The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has obtained its first ERC Proof of Concept Grant, a European Research Council (ERC) grant aimed at promoting the transfer of results derived from excellent research projects. The funding has been awarded to the SubstellarLLM project, led by Eduardo L. Martín Guerrero de Escalante, IAC researcher and principal investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant SUBSTELLAR.
ERC Proof of Concept Grants aim to maximise the value of ERC-funded research by supporting activities that help verify the innovation, commercialisation or societal impact potential of results obtained in ongoing or recently completed ERC projects. In this first 2026 call, the ERC has selected 182 proposals, including SubstellarLLM, which will receive funding of €150,000 over a period of 18 months. This is in addition to the €2.5 million already awarded by the European Research Council for the development of SUBSTELLAR.
The SubstellarLLM project will develop a multimodal artificial intelligence platform adapted to the field of substellar astronomy. Its objective is to apply foundation models, spectral analysis using vision-language models, retrieval-augmented generation and automated workflows to facilitate the study of very low-mass objects, such as brown dwarfs, exoplanets and free-floating planets.
“SubstellarLLM will allow us to explore how advanced artificial intelligence tools can accelerate the analysis of large volumes of astronomical data and open up new avenues for the study of substellar objects. This Proof of Concept represents an opportunity to transfer the results of SUBSTELLAR into useful solutions for the scientific community,” says Eduardo L. Martín Guerrero de Escalante.
The proposal benefited from the key collaboration of Ramarao Tata, a former IAC postdoctoral researcher and currently a professor at Ohio University. Tata has developed artificial intelligence tools adopted by various public institutions, including the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the United States tax agency.
This new grant is directly linked to SUBSTELLAR, the ERC Advanced Grant awarded to Eduardo L. Martín to exploit data from the Euclid space telescope of the European Space Agency (ESA) and broaden our understanding of substellar-mass objects, such as brown dwarfs and exoplanets, as well as their connections with the evolution of the Milky Way. Through this line of research, the team led by Martín is working to identify and characterise an unprecedented number of very low-mass stars and substellar objects, including objects that are particularly difficult to detect, such as galactic halo brown dwarfs and young free-floating planets.
Eduardo L. Martín Guerrero de Escalante holds a PhD in Physics from the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL), is an IAC researcher and is one of the world’s leading experts in the study of substellar-mass objects. Co-discoverer of brown dwarfs in 1995, together with Rafael Rebolo and María Rosa Zapatero Osorio, he has more than three decades of experience in research into very low-mass stars, brown dwarfs, exoplanets and free-floating planets. His contributions include the discovery of some of the first brown dwarfs in open clusters and in the field, the identification of brown dwarf binary systems, the proposal of the L spectral class for ultracool objects, and the development of the lithium test to distinguish substellar objects. Since 2012, he has been a scientist appointed by the European Space Agency (ESA) to the Euclid Science Team.
The award of this Proof of Concept strengthens the IAC’s capacity to transform frontier research into innovative tools with potential applications for the international scientific community. It also consolidates the Institute’s position in the field of competitive European funding, as it adds its first ERC Proof of Concept to its track record of projects funded by the European Research Council.
In total, the first ERC Proof of Concept call of 2026 will fund projects at universities and research centres in 21 European Union Member States and associated countries. Spain has obtained 13 grants in this round.
