ERC Starting Grants 2023: four winners from Université Paris-Saclay
The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the laureates of the ERC Starting Grants 2023, which are awarded to talented, early-career researchers. A total of four projects coordinated by researchers from Université Paris-Saclay are among the grant winners. They will receive a maximum of €1.5 million to finance their projects for a period of five years.
Launched in 2007 as part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, ERC grants aim to support cutting-edge research based on scientific excellence. This year, 400 bright minds have been awarded grants, totalling €628 million, to launch their projects, train their teams and turn their scientific ambitions into realities.
Among the 400 winning scientists and scholars, four are from Université Paris-Saclay:
- Chloé Girard (CNRS), a researcher at the Institute for Integrative Biology of the Cell (I2BC – Univ. Paris-Saclay, CNRS, CEA), was awarded a grant for her project, DYNACO.
Meiotic crossovers, by rearranging parental allele combinations, make us unique. Surprisingly, crossovers tend to be more evenly spaced along chromosomes than expected by chance, a phenomenon discovered over a century ago called interference. The emergence of spatial regulation requires communication. But how does the crossover formation machinery communicate with neighbouring crossovers located half a chromosome away? The DYNACO project will enable fundamental advances in our understanding of crossover formation, designation and interference. This work could also provide tools for manipulating recombination, in order to speed up the introgression of selective traits into the genomes of varieties of interest.
- Mathieu Casado (CNRS), a researcher at the Laboratory for Sciences of Climate and Environment (LSCE – Univ. Paris-Saclay, CNRS, CEA, UVSQ), was awarded a grant for his project, Snow Antarctic Mean Isotopic Records (SAMIR).
In Polar regions, climate change leads to warming that is greater than in other parts of the world, a process known as Polar Amplification. In Antarctica, observations from weather stations are too short to evaluate the amplitude of anthropogenic warming compared to natural variability precisely. The SAMIR project will use water isotopic composition from ice cores in Antarctica to recover climate records covering the last thousand years, in order to evaluate the amplitude of climate change in Antarctica in its historical context.
- Benjamin Wieder (CEA), a researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Physics (IPHT – Univ. Paris-Saclay, CNRS, CEA), was awarded a grant for his project, TopoRosetta.
Over the past 15 years, we have learnt that topological phases of matter are not rare or esoteric, but in fact appear in some form in more than half of all known solid-state materials. However, the most frequently occurring topological phases in real 3D materials are complicated, symmetry-protected topological crystalline insulator (TCI) states that, unlike more familiar quantum Hall states, have unknown smoking-gun experimental signatures, and hence practical applications. The TopoRosetta project aims to introduce a "Rosetta Stone" based in group theory, to translate between the currently disconnected languages of solid-state topology and system-independent physical observables, with the hope of uncovering new experimental platforms for spintronics and quantum information science.
- Yilin Wang (IHES), a Professor at the Institut des hautes études scientifiques (IHES), was awarded a grant for her project, RaConTeich.
Random conformal geometry deals with the analysis of conformally invariant systems using probabilistic methods, and Teichmüller theory studies complex structures on a surface. Recent results of the Principal Investigator reveal a close link between these two well-developed fields. This project aims to advance the understanding of the links between fundamental concepts of these two fields by combining techniques in probability, complex analysis, geometric analysis, etc.