Professor Martin Booth receives ERC Proof of Concept grant to develop commercial potential of novel imaging technology

Professor Martin Booth is one of 55 scientists funded by the European Research Council to explore the commercial or societal potential of their work and to bring their work closer to the market.

ERC Proof of Concept (PoC) grants, worth €150,000 each, can be used to explore business opportunities, prepare patent applications or verify the practical viability of scientific concepts.

Through their existing ERC Advanced Grant AdOMiS: Adaptive optical microscopy systems, Professor Booth’s research group have developed a suite of technologies that improve the imaging quality of microscopes using adaptive optics to correct aberrations.  The new proof of concept project will develop plans for the commercial exploitation of these adaptive optics technologies.

ERC President Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon commented: “Congratulations to all the winners! The ERC is happy to support researchers working in many different areas who move their scientific findings closer to the market and to societal needs. Frontier research is the basis that generates innovation in many forms, not only technological, which in turn can impact society positively.”

This set of results is from the third and final round of PoC calls for 2020. The budget for the whole 2020 PoC competition was €25 million, and in total, 510 proposals were evaluated, with an average success rate of 32%. Professor Jin-Chong Tan was awarded a PoC Grant in the first round of 2020 for research into a revolutionary sensor device exploiting a novel photoluminescent nanomaterial discovered in this research group.