University of Liverpool researcher wins prestigious European Research Council Starting Grant

A researcher from our Department of Communication and Media has won a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) grant.

Dr Antonis Kalogeropoulos has been awarded 1.2 million Euros for a project designed to understand and alleviate social inequalities in digital news consumption.

Dr Kalogeropoulos (pictured) said: “There has been a great deal of academic research around how digital news consumption has changed in recent years – for example through increased use of social media, search engines and mobile phones.

“While changes in media consumption have been widely researched, so far, little attention has been given to how these changes manifest themselves against the backdrop of pre-existing social inequalities in news use in terms of class, gender and age.

“This funding will allow us to conduct a unique four-year project examining whether people from different backgrounds face disadvantages in the way they consume news in countries of the Global North and the Global South.

“Importantly, thanks to the ERC grant, our team will also be able to develop and test potential solutions which can hopefully be implemented to increase the use in digital news, ensuring that different groups in society can benefit from digital news consumption.”

Dr Kalogeropoulos joined the University of Liverpool in 2019, following his work as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

The ERC, established by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe.

Four hundred eight researchers have won this year’s ERC Starting Grants. The funding is worth in total €636 million and part of the Horizon Europe programme.

The funding is designed to help excellent younger researchers, who have two to seven years’ experience after their PhDs, to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas.