The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded 218 “Advanced Grants” in the current round of applications. Four of them go to researchers working in Austria, the ERC announced on Thursday. The prestigious and highly endowed sponsorship prizes, each endowed with up to 2.5 million euros, should allow the most established researchers to carry out demanding and risky projects. Three prizes go to Viennese institutions, plus one to the University of Graz.
ERC Advanced Grants are endowed with up to 2.5 million euros.
– © European Research Council
The five-year “Advanced Grants” represent the ERC’s “flagship programme”, with which basic research is funded in the EU’s “Horizon Europe” research framework programme. In the current round, 544 million euros will be distributed. Most of the prizes this time go to scientists working in Germany (37). 35 “Advanced Grants” go to Great Britain, 32 to France and 16 to Spain. A total of nearly 1,650 entries were received for the coveted awards. According to the ERC, the success rate was 13.2%.
Cultural and social anthropologist Manuela Ciotti, who works at the University of Vienna, can be happy with the award. In her project entitled “Anthrofuture”, the researcher wants to look into the future. The starting point must be the consideration of social developments that have been further accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. According to the University of Vienna, one field in which much of this can be defined is the art world with its high level of experimentation and strong orientation towards the future.
Axolotl, emergence and nanomachines
Elly Tanaka, from the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, will develop her research on the Mexican axolotl salamander, generally considered a “miracle of regeneration”; it is his second “advanced grant”. Despite its incredible ability to regenerate entire body parts, the nerve pathways within it are sometimes poorly connected. New studies of nerve formation in connection with regeneration should shed light on why this is the case.
Jörg Schmiedmayer of the Atomic Institute at the Vienna University of Technology (TU) also received his second “Advanced Grant” to investigate the principle of “emergence” in quantum physics. According to this principle, the interaction of many individual parts in a system can result in completely new phenomena. The physicist uses systems that can be controlled extremely well in experiments. As memory and compute requirements increase exponentially with its size, it is no longer possible to analyze all the details at a microscopic level, but rather to focus on the emergent properties of the system.
“Making nanomachines suitable for practice” is what physicist Leonhard Grill from the University of Graz wants to do as part of his ERC project. The aim is to modify chemical processes so that mini-machines, which, for example, carried small amounts of cargo, can be driven in a targeted manner. To do this, it is necessary to deceive nature to some extent, according to the University of Graz. (apa)