Grant winners

EUROPEAN RESEARCH COUNCIL

About EUR325 million (£292 million) has been awarded by the ERC to the winners of its second Starting Grant competition. The awards, which are each worth up to EUR2 million, are provided to early-career researchers over five years to aid their studies. UK-based winners in the physical sciences and engineering are listed below: the others will be published in the coming weeks.

Award winner: James Baldini

Institution: University of Durham

Past hurricane activity reconstructed using cave deposits: have humans increased storm risk?

Award winner: Sarah Louise Bridle

Institution: University College London

Capitalising on gravitational shear

Award winner: Tom Coates

Institution: Imperial College London

Gromov-Witten theory: mirror symmetry, modular forms and integrable systems

Award winner: Radek Erban

Institution: University of Oxford

Stochastic and multiscale modelling in biology

Award winner: Tim Gershon

Institution: University of Warwick

Advanced techniques to search for physics beyond the standard model with the LHCb detector at Cern

Award winner: Feliciano Giustino

Institution: University of Oxford

Ab-initio computational modelling of photovoltaic interfaces

Award winner: Oleksandr Gorodnyk

Institution: University of Bristol

Dynamics of large group actions, rigidity and diophantine geometry

Award winner: Nicole Grobert

Institution: University of Oxford

Dedicated growth of novel one-dimensional materials for emerging nanotechnological applications

Award winner: Catherine Heymans

Institution: University of Edinburgh

Fine observations of the rate of cosmic expansion: combining the powers of weak gravitational lensing and baryon acoustic oscillations as probes of dark energy

Award winner: Peter Keevash

Institution: Queen Mary, University of London

Extremal combinatorics

Award winner: Michael Karl Koehl

Institution: University of Cambridge

Exploring hybrid quantum systems of ultracold atoms and ions

Award winner: Athina Markaki

Institution: University of Cambridge

Actuation of ferromagnetic fibre networks to improve implant longevity

Award winner: Benjamin Murray

Institution: University of Leeds

Laboratory and modelling studies of ice nucleation and crystallisation in the Earth's atmosphere

Award winner: Jeremy Lloyd O'Brien

Institution: University of Bristol

Integrated quantum photonics

Award winner: Esther Olivia Rodriguez-Villegas

Institution: Imperial College London

"Chips on the go": towards truly wearable EEG systems

Award winner: Oren Alexander Scherman

Institution: University of Cambridge

Aqueous supramolecular polymers and peptide conjugates in reversible systems

Award winner: Benjamin Schlein

Institution: University of Cambridge

Mathematical aspects of quantum dynamics

Award winner: Stefan Szeider

Institution: University of Durham

The parameterised complexity of reasoning problems

Award winner: Alessandro Troisi

Institution: University of Warwick

Microscopic modelling of excitonic solar-cell interfaces

Award winner: Andrew Wilson

Institution: University of Leeds

Proteomimetic foldamers: towards future therapeutics and designer enzymes

Award winner: James Wookey

Institution: University of Bristol

An integrated geoscientific study of the thermodynamics and composition of the Earth's core-mantle interface

IN DETAIL

Award winner: Stephen Liddle

Institution: University of Nottingham

Value: EUR1 million (£900,000)

UNCLE: Uranium in non-conventional ligand environments

In a first for Nottingham, Dr Liddle has been awarded a Starting Grant to study speculative and pioneering research into molecular-depleted uranium chemistry. It is expected that this study will produce greater understanding of depleted uranium, a by-product of uranium enrichment, which could be used for safe applications such as counterweight balances in aeroplanes and radiation shielding in medical radiation therapy.