“Like going to the moon... it’s the travel that matters” 

Maurizio Corbetta is Professor of Neurology at the University of Padua and Director of the Neurological Clinic at the Azienda Ospedaliera in Padua. He is also one of the Principal Investigators in a research project that addresses one of the most critical issues of clinical neuroscience: rehabilitation after a neurological damage, caused for example by a stroke or other pathologies. This research project, which Corbetta leads along with researchers from Milan and Barcelona, was awarded an ERC Synergy Grant in 2022.

Before moving to Padua in 2016, he spent 30 years in the United States. “I guess I am one of the few “returning brains”. I was comfortable with my job, I had a nice life, but the homing gene kicks in at some point in your life”.

The chance to answer this nostalgic call opened up as a Chair in Neurology in Padua became available: “In the Italian system most people are promoted from the inside, very rarely people are actually recruited from outside, so this was a unique opportunity to try to come back to Italy and do something here”.

Since the beginning, Maurizio Corbetta proposed to develop a center to study the brain in Padua, where there is a long tradition of anatomy, physiology and molecular biology. “But systems neuroscience, which is what I do, that is studying the brain as a whole, was divided among different departments”. This is why the Padua Neuroscience Center was founded as a university center. In 2018 a new PhD programme in neuroscience was created too.

Getting an ERC Synergy Grant is no easy task, but Maurizio Corbetta was well trained. “During my stay in the US I lived my life, my lab life and my family life supporting myself on individual grants from the NIH (National Institutes of Health), so I have a lot of experience in doing grants”.

According to Prof. Corbetta, it is quite common in Europe to have consortia with multiple universities collaborating. “But most of the time everybody does their own things, you come together for the money but then very rarely you get a solid scientific collaboration”.

“We really had four investigators, all looking at the same thing. They have been collaborating before, and everybody got to a point where you needed the other one to move along. I’ve worked together with Gustavo Deco, who is a physicist in Barcelona, for ten years. Marcello Masimini in Milan worked with Mavi Sanchez-Vivez in Barcelona for another ten years. And now the two of us needed the other two, so we came together and we became friends. We’ve been talking about this grant for about a year before we wrote it. We had to submit it twice and this time we got scored very highly and we got the grant”.

True exchange of expertise and ideas among the investigators is really key to the Synergy Grant. “The four pillars of the proposal are really intersecting. I think this is the key of the Synergy Grant: you cannot pretend you are interacting, you really need to interact. I do not have skills that Marcello in Milan has or Gustavo in Barcelona has, I have never done animal research on mice, but now we are setting up an animal lab in Padua to work with Mavi in Barcelona. I’m starting to do something I have never done before, it’s really exciting”.

A suggestion to those who want to submit a proposal: “I think it is important to spend together the last weeks: we locked ourselves in a hotel for about a week and we prepared the interview very intensely, living together, eating together, talking science 24 hours”.

The great thing about this kind of grant is they really allow you to work together. The bad thing is they are a bit of a shoot in the sky: “you shoot for the moon, you have this revolutionary concept to get the money. We are proposing something that is very innovative, technologically very challenging. It’s like going to the moon, but it’s the travel that matters. Are we going to get to the moon? I don’t know. Are we going to cure post-stroke deficits? We’ll see. But I think in the process we are going to learn a lot. We have six years, we’re planning a lot of activities, even a movie on how the project has come up and is developing: we have cameras in all our labs. Maybe we’re going to Venice Film festival with this documentary, we’ll see”.

The ERC Synergy Grant is designed to support projects addressing a research problem so ambitious that it requires a team of 2-4 Principal Investigators (PIs) to address it. PIs have to work together and bring different skills and resources to tackle ambitious research problems. The criterion of evaluation takes on the additional meaning of outstanding intrinsic synergetic effect.
Synergy Grants can be up to a maximum of € 10 million for a period of 6 years.