Specific program: “Starting grants”

The call for projects “Europa Excelencia” aims to improve the success of Spanish participation in the calls for proposals of the European Research Council (ERC), in its “Starting Grants,” “Consolidator Grants,” and “Advanced Grants” categories, within Pillar 1 “Excellent Science” of the European Union's Horizon Europe Research Framework Program.

These are scientific and technical research projects related to the objectives of proposals that have been submitted and positively evaluated and considered eligible by the ERC, but which, for budgetary reasons, have not ultimately been funded by that body.

Grant EUR2025-165042 funded by MICIU/AEI /10.13039/501100011033

Code: EUR2025-165042

Project start date: 12/01/2025

Project end date: 11/30/2027

Brief description:

COSMOS is a 24-month research project led by Andrea Merlo at the University of the Basque Country. Its core ambition is to settle or greatly advance the WALA conjecture, a quantitative differentiability problem that links how Lipschitz functions behave at small scales with the large-scale geometry of rough sets and measures. Resolving WALA would provide a new bridge between classical Rademacher theory and modern notions such as uniform rectifiability and could unlock a path towards a complete resolution of the regularity problem for elliptic pdes.