Being the leader of the scientific council of the European Research Council (ERC) when it launches later this year will give biologist Fotis Kafatos the chance to pass on a favour. (See CV)

One of the ERC's aims is to support independent careers for early-stage investigators; Kafatos credits mentoring by an early adviser, Tom Eisner, a Cornell University chemical ecologist, for helping him become an expert in the molecular study of developmental biology and comparative genomics.

Kafatos, who survived malaria as a child, went on to lead the consortium that sequenced the mosquito genome in 2002 and continues to work on malaria.

“A lot of what I became was due to Tom's vision of how evolution permeates all of biology,” he says. “He also taught me how important it is to be a mentor to others. You give and you receive, as an exchange not with one person but with a community.”

The other goals of the ERC also resonate with Kafatos and his career. One of the ERC's initial programmes is to fund established researchers' work at the interface between fields. As a young professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he knew that advancements would be made with interdisciplinary approaches.

“I wanted to do research in insect metamorphosis,” he says. “But I realized the field would only be cracked with the help of molecular biology, and that wasn't the vision of the time. I learnt molecular biology late, but it paid off.”

Kafatos hopes the ERC will help keep good researchers in Europe and lure them back from abroad, as a part-time job at the University of Athens did for him. For many years, he divided his time between there and his tenured post at Harvard. He went on to build a department and research institute in his native Crete and then to lead the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Germany.

When his term at EMBL ended last year, he moved to Imperial College London. He also turned 65, but that didn't mean a lot to him. “After my so-called 'retirement', I couldn't wait to get back into full-time research,” he says.

Yet, even though it would require more administrative duties, the ERC job was too good to turn down. “It was a personal challenge and an opportunity to contribute to a project of vital importance for science in Europe,” he says. Luckily, it will still allow for more research time than he had at EMBL, where he went on to the lab after a working day.

“I believe passionately in the ERC,” he says. “That's why I'm giving it more time than I really have!”