Summary
Anna Sandak describes how two major European grants shifted her work from laboratory experiments to leading a 16-scientist research group and a cross-border consortium developing fungal-biofilm-based building materials.
A pair of large European research grants shifted Anna Sandak’s work from daily laboratory experiments to managing a 16-scientist group and a cross-border consortium, she describes in a first-person Nature career column published on 18 September 2026.
Sandak is a professor and head of the materials research group at the InnoRenew Centre of Excellence in Slovenia. Her account shows how funding can alter not only the scale of a research programme, but also the practical responsibilities of the scientist leading it.
The first grant changed the job
Sandak submitted her first European Research Council proposal in April 2021 after six months of writing and revising an idea she had developed over several years. Following an interview in January 2022, she began preparing a revised proposal in case the application failed. Instead, she learned in March that she had won nearly €2 million (US$2.3 million) over five years.
The grant was intended to support a new generation of living coatings for buildings: materials based on fungal biofilms that could self-repair and protect surfaces from ultraviolet light. Sandak had expected the award to be the high point of her career. She had not expected it to change her job so quickly.
Her earlier training had focused on designing experiments, analysing data, writing papers and competing for funding. The larger project introduced a different set of decisions. Instead of asking only how to quantify the bioremediation capacity of a fungal biofilm, she also had to consider which skills the group lacked, whom to hire and how each appointment would affect the laboratory’s expertise, culture and future direction.
Hiring, collaboration choices, funding allocation and project priorities became part of the scientific work because they shaped both the research and the opportunities available to team members.
A second grant added a route to application
In 2024, Sandak secured a €3 million Pathfinder grant from the European Innovation Council. The Pathfinder programme is designed to help develop emerging scientific technologies towards marketable products and includes business-acceleration support.
That funding changed the questions surrounding the group’s ideas. Scientific promise remained important, but the project also had to be considered in terms of technical feasibility, scalability, value and relevance beyond academia. Sandak began asking who would use the technology, which problem it would solve, how it could be produced and what partnerships would be needed to bring it into the world.
The two grants therefore created different but connected forms of expansion. The ERC award enlarged the group’s research programme, while the Pathfinder award added questions about development and potential use.
Leadership became part of the research
As the ERC project grew, Sandak’s group expanded to 16 scientists. Some questions required expertise that was not available at her institute, leading the team to work with researchers at six institutions across Slovenia, Austria, Slovakia and the Netherlands. Sandak now leads the resulting consortium.
Her typical day consequently moved away from continuous experimental work. She may check the laboratory in the morning, but much of the remaining time is spent revising papers and project deliverables, preparing proposals, interviewing candidates, writing reports for funders, speaking with consortium partners and handling budgets with university administrators.
The account presents research leadership as a change in the nature of scientific contribution rather than a departure from science. Sandak’s decisions about people, money, partnerships and priorities determine which experiments can be attempted and which expertise the group can build. The researcher’s role becomes less centred on personally performing each experiment and more focused on creating the conditions in which a larger team can conduct the work.
Sandak’s experience is a single first-person account, not a study of how research funding affects scientists generally. The source focuses on the organisational and career consequences of the grants; it does not report final performance results for the fungal coatings or the Pathfinder project.