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Instruct-ERIC R&D Funding Awardees 2025

31-Oct-2025

Instruct-ERIC is delighted to announce the awardees of the latest R&D funding calls.

Between 2013 and 2025, Instruct has provided R&D funding for more than 70 projects, being the catalyst for technical advancement and development in the field of structural biology.

Instruct offers funding for R&D projects through three different calls:

• R&D Pilot Award Scheme
• TechDev Funding
• Industry Co-Fund

R&D Pilot Funding

The R&D Pilot Funding awardees in 2025 are:

• Florian Faßler, IGBMC: Changing Perspectives: On-grid culturing approaches for imaging by (cryo-) light microscopy and cryo-electron tomography
• Anton Popov, EMBL Grenoble: Time resolved bioSAXS experiments utilising in vacuum
• Chiara Marabelli, Università di Pavia: Establishing new workflows in Cryo-ET
• Umut Gunsel, Helmholtz Munich: Facilitating cryo-EM Studies of Small Integral Membrane Proteins

R&D pilot projects are funded up to a maximum of €15,000 – the intent of this support is to help researchers develop external funding for projects, i.e. the expectation is that a pilot study will lead to a grant submission to national or international funding bodies.
The call is open to all topics, but must contain aspects of technology or software development within integrated structural biology, accessing technologies/expertise at one or multiple Instruct centres. This call is specifically aimed at early career researchers as defined in the EU ERC programme.

TechDev Funding

The TechDev Funding awardees in 2025 were:

• Casper Berger, Rosalind Franklin Institute: Machine learning based segmentation of cryo-SEM images
• Arjen Jakobi, Delft University of Technology: Intelligent CryoEM/ET Targeting, Evaluation, and Acquisition

TechDev projects are funded up to a maximum of €30,000 – the call is aimed at researchers with a proven track record in technology and methods development.

The methods and technology development must be within a specific thematic area, which changes with each call. In 2025, the topic was AI tools for Integrated Structural Biology.

Find out more about Instruct's R&D Funding opportunities here, and look out for future calls.

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