Professor Aditi Lahiri receives a record third ERC Advanced Grant

26 April 2022
Aditi Lahiri

Professor Aditi Lahiri of the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics is one of only four Oxford researchers to have been awarded a major European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant, it has been announced today.

The prestigious grants have been made after a highly competitive process. Just 14% of applications were successful this year: only 253 researchers across Europe and other territories, received awards out of more than 1,700 proposals.

Incredibly, this is a record third ERC Advanced Grant for Professor Lahiri, in addition to two further ERC awards.

Professor Dan Grimley, Head of Oxford’s Humanities Division, says: 'I’m thrilled to be able to congratulate Professor Lahiri on the award of a fifth prestigious grant from the European Research Council. This international recognition is testimony not only to Professor Lahiri’s ground-breaking work, but also to her leadership in such an important and significant area of Linguistics research.'

Professor Lahiri, who founded Oxford’s Department of Linguistics, will receive her award for a study of pertinacity. She points out that natural languages change in time. Nevertheless, this project takes the challenging view that phonology is pertinacious and changes in existing phonological systems are strictly limited. To examine the principle of Pertinacity, comparable phonological processes internal to individual languages as well as influences due to borrowing between languages will be examined across Germanic and Indo-Aryan language families, combining classical historical research with psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experimentation and computational speech recognition.

Commenting on her award, Professor Lahiri says: 'I am extremely grateful and deeply honoured that my peers believe in this line of research in linguistics and have supported advanced grant funding for me for the third time. I sincerely hope we will be able to retain ERC funding in this country for the sake of the next generation in humanities when academic prospects in general are so bleak.'

ERC Advanced Grants are five-year awards, designed to support excellent scientists and scholars in any field at the career stage when they are already established research leaders, with a recognised track record of research achievements.  

The holding of ERC awards by researchers based at UK institutions is subject to formalisation of the UK’s association to Horizon Europe, which remains the stated priority for the UK government, in line with the Trade and Cooperation Agreement agreed between the UK and the EU in December 2020. In the event that association is not confirmed by the final date for signature of grant agreements then the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee will apply, with UK awardees receiving equivalent funding via UKRI.