PRIO’s Jørgen Carling is one out of nine Norway-based researchers receiving the highly prestigious Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council, following an announcement from the ERC today. The sole criterion for selection is scientific excellence. The aim of the grant, in the words of the ERC, is to recognise the best ideas, and confer status and visibility on the best scientists in Europe, across all fields of science.
Carling will carry out a project that takes migration research in a new direction. Instead of studying the movement of people across borders, he will examine the migration that people imagine as part of their own future. “I want to find out how imagined future migration has real consequences in the present” he says. The name of the project is Future Migration as Present Fact (FUMI).
Please see the FUMI project page for additional information and a video presentation.
PRIO is now the only non-university institution in Norway to hold two ERC grants, as Halvard Buhaug received a consolidator grant in 2015.
Jørgen Carling received his PhD in 2007 and became a Research Professor in 2011. He has been a pioneer in developing migration research at PRIO together with Cindy Horst and Marta Bivand Erdal. He currently leads the MIGNEX project, which is the largest European-funded research project on migration. Over the next five years, he will divide his time evenly between MIGNEX and the new ERC project.
“PRIO has for a long time been very proud of Jørgen Carling’s achievements within migration research and team-building. He is an internationally leading scholar in his field, who has had major impact both in science, policy, and public debate. It is an absolute delight for us to see these achievements appreciated and rewarded by the European Research Council”, says PRIO Director Henrik Urdal.
“To me, the ERC grant is a dream come true” says Jørgen Carling. “It has taken years of hard work to get here, but now I can fully devote myself to finding new answers to hard questions that really matter.”
Contact information:
- Jørgen Carling: jorgen@prio.org, (+86) 131 4367 2370 (NB! Currently in China)
- Henrik Urdal: urdal@prio.org, tel +47 92 04 78 41
