WASP Fellow Rocío Mercado has been awarded an European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant for her project POLYGEN: New Paradigms for Deep Generative Modeling of Polymers.
“Receiving the ERC Starting Grant is a milestone in my research journey. It recognizes the early contributions my team has made in AI for molecular engineering and gives us the resources to tackle a much harder but equally important frontier: polymers”, says Rocío Mercado, Assistant Professor at Chalmers and WASP Fellow.
The European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant 2025 has awarded up to €1.5 million each to 478 researchers across Europe to support the development of their research projects and the establishment of their own research teams. Twenty-one of these projects are hosted by Swedish institutions—one of them is Rocío’s project, POLYGEN.
“My project aims to develop new generative AI methods for polymer design. Polymers are everywhere in our daily lives, from plastics in packaging to materials in medicines and batteries, yet designing new ones is extremely difficult because of their complexity. Just as AI can now generate realistic images or text, we want to build AI tools that can generate promising new polymer materials tailored to specific needs. If successful, this would provide scientists with a powerful new way to explore the vast space of possible polymers and accelerate innovation in materials science,” she explains.
Tackling global challenges through AI and materials science
Rocío emphasizes the societal impact of improving polymer design, pointing to urgent challenges such as sustainable packaging, safer chemicals, and advanced energy storage.
“Polymers make up the vast majority of the materials we interact with every day, from packaging and clothing to medicines, electronics, and energy devices. Improving the way we design them is therefore essential for tackling many urgent challenges, such as sustainable packaging, safer manufacturing chemicals, and better energy storage materials,” Rocío explains.
“Scientifically, I hope our work shows how computer science and AI can open entirely new directions in materials discovery. Societally, my hope is that the methods we develop will empower polymer scientists and engineers worldwide to find better solutions more quickly to pressing environmental and health challenges,” she continues.
Receiving the ERC Starting Grant marks a significant step forward for Rocío and her team.
“I’m deeply grateful to my collaborators who made this possible. This grant allows us to grow a strong interdisciplinary group and build the AI methods and computational tools needed to unlock the complexity of polymers,” she says. “I’m excited about the potential impact across both computer science and materials science.”
About the ERC Starting Grant
The ERC starting grant is awarded to promising early-career researchers and has scientific excellence as the only selection criteria. The ERC starting grant recipients and their research proposal undergo a stringent and competitive peer-review process. This year 3928 researchers applied for an ERC starting grant (in 2024 it was 3474 applicants).
In total, 478 researchers in Europe will share more than 761 million euro, with a success rate of about 12 percent.
Among the 21 researchers in Sweden receiving ERC Starting Grants, eight are active in life sciences, eight in social sciences and humanities and five in physical and engineering sciences.
Published: September 9th, 2025
