IC's Ola Svensson wins ERC 2021 Consolidator Grant
Ola Svensson © Alain Herzog / EPFL 2022
EPFL Associate Professor, Ola Svensson, head of the Theory of Computation Laboratory 2, has won a prestigious European Research Council Consolidator Grant for his proposal: Polyhedral Techniques in Combinatorial Optimization.
How can computer software be made secure? Can we transition to renewable energy sources faster by creating social tipping points? What can we learn from astrophysical shocks? And how can the heart find the rhythm to its beat? These are just some of the major questions across all scientific disciplines that will be tackled with funding from the European Research Council’s latest Consolidator Grants.
This year, IC Associate Professor Ola Svensson has joined the 313 winners of the Grants, backed with some €632 million, whichsupports mid-career researchers, helping them to consolidate their teams and conduct pioneering research on topics with methods of their choosing.
“My project consists of two complementary directions. The first is about developing powerful algorithmic techniques by addressing longstanding open problems in combinatorial optimizations and the second is to extend the reach of these techniques by considering modern computational models that use, for example, statistical knowledge. By the end of the project I hope to have made significant progress and the development of new algorithmic techniques,” says Svensson.
He hopes to begin his project after a sabbatical in 2023 and is thrilled that, “the grant gives me the freedom to work on a topic that I love for five years.”
The 2021 project proposals were submitted when Switzerland was still included in this part of the Horizon Europe program but due to the country’s subsequent non-association, Svensson’s research will be funded by SERI, the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation.