Double congratulations to Dr Eleanor Raffan, who has just been announced as one of eight University of Cambridge researchers, who will receive a share of the European Research Council’s (ERC) record €728 million Consolidator Grant awards this year, and has also been named as one of three finalists in the 2025 Canine Health Discovery of the Year Awards.
The Consolidator Grants support mid-career researchers to carry out cutting-edge research projects lasting up to five years, in a broad range of scientific fields. With funding from the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, the grants support research at universities and research centres in 25 EU Member States - and associated countries including the UK. Dr Raffan receives the award for ‘Appetite and Obesity: leveraging the power of dog genetics for biomedical insight’, where she will study pet dogs to find genes and biological processes that contribute to obesity. Laboratory studies will help in understanding how these genes influence appetite, activity, and metabolism, and the team will check whether they have similar effects in humans. The overarching aim is to reduce the impact of obesity on human and animal health.
The AKCCHF 2025 Canine Health Discovery of the Year Award honours transformative advancements in canine health. Breakthrough research that improves the understanding, prevention, and treatment of canine disease. Dr Raffan is nominated for her research (published earlier this year) which finds that the 'greedy' genes responsible for obesity in pet labrador dogs, are also relevant to human obesity. The research gives vets and owners new tools to understand—and support—their pets, and can be used to further investigate the causes of obesity in humans.