On 19 December, the European Research Council (ERC) appointed new members of its Scientific Council. The Nobel laureate for Chemistry Ben L. Feringa, from the University of Groningen, Lene Vestergaard Hau, physicist, Professor at Harvard University, and Manuel Arellano, economist, Professor at the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Madrid were appointed. In addition, Fabio Zwirner, already a member of the ERC Scientific Council since 2015, a theoretical physicist, INFN researcher and Professor at the University of Padua, was reconfirmed for a second two-year term and appointed Vice-President of ERC, together with Dame Janet Thornton, biologist, Director emeritus of the European Bioinformatics Institute and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. Zwirner took on the role of Vice-President in January 2019 with particular responsibility for the physical sciences and engineering sector. In his career, Zwirner has worked at the University of California Berkeley, INFN, CERN and at Sapienza University of Rome, and has dealt with various aspects of unified theories of fundamental interactions, supersymmetry and supergravity.