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04/09/2026 - Institutional news

Sara Mederos receives an ERC Starting Grant

Worth nearly €2.5 million, the grant will support research into how our decision-making changes according to our internal state, for example when facing a threatening situation or when no danger is present.

The European Research Council (ERC) has selected a project led by Dr Sara Mederos, head of the Neural Computation Laboratory at the Hospital del Mar Research Institute (HMRIB), to receive an ERC Starting Grant worth almost €2.5 million. The review panel described her proposal as conceptually pioneering and well grounded.These grants are aimed at outstanding researchers with between two and seven years of postdoctoral experience. They usually provide €1.5 million in funding, with the possibility of requesting additional support, as in this case, to carry out high-level research projects.

The selected project, InternalChoice - Neural circuit mechanisms of flexible choice across internal states, will investigate how we make decisions and how this process is influenced by our internal state. As Dr Mederos explains, "The aim is to discover how our internal states influence the decisions we make. For example, when leaving work, we may choose between stopping at the supermarket to prepare a healthy dinner or going straight home and ordering a pizza. On a normal day, we might choose the first option, but after a particularly stressful meeting or if a severe storm begins, going directly home may seem like the better choice.” The project will study how the brain represents and updates these internal changes in order to adapt our decisions.

To do this, the team led by Dr Mederos will use threat as an experimental starting point to induce changes in internal states and measure their impact on decision-making. Advanced tools will be used to record and manipulate neural circuits, as well as to model latent states. The researchers aim to identify the circuits through which the brain represents environmental variables and uses them to determine preferences between different options. Understanding these mechanisms will help advance knowledge of anxiety and conditions such as autism, in which cognitive flexibility and adaptation to context may be altered.

ERC Starting Grants

ERC Starting Grants are considered among the most prestigious forms of recognition for scientific excellence in Europe. Their aim is to support pioneering, high-risk research projects with strong transformative potential. The European Research Council is Europe's leading funding body for frontier research.

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