Two young physicists of IPhT, Geraldine Servant and Iosif Bena, have been selected under the first call for "Starting grants" launched by ERC(European Research Council): their projects are among the 431 which passed the quality thresholds for excellence, out of more than 9000 applications. Geraldine's project will be funded by ERC. It deals with the nature of dark matter and its manifestations. She will pursue her research at CERN. Iosif's project is on the reserve list of ERC, and will be funded by the French ANR. It deals with black holes and string theory.