Mariya Gabriel, EU Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, invited Mezini and five other international scientists to work on the committee.

With the appointment of Mezini, a member of TU Darmstadt has become part of a central body responsible for the future orientation of the ERC at an important point in time: The Identification Committee will focus on both the continuation and renewal of the activities of the Scientific Council with respect to “Horizon Europe” – the next EU research and innovation programme. “The ERC is entering a new phase, under the next research and innovation programme Horizon Europe”, says Commissioner Gabriel. “In identifying eminent candidates for the ERC Scientific Council, the Identification Committee will make important contributions to upholding the European Research Council's worldwide reputation of the highest level of excellence in Horizon Europe.” The Scientific Council is responsible for defining, amongst other things, the ERC's scientific funding strategy.

“This appointment is a great honour for Mira Mezini, for which we offer her our warmest congratulations”, says Professor Barbara Albert, Vice President, Research and Early Careers. “We are delighted that TU Darmstadt is now even more firmly rooted in the European research landscape.” TU Darmstadt has excellent connections in research and teaching at a European level, such as in the UNITE! European university alliance that was founded in 2019. The EU provided TU Darmstadt with €11.8 million of funding last year. Numerous TU members were awarded ERC grants for their projects.

Mira Mezini is Head of the Software Technology Group in the Department of Computer Science and was also previously the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant for her project “PACE – Programming Abstractions for Applications in Cloud Environments”. She is currently receiving funding from the ERC in the form of a Proof of Concept grant for her project “REScala – A Programming Platform for Reactive Data-intensive Applications”.