ERC Starting Grants Fund Frankfurt Projects on Global Finance and Cell Aging

Two researchers at Goethe University Frankfurt have won prestigious Starting Grants from the European Research Council, securing up to 1.5 million euros each in funding over a period of up to five years. The awards support two projects that, despite belonging to very different disciplines, converge on a shared theme: how large, complex systems—whether the architecture of global finance or the molecular machinery of a single cell—change over time, and what those changes mean for the future. One project will examine the shifting balance of power in the world’s financial markets; the other will probe the ubiquitin signaling pathways that govern aging and neurodegeneration at the molecular level.

The grants, announced by the university, were welcomed by Prof. Bernhard Brüne, vice president for research at Goethe University, who emphasized that the two projects address some of the most pressing questions of the present era. In his view, the current geopolitical power structures and their impact on finance, together with the rising share of neurodegenerative diseases driven by an aging population, rank among the defining challenges ahead. The ERC Starting Grant scheme is specifically designed for outstanding researchers in the early years after their doctorate, enabling them to build their own research teams and establish themselves academically with a promising project focused on fundamental principles.

The first of the two funded projects, titled GEOFINANCE—The Geopolitics of Global Finance—is led by Dr. Johannes Petry, a political scientist and research associate specializing in international relations and international political economy. Petry’s starting point is a set of questions that have moved from the margins of academic debate to the center of policy discussions worldwide: Will the financial dominance of the United States continue? Is a more strongly bipolar system emerging? Or will the global financial system become increasingly fragmented and complex? The answers, his project suggests, will shape not only markets but the distribution of power among states for decades to come.

The context for these questions is a profound transformation of the global financial world. Geopolitical rivalries, financial sanctions, investment restrictions, and deliberate efforts to reduce dependence on the US dollar are once again placing states at the center of global financial markets—a notable shift after decades in which private market actors appeared to dominate cross-border capital flows. In GEOFINANCE, Petry examines how this growing geopolitical competition is changing the relationship between states, markets, and power. Rather than treating finance as a purely technical or economic sphere, the project frames it as an arena in which political authority and market forces continuously interact and renegotiate their boundaries.

Methodologically, the project is ambitious in scope. GEOFINANCE compares key financial powers such as the United States, China, the European Union, and Japan, as well as leading international financial centers including Hong Kong, Dubai, and London. Drawing on extensive field research, newly constructed financial datasets, and network analyses, the project investigates who holds power in the global financial system and how cross-border financial networks, infrastructures, and investment flows are changing. Network analysis of this kind allows researchers to map the connections among institutions, jurisdictions, and payment and investment channels, revealing structures of dependence and influence that conventional statistics on trade or capital stocks can obscure. By combining these quantitative maps with qualitative fieldwork, the project aims to identify both the visible and the hidden architecture of financial power.

The second Starting Grant goes to the university’s faculty of medicine and addresses aging at an entirely different scale: that of the cell. Dr. Seda Koyuncu, a molecular biologist, will lead the project UbiAge—Ubiquitin Signaling as a Key Regulator of Aging and Neurodegeneration—which explores the mechanisms underlying aging and the causes of neurodegenerative diseases such as the hereditary disorder Huntington’s disease and the neuromuscular disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as ALS. Both conditions are strongly associated with age and involve the progressive dysfunction and death of neurons, making the molecular events that accompany cellular aging a central target for research.

At the heart of UbiAge lies the small protein ubiquitin, a molecule whose name reflects its pervasive presence across living systems. Ubiquitin helps cells ensure that proteins are present in the right amount at the right place, and that defective proteins are sent to the cell’s own recycling system. This quality-control function, known broadly as protein homeostasis, is essential for cellular health: when the balance of protein production, modification, and degradation is disturbed, damaged or misfolded proteins can accumulate, a process widely linked to aging and to neurodegenerative disease. Koyuncu will investigate how imbalances in the cell’s protein balance reflect aging processes and contribute to the onset of neurodegenerative diseases, shedding light on the underlying mechanisms and examining how they drive the development of age-related conditions.

The project builds on a substantial body of prior evidence. Previous studies in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans—including work by Koyuncu herself—have already shown that age-related changes in the ubiquitin system influence both lifespan and neurodegenerative processes. The transparent roundworm C. elegans is a classic model organism for aging research, prized for its short lifespan, fully mapped cell lineage, and genetic tractability, which together allow researchers to observe and manipulate the molecular events of aging in a living animal over its entire life course. With UbiAge, Koyuncu will now dissect the mechanisms behind these observations and determine how they contribute to disease, moving from correlation toward causal understanding of how ubiquitin signaling shapes the trajectory of aging in the nervous system.

Koyuncu brings seven years of postdoctoral experience in the Cologne Cluster of Excellence on Aging and Age-Associated Diseases, known as CECAD, one of Germany’s leading research centers dedicated to the biology of aging. With the ERC funding, she will now establish an independent research program at Goethe University to investigate the molecular foundations of aging and neurodegeneration. The transition from postdoctoral researcher to independent group leader is a critical juncture in a scientific career, and the ERC Starting Grant is designed precisely to make that leap possible, providing the resources to recruit a team, acquire equipment, and pursue a long-term research agenda.

Taken together, the two projects illustrate the breadth of fundamental research supported by the European Research Council, an institution established by the European Commission to fund work focused on basic principles rather than immediate applications. Petry’s GEOFINANCE project seeks to understand how geopolitical competition is redrawing the power structures of global finance, with implications for sanctions policy, currency dependence, and the stability of the international economic order. Koyuncu’s UbiAge project aims to uncover how a single, ubiquitous protein regulates the aging process and the emergence of devastating neurodegenerative diseases, with potential long-term relevance for a population in which age-related disorders are steadily increasing. Both researchers now have the opportunity, over the coming five years, to build teams and pursue questions whose answers may reshape their fields—whether the map of global financial power or the molecular clock that ticks inside every cell.

Subject of Research: ERC Starting Grant projects on the geopolitics of global finance and ubiquitin signaling in aging and neurodegeneration

Article Title: Two ERC starting grants for research projects at Goethe University

Article References: Two ERC starting grants for research projects at Goethe University. (n.d.). Original publication

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Keywords: ERC Starting Grant, Goethe University Frankfurt, global finance, geopolitics, US dollar, financial centers, ubiquitin, aging, neurodegeneration, Huntington's disease, ALS, Caenorhabditis elegans