Cassandra Koh awarded a 2024 ERC Starting Grant

ERC Starting Grants support research projects on ambitious and high-risk topics. They are awarded for five years to selected early career researchers (two to seven years' experience since completion of their PhD) so that they can build their own research teams to work on an original topic.

On September 5, the European Research Council (ERC) published the list of 494 early career researchers, from 24 European countries, who have been selected for Starting Grants in 2024.

The 49 French candidates selected include Cassandra Koh, postdoctoral fellow in the Viruses and RNA interference unit for the MULTITUDES project (The Multitudes of Mosquito Viruses and Their Impact on Arbovirus Disease Ecology).

The MULTITUDES project seeks to explore the fundamental biology and ecology of novel mosquito-specific viruses and their virus-host interactions.
The viruses of mosquitoes include more than disease-causing arboviruses. Among the mosquito viral microbiota, mosquito-specific viruses have a host range that is limited to mosquitoes yet they can inhibit or enhance co-infecting arboviruses. Such viruses can therefore influence the transmission of important arboviruses such as dengue, chikungunya or Zika viruses. Virus metagenomics has uncovered a great diversity of novel mosquito-specific viruses, yet very little is known about them apart from their genome sequences.

This research will lay the groundwork for deeper investigations into mosquito virus ecology, permitting deeper understanding of mosquito-borne disease transmission under the One Health concept.

Find out more about the 2024 Starting Grants ERC

Find out more about the Starting Grants ERC