ERC Starting Grants were this year awarded to a record number of University of Helsinki researchers. Their topics range from space weather to the manipulation of prisoner health statistics. University of Helsinki researchers have performed well in competitive ERC funding calls.
Eight University of Helsinki researchers have received the European Research Council's ERC Starting Grant for promising early-career scholars. Starting Grants amount to €1.5 million per grant for a period of five years. The grant is intended for establishing a research group and launching independent research activities in Europe.
ERC Starting Grant 2024 winners and their research projects
Space weather can affect Earth and our technology - it can disturb navigation and communication, threaten power grids, damage spacecraft electronics, and increase atmospheric drag. Maxime Grandin´s (Faculty of Science) project aims to characterize the energy input in the upper atmosphere during substorms, which helps us to better anticipate and mitigate negative effects of space weather. The project will rely on new ground-based instruments such as the EISCAT_3D ionospheric radar system, together with novel citizen science methods, which will be developed during the project.
The thymus produces T-cells, an important part of the immune system. This organ is easily damaged during stem cell transplantation, causing serious complications. Eliisa Kekäläinen's (Faculty of Medicine) research project aims to find out how the thymus protects itself against external threats and how this defence changes with age. The project is working to establish a tissue culture model for studying thymus damage. Moreover, the model will enable testing treatments that could protect the thymus during such transplantation.
Kamil Mamak's (Faculty of Social Sciences) ERC-funded project builds a philosophical ground for criminal law that accommodates robots and thus prepares ground for the smooth cooperation of humans with robots. The project has three main goals: answer the question of what robots, from the perspective of criminal law, are; introduce and defend the phenomenological account of criminal law; and develop models of criminal law institutions for robots.
Gambling products and other addictive commodities are increasingly sold and marketed online. All online activities generate vast amounts of behavioural data. Virve Marionneau's (Faculty of Social Sciences) project is investigating networks of digital gambling companies and how they use data for commercial purposes. The project is seeking to increase understanding of both the economic power structures contributing to addiction and the regulatory means to address them.
Alexander Mühleip's (Institute of Biotechnology) ERC-funded project will examine how the cellular powerhouse of the malaria parasite, mitochondrion, changes its membrane architecture. To transition between different stages of its life cycle, the parasite depends on a rewiring of its metabolism and the remodelling of its mitochondrion. Understanding the fundamental biology governing this process may open up new avenues for controlling the spread of malaria and for future development of antimalarials.
Nanna Myllys's (Faculty of Science) research project is developing new computational and experimental methods for determining how atmospheric oxygen-rich organic compounds form, contribute to the aerosol particle formation, and affect the climate. The project produces data which is used to improve the accuracy of atmospheric models, which aids to make environmentally sustainable political decisions.
Why and when did prisoner health statistics became significant enough to be manipulated for political purposes? The theme of Mikhail Nakonechnyi's (Faculty of Arts) project examines British, Indian colonial, American, and Soviet-Russian prisons and camps from the birth of the Western penitentiary to the present day. The outcome will be the first comparative, integrated history of bureaucratic malpractices to occasionally downplay the accurate scale of sickness, epidemics, and mortality in custodial institutions.
Jonathan Valk's (Faculty of Arts) research project examines the rise of Aramaic writing in the Middle East in the first half of the first millennium BCE. The project will create a comprehensive digital database of early Aramaic writing from the Middle East, catalogue indirect evidence of it, and reconsider the Aramaization of the Middle East as a long-term process. The research contributes to our comprehension of language change both in the ancient Middle East and in our time of global linguistic and cultural flux.
Read about the awarded ERC Starting Grants on the website of the European Research Council.
