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IAC Secures 150,000 ERC Proof of Concept Grant for SubstellarLLM AI Platform
The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has landed its first European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept grant, a €150,000 award that will fund the SubstellarLLM project for the next 18 months. The grant, awarded to researcher Eduardo L. Martín Guerrero de Escalante, follows the institute’s earlier success in securing a €2.5 million ERC Advanced Grant for the broader SUBSTELLAR initiative.
ERC Proof of Concept grants are designed to bridge the gap between academic discovery and real‑world application. In the 2026 call, 182 proposals were selected, each receiving €150,000, for a total budget of €27.3 million. Spain received 13 of the awards, underscoring the country’s growing presence in European research funding.
SubstellarLLM will build a multimodal artificial‑intelligence platform specifically for substellar astronomy. The system will combine foundation models, vision‑language techniques for spectral analysis, retrieval‑augmented generation, and automated workflows to accelerate the study of very low‑mass objects such as brown dwarfs, exoplanets, and free‑floating planets.
The platform builds on the SUBSTELLAR ERC Advanced Grant, which funds the analysis of data from the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope. SUBSTELLAR aims to catalogue and characterise thousands of substellar‑mass objects—halo brown dwarfs, young free‑floating planets, and more—to understand their role in the Milky Way’s evolution. SubstellarLLM will translate those scientific methods into a usable AI tool for the wider astronomical community.
A key collaborator on the grant is Ramarao Tata, a former IAC post‑doctoral researcher who is now a professor at Ohio University. Tata has developed AI tools that have found use in public institutions, including the United States Internal Revenue Service. Eduardo L. Martín, who earned his PhD in physics from the Universidad de La Laguna, is a leading authority on substellar objects; he co‑discovered brown dwarfs in 1995, proposed the L spectral class for ultracool objects, and devised the lithium test to distinguish substellar bodies. Since 2012 he has served on the European Space Agency’s Euclid Science Team.
The grant strengthens IAC’s capacity to convert frontier research into innovative tools with global impact. While the project will focus on development and validation over the next 18 months and no commercial product launch is scheduled yet, the work will lay the groundwork for future tools that could be adopted by astronomers worldwide.
ERC Proof of Concept grants are designed to bridge the gap between academic discovery and real‑world application. In the 2026 call, 182 proposals were selected, each receiving €150,000, for a total budget of €27.3 million. Spain received 13 of the awards, underscoring the country’s growing presence in European research funding.
SubstellarLLM will build a multimodal artificial‑intelligence platform specifically for substellar astronomy. The system will combine foundation models, vision‑language techniques for spectral analysis, retrieval‑augmented generation, and automated workflows to accelerate the study of very low‑mass objects such as brown dwarfs, exoplanets, and free‑floating planets.
The platform builds on the SUBSTELLAR ERC Advanced Grant, which funds the analysis of data from the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope. SUBSTELLAR aims to catalogue and characterise thousands of substellar‑mass objects—halo brown dwarfs, young free‑floating planets, and more—to understand their role in the Milky Way’s evolution. SubstellarLLM will translate those scientific methods into a usable AI tool for the wider astronomical community.
A key collaborator on the grant is Ramarao Tata, a former IAC post‑doctoral researcher who is now a professor at Ohio University. Tata has developed AI tools that have found use in public institutions, including the United States Internal Revenue Service. Eduardo L. Martín, who earned his PhD in physics from the Universidad de La Laguna, is a leading authority on substellar objects; he co‑discovered brown dwarfs in 1995, proposed the L spectral class for ultracool objects, and devised the lithium test to distinguish substellar bodies. Since 2012 he has served on the European Space Agency’s Euclid Science Team.
The grant strengthens IAC’s capacity to convert frontier research into innovative tools with global impact. While the project will focus on development and validation over the next 18 months and no commercial product launch is scheduled yet, the work will lay the groundwork for future tools that could be adopted by astronomers worldwide.
