The Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology is very proud to announce that Dr. Marcos Freire de Andrade Neves has been awarded a prestigious ERC Starting Grant by the European Research Council.

The grant, worth 1.49 million euros, will support his new project „MORTALMED: The Social Life of a Death-Inducing Pharmaceutical“. Over the next five years, the project will investigate the global circulation of sodium pentobarbital, a drug primarily used to facilitate both voluntary and coerced death. By following its use across three key contexts—assisted dying in Switzerland, state-sanctioned executions in the United States, and commercialization in Mexico—MORTALMED explores how pharmaceuticals shape, and are shaped by, wider social, political, and cultural forces.

Dr. Freire de Andrade Neves is a research associate at Freie Universität Berlin’s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, where he teaches and researches in the field of Medical Anthropology | Global Health. His work examines the transnational circulation of people, pharmaceuticals, and documents in the context of assisted dying and the death penalty. A graduate of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), he has been a lecturer and researcher at Freie Universität since 2020 and held a DAAD PRIME fellowship at the University of Edinburgh (2022–2023). Beyond his ERC project, he is currently a Fejos Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethnographic Film, completing the ethnographic documentary „Not Dead Yet“, funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Link to the press release from Freie Universität Berlin: https://www.fu-berlin.de/presse/informationen/fup/2025/fup_25_139-erc-starting-grant-marcos-freire-de-andrade-neves/index.html