Andrew Weller awarded an ERC Advanced Grant

Posted on Tuesday 29 July 2025

The ERC Advanced Grants competition, part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, is one of the most prestigious and competitive funding schemes in the EU. It gives senior researchers the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs. This year, the competition attracted 2,534 proposals, which were reviewed by panels of internationally renowned researchers. Only 11 % of proposals were selected for funding.

President of the European Research Council, Professor Maria Leptin said: "Congratulations to the new grant winners! Much of this pioneering research will contribute to solving some of the most pressing challenges we face - social, economic and environmental, etc."

Professor Weller’s ERC project, PRECISION SMOM, addresses the problem of how to synthesise, and then deploy, highly active molecular organometallic catalytic species for a wide range of chemical transformations, without the solvent solution that is commonly used quenching reactivity at the mental centre. It does this by exploiting the Solid-state Molecular OrganoMetallic (SMOM) methods pioneered by Weller; where synthesis, reactivity and catalysis occur in crystallo using precisely-defined molecular single-crystals in solid/gas processes; focussing on selective and efficient processes for a range of challenging but widely applicable chemical transformations. The ethos of the approach is that “If the problem is the solution, then the solution is to remove the solution!”. 

The grant involves an ongoing collaboration with Professor Stuart Macgregor and his team at the University of St Andrews, who are developing with Professor Weller the computational modelling approaches to understand this unique approach to synthesis and reactivity.