Eleven talented young EPFL researchers obtain ERC grants
© 2012 EPFL
This year EPFL is receiving eleven “Starting Grants,” prestigious grants awarded to promising young scientists by the European Research Council (ERC).
Eleven young EPFL professors have just been awarded European Research Council (ERC) grants. This is the 5th year that these “Starting Grants,” specifically awarded to researchers who have earned their PhDs within the past 12 years, have been announced. Results of the call “Advanced Grants” for more senior researchers, will be out later in the year.
This new crop of awards cements EPFL’s high scientific reputation as successful in obtaining this important source of funding. EPFL is leading the success together with ETH Zürich - which gets eight grants - among European universities.
Four winning women
In particular, women are well represented, with four women professors winning grants. In addition, among the projects, four are from the life sciences, demonstrating that EPFL is firmly ensconced in the current ascendancy in this area of research, only ten years after the creation of its School of Life Sciences. And for the first time, an ERC grant has been awarded to a researcher from EPFL’s College of Management of Technology (CDM).
The ERC grants are the foundation of the “Ideas” programme, part of the EU’s seventh framework programme, with the goal of not only encouraging research of exceptional quality, but also novel and innovative ideas. In practical terms, they provide funding up to €2 million over five years. “For young scientists, winning an ERC grant is a guarantee that they will be able to conduct their research uninterrupted, over a long period of time,” says Vaccaro, head of EPFL’s Grants Office. “These grants are also increasingly considered as a career advancement, like a prestigious prize.”
The scientists and their projects
- Camille Bres, School of Engineering, assistant professor in the Photonic Systems Laboratory, with a project to develop new infrared light frequencies that will help enable the identification of molecules.
- Clémence Corminboeuf, School of Basic Sciences, assistant professor in the Computational Molecular Design Laboratory, with a project to develop a new computational screening strategy for designing molecular precursors to organic electronics..
- Georg Fantner, School of Engineering, assistant professor in the Laboratory for Bio- and Nano-Instrumentation, with a design for a high-speed atomic force microscope that can image the dynamics of nanometer-scale processes in living cells, in particular the pore-formation mechanisms of antibiotic peptides.
- Damir Filipovic, College of Management of Technology, Swissquote Chair in Qualitative Finance, will develop a new theory for polynomial processes and use it as the basis for creating new models that will then be tested using real market data.
- Colin Jones, School of Engineering, assistant professor in the Automatic Control Laboratory 3, will design intelligent optimizing controllers that can coordinate the flow of power in a network of buildings, which will enable a better integration of locally produced sources of renewable energy.
- Viktor Kuncak, School of Computer and Communications Sciences, assistant professor in the Laboratory for Automated Reasoning and Analysis, with a project that aims to facilitate software design, from introducing new programming language constructs and their implementation to providing new software development tools.
- Oleg Yazyev, School of Basic Sciences, SNSF-funded professor, will study the fundamental physical properties of topological insulators – materials that are insulators inside and conductors on their surface – and their possible electronics applications.
- Mélanie Blokesch, School of Life Sciences, assistant professor in the Laboratory of Molecular Microbiology, will investigate the associations between V. cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera, and marine invertebrates, to show that virulence determinants of the disease in humans are also critical for colonization of these environmental hosts.
- Nicola Harris, School of Life Sciences, assistant professor in the Laboratory of Intestinal Immunology, will study the interactions between intestinal helminth (a class of parasitic worms) infection and intestinal bacterial communities, and the implications this has for human health.
- Jeffrey Jensen, School of Life Sciences, will develop the theory and methodology to identify adaptively evolving regions on the genome as well as estimate whole-genome rates of adaptive evolution.
- Matthias Lutolf, School of Life Sciences, assistant professor in the Laboratory of Stem Cell Bioengineering, will develop a new in vitro bone marrow model to recreate how bone marrow regulates the functionality and fate of hematopoietic stem cells (the precursors of all blood cell types).