761
Read more about Jósef Sigurdsson’s research
Jósef Sigurdsson receives ERC Starting Grant
Can we trust climate model projections?
The research project will investigate the relationship between two key factors setting global mean temperatures: ocean heat uptake and radiative feedbacks. The aim is to improve understanding of both global climate processes and the regional mechanisms that drive them.
Maria Rugenstein, Associate Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University
Project title: Constraining Projections of Global Climate Change by Understanding the Interplay of Ocean Heat Uptake and Radiative Feedbacks
The research will be carried out at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany.
Grant amount: €3,497,447
Read more about Maria Rugenstein’s research
ERC Starting Grant
The ERC Starting Grant is a research funding scheme from the European Research Council (ERC) for outstanding early-career researchers. It supports ambitious, innovative research and helps researchers establish independent research programmes.
The number of applications continues to grow, and this year’s success rate was 8.8 percent.
See the full list of grant recipients 2026
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Last updated: 2026-09-07
Source: Communications Office