A Historic Achievement for Bulgaria: INSAIT Wins the Country’s First ERC Grant in Engineering and Natural Sciences

Sofia, June 2026

Bulgaria’s first-ever ERC grant in Natural Sciences and Engineeringhas been awarded to Dr. Bernhard Haeupler, a researcher at INSAIT, an institute of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. The grant, worth €2.5 million, is among the most prestigious in the world and is awarded for excellent, curiosity-driven, frontier research projects led by outstanding researchers, with the goal of advancing fundamental knowledge and enabling breakthrough discoveries. This exceptional achievement comes after 171 unsuccessful prior applications from Bulgarian institutions in these scientific fields over the past nearly 20 years.

Dr. Haeupler joined INSAIT in 2024 and established in Sofia one of the world’s premier research groups in the area of algorithms. His project focuses on developing new algorithms that enable real-time management of complex systems such as transport networks. The project has broad applications, including improving the management of delays, congestion, and routing in railway systems, as well as optimizing all large, interconnected networks, such as supply chains and the internet.

The ERC Advanced Grant places INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski,” and Bulgaria in the “Champions League of Science.” The programme is also known as the “Scientific Nobel Prize” – 15 researchers supported by the ERC have gone on to become Nobel laureates. The acceptance rate hovers around less than 9%, placing it among the world’s most selective funding programs.

Starting operation in April 2022, INSAIT set out with a deliberately outsized goal: build a research institute in Eastern Europe capable of competing with the world’s leading centers in artificial intelligence and computer science.

It has moved quickly. The institute, created in partnership with Switzerland’s world-leading technical universities ETH Zurich and EPFL, has attracted researchers and students from more than 30 countries, including graduates of Cambridge, Oxford, Carnegie-Melon, MIT, and ETH Zurich. In a short time it has published more than 200 research papers at all leading AI research venues and has established a number of visible joint research projects with companies such as Google DeepMind, Toyota, Netflix, vivo, and many others.