Funding research projects on families in a world of flexible work, formation of Earth, Mars and Venus, seagrass and digital twins
Sociologist Caroline Berghammer, astrophysicist Kristina Kislyakova, marine microbiologist Jillian Petersen and political scientist Alice Vadrot will each receive an ERC Consolidator grant, each worth almost €2 million. A total of 127 ERC grants have already been awarded to the University of Vienna. The European Research Council (ERC) program aims to enable and promote basic and pioneering research with high potential for innovation.
“The mix of natural and social science disciplines shows the breadth of high-level research at the University of Vienna. We are very pleased with all the award winners for this great success,” said Rector Sebastian Schütze.
Families and inequality in a world of flexible work
Nowadays, in most families, both partners work. They face the challenge of balancing work and family and often face high levels of stress. The current trend towards flexible working – greater freedom to decide where and when to work (e.g. working from home) – has fundamentally altered the spatial and temporal relationship between work and private life. In her ERC-funded FLIN research project, sociologist Caroline Berghammer and her team are creating new insights into how families today combine work and family in the context of flexible working. The project will analyze the effects of the “new normal” (after the Corona pandemic) of flexible working in three areas: (1) Family time: time with children and partner; (2) Division of (un)paid labor: childcare, household chores, paid work; (3) Births and separations of partnerships.
Furthermore, social inequalities are also taken into account: flexible working is significantly more widespread among people with higher education and higher professional status. If flexible working has positive effects (e.g. allowing more time with children), families with a higher socio-economic status could benefit disproportionately from new developments and social division could increase. It is currently unclear whether flexible working promotes a better balance between work and family or leads to a blurring of the boundaries between the two areas of life. The project is designed to compare countries and takes into account institutional and cultural context, for example legal regulations regarding flexible working, gender norms, work values. It combines a detailed country analysis (Germany, France, Italy, Norway, Austria and Poland) with a comparison of all European Union countries. Representative data with very high case numbers serve as the database: time use surveys, registration data and EU labor force surveys.
About Caroline Berghammer
Caroline Berghammer has been an assistant professor at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Vienna since 2019. She received her doctorate from the University of Vienna in 2010 and worked at the Institute of Sociology as a university assistant (postdoctoral) from 2011 to 2018. From 2018 to 2022, she held an Elise Richter position funded by the FWF Science Fund. In 2006/07 she participated in the European Doctoral School of Demography at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock / Germany. Since 2005, Caroline Berghammer has also worked as a research assistant at the Vienna Institute for Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She has completed short research stays at Princeton University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Toronto, and University of British Columbia (Vancouver).
You can read more about Caroline Berghammer’s research here in the interview in the scientific journal Rudolphina at the University of Vienna.
Early Earth, Venus and Mars as exoplanets (EASE)
In recent decades, thousands of planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, called exoplanets, have been discovered. Because these worlds are distant, we cannot understand exoplanets without looking at the cradle of life as we know it – Earth. Why did Earth become a habitable planet? Why did Mars and Venus evolve differently? What would large telescopes see if they looked at the planets of the solar system as they were billions of years ago? In the EASE project, Kristina Kislyakova and her team will explore the long-term evolution of the atmospheres and spectral fingerprints of Earth, Venus and Mars. The project represents a combined study of volcanism, atmospheric loss to space and spectroscopy.
EASE aims to significantly expand our knowledge about the evolution of Earth, Venus and Mars and also to better estimate the probability of a terrestrial planet evolving into a habitable planet. In particular, the team will characterize possible “failed” Earth analogues and examine whether they could potentially have become habitable planets under slightly different conditions. The project will break new scientific ground by examining the unique combination of factors that play a crucial role in the evolution of Earth-like worlds.
About Kristina Kislyakova
Kristina Kislyakova is a senior scientist at the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Vienna. She received her doctorate for the first time in 2012 in solar physics at Lobachevsky University in Nizhny Novgorod and in 2014 for the second time in exoplanet research at Karl Franzens University in Graz. She studied the habitability of exoplanets as a postdoctoral fellow, first at the Institute for Space Research Graz (2012-2016) and then at the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Vienna, where she will also carry out the EASE project.
Seagrasses – the “lungs of the sea”
Seagrasses perform several important functions for the health of coastal oceans and are also known as the “lungs of the sea”. For example, they anchor sand and prevent beaches from washing away. They are home to hundreds of thousands of other species, including some that are important fisheries. They clean the water of excess nutrients that are pumped from farmland to the sea and oxygenate the environment. Seagrasses are flowering plants that descend from land plants that (re)colonized the oceans almost 100 million years ago. Like terrestrial plants, they also need communities of microbial symbionts to maintain their health and productivity, but these have not been studied as intensely as terrestrial plants.
