The University of Pisa has secured two ERC Starting Grants in the 2026 call. The grants have been awarded to Alice Cortinovis, a researcher in the University’s Department of Computer Science, and Daniele Guerci, currently a professor at William & Mary in the United States. Thanks in part to more than €1 million in additional funding made available by the ERC specifically for this purpose, Guerci will be able to return permanently to Europe and carry out his project at the University of Pisa.
Starting Grants are awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) to researchers in the early stages of their careers and provide funding of up to €1.5 million over five years.
Alice Cortinovis received the grant for her project “COSE – Robust and reliable low-rank approximation and dimension reduction with COlumn subset SElection”, which focuses on developing new mathematical and computational methods to extract information from large volumes of data in an efficient, interpretable and reliable way. After graduating in Mathematics from the University of Pisa while also studying at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Cortinovis obtained her PhD from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and, before returning to Pisa in 2024, taught at Stanford University.
Daniele Guerci received an ERC Starting Grant for “STORM – Superconductivity in Time-reversal broken ORbital Magnetic matter”, a project investigating how magnetism and topological phases can foster new forms of superconductivity. A theoretical condensed-matter physicist, Guerci has worked at SISSA, Université de Paris, the Flatiron Institute and MIT.
“I chose the University of Pisa,” said Guerci, “because it offers an outstanding research environment for condensed-matter physics, with complementary expertise and students who are exceptionally well prepared to tackle advanced research problems. It is the ideal setting in which to develop STORM, build a competitive research group and foster new collaborations between theory, numerical simulations and experiments on quantum materials.”
“Two ERC Starting Grants in the 2026 call represent a major achievement for the University of Pisa and confirm the quality of the research our University conducts at European level,” said Rector Riccardo Zucchi. “ERC grants are among the most prestigious and competitive sources of research funding in Europe: they reward scientific excellence, but above all the courage to explore new ideas and open up new frontiers of knowledge. The fact that this recognition has gone to young researchers makes the achievement even more significant: it gives them the opportunity, at a decisive stage in their careers, to establish their own independent and ambitious lines of research. Their success is a source of pride for our entire community.”
