Meanwhile elsewhere in the world: The Starting Grants given by the European Research Council (ERC): a tremendous boost to the careers of young scientists

Meanwhile elsewhere in the world: The Starting Grants given by the European Research Council (ERC): a tremendous boost to the careers of young scientists: http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201205/international.cfm    "The ERC program has unique features among all those funded by the European Community for supporting research and innovation. It is fully in the hands of the scientists, with very modest administrative support. It is devoted solely to fundamental research, and all proposals are of the bottom-up sort. There is a call once a year and the proposals are reviewed by a panel of experts who are high-level scientists of different European nationalities. The winners receive an award of order 1.5 million euros, to be spent over the five years of the contract. Allowed costs cover personnel (usually PhD students and postdocs, and even partial or total salary of the Principal Investigator), as well as equipment and other items needed for the project.
The evaluation is based both on the high scientific level of the candidate and on the excellence of his or her project. These two criteria are weighted equally by the panel. Four members of the jury scan each proposal for the selection at the first step. At the second step a restricted number of applicants make an oral presentation in front of the members of the jury, who listen to all the candidates selected for this second round, ask questions for 15 to 20 minutes, and are therefore able to evaluate the degree of maturity of the candidate. About 20 % of the applications are ultimately selected. The number of proposals keeps growing each year; the global funding of this very popular program has been increased several times."