In her SeaSym project, Jillian Petersen and her team will study the biodiversity and ecological functions of a widespread species of microbial symbionts in coastal marine ecosystems, including seagrass beds and salt marshes, which are also essential to ocean health. This group of symbionts is called Sedimenticolaceae. Petersen and his team will test the theory that Sedimenticolaceae symbionts provide a natural “fertilizer” to their hosts through their nitrogen-fixing activity and that they clean the environment of toxic sulfides, thereby promoting plant health. They will investigate how the function of such symbioses may adapt to future warming seas. Another characteristic of these remarkable symbionts is their ability to colonize animal and plant hosts. Understanding how such a unique lifestyle developed is also an interesting aspect of the planned research.
About Jillian Petersen
Jillian Petersen studied marine microbiology at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany, where she also completed her doctorate and postdoctoral studies. She came to Vienna in 2015 as an assistant professor with a grant from the Vienna Research Group “Vienna Science and Technology Fund”. Her research group focuses on host-microbe interactions in broad ecological contexts, from seagrass beds to agricultural fields. The goal is to understand the importance of interactions between plants and animals and their symbiotic microbial partners in the evolution and health of our ecosystems. Petersen previously received an ERC seed grant in 2018 to investigate host-microbe interactions in marine animals, and SeaSym is now his second ERC-funded project.
You can see more about Jillian Petersen’s research here in the video article in the scientific journal Rudolphina at the University of Vienna.
Digital twins for a sustainable ocean future
To respond to the urgency of taking action on climate change and biodiversity conservation, the European Commission is currently building a digital twin of the ocean (DTO). Digital twins are a method for analyzing complex systems and developing what-if scenarios that aim to accelerate the implementation of global sustainability goals. The EU DTO is part of a broader global and national effort to develop high-precision digital models of the ocean for better marine conservation policymaking.
The ERC’s TwinPolitics project investigates the development of digital twins as a (geo)political phenomenon that could permanently change the interface between science and politics. The focus here is on the question of whether, and if so, how digital twins can contribute to a fairer design of multilateral negotiations in the future. TwinPolitics will develop new methods to empirically examine digital twins as sociotechnical and political relationships and to model their emergence at the interface between science and policy. To do this, Alice Vadrot and her research group will combine methods from ethnography and computer-assisted social sciences and apply them to digital twins of the oceans in the EU, China and the US. To explore which characteristics of digital twins promote inclusion, diversity and equity, ethnographic data will be collected at different political levels and in various research sites. These are then inserted into sociotechnical models. In a final step, the use of digital twins in multilateral negotiations will be tested using three examples: the International Seabed Authority, negotiations on a new UN agreement on plastics and negotiations on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity.
About Alice Vadrot
Political scientist Alice Vadrot has been Associate Professor of International Relations and the Environment at the Institute of Political Science since February 2022. She received her doctorate from the World Biodiversity Council in 2013 and returned to the University of Vienna in 2017 after a research stay of 2 years at Cambridge University as Erwin Schrödinger Fellow of the Austrian Research Fund (FWF). Her focus is to explore the interface between science and politics in international environmental diplomacy and to develop new methodological approaches to examining the role of knowledge in international negotiations. In 2018, the political scientist received an ERC Starting Grant for her project MARIPOLDATA (2018-2024), in which she and her research group mapped negotiations on a new agreement to protect the high seas and the development of the scientific field of marine biodiversity. As part of the EU project MARCO-BOLO (2022-2026), she is investigating data needs in biodiversity policy and nature conservation practices. Vadrot is a member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), the Mission Board of the EU Water Mission, the Board of Directors of the Environment and Climate Center at the University of Vienna and the management team of the Austrian Biodiversity Council.
You can hear more about Alice Vadrot’s research here on the Audimax podcast of the scientific journal Rudolphina at the University of Vienna.
Illustrations:
Fig. 1: Main building of the University of Vienna C: Alex Schuppich
Figure 2: Caroline Berghammer C: Luiza Puiu
Figure 3: Kristina Kislyakova C: Kristina Kislyakova
Fig. 4: Jillian Petersen C: The button pusher
Fig. 5: Alice Vadrot C: Floyd photo studio