[{Image src='Leptin_Maria_small.jpg' caption='' height='400' alt='Maria Leptin' class='image_left'}]
!!Professor Maria Leptin appointed as the incoming President of the European Research Council 

The __Trustees of the Academia__ are pleased to announce that our member, [Professor Maria Leptin|Member/Leptin_Maria], member of the [Biochemistry and Molecular Biology section|Acad_Main/Sections/Biochemistry_molecular_biology] and elected to the Academy in 1998, has been appointed as the next President of the [European Research Council|https://erc.europa.eu] (from October 1st).
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Professor Leptin will succeed [Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon|Member/Bourguignon_Jean-Pierre], member of the [Mathematics section|Acad_Main/Sections/Mathematics] of Academia Europaea who is currently President of the ERC. 

!European Research Council

The ERC's mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields, on the basis of scientific excellence.
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The ERC aims to:

*Support the best of the best in Europe across all fields of science, scholarship and engineering
*Promote wholly investigator-driven, or 'bottom-up' frontier research
*Encourage the work of the established and next generation of independent top research leaders in Europe
*Reward innovative proposals by placing emphasis on the quality of the idea rather than the research area
*Raise the status and visibility of European frontier research and the very best researchers of today and tomorrow