Organic chemist Klaus Bock will replace Sierd Cloetingh as one of the pan-European funder’s vice presidents

The European Research Council (ERC) has named Klaus Bock, a Danish organic chemist, as a new vice president.

Bock is currently chair of the Danish National Research Foundation. Before that he was based at the brewer Carlsberg, where he joined as head of the chemistry department in 1988, later becoming head of research in 1992 and executive vice president for research in 2001. As an organic chemist, he has more than 260 papers to his name. 

Bock will take up the post from 1 January 2016, replacing Dutch geoscientist Sierd Cloetingh to oversee the ERC’s engineering and physical sciences domains. He joins the other two vice presidents, biochemist Mart Saarma and psychologist Núria Sebastián Gallés, and the president mathematician Jean-Pierre Bourguignon.

The ERC has said it will award €1.7 billion (£1.2 billion) in grants in 2016. The agency uses peer review to awards grants for basic research across the EU.

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