Musicologist Tess Knighton, physicist Jordi Sort and Prehistoric archaeologist Karen Hardy received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council in its 2021 call.
The European Research Council announced the winners of its 2021 Advanced
Grants competition. ERC Advanced Grants are designed to support excellent scientists and scholars in any field at the career stage when they are already established research leaders, with a recognized track record of research achievements. The funding, worth in total €624 million, will go to 253 leading researchers across Europe, 13 of which in Spain. Among the winners are three UAB researchers who will receive funding to develop their research projects, which represents 23% of the spanish grants awarded to UAB projects.
Tess Knighton, SOUNDSPACE project
Tess Knighton, ICREA researcher at the UAB Department of Art and Musicology, was awarded an Advanced Grant to develop the project SOUNDSPACE How Processions Moved: Sound and Space in the Performance of Urban Ritual, c.1400–c.1700.
The premise of the project is that hermeneutic study of the procession as performance affords insight into the dynamic workings of society and the experience of urban life. It aims to go beyond this to assess the impact of urban ritual on participants and ear-witnesses through analysis of the social and cultural processes that lay behind that experience, and of the perceptual discourses that gave it meaning and significance for all those present. The procession formed a moving intersensory experience that also mobilised the emotions of the urban community. The project aims to interrogate the multi-faceted relationship between sound, space and society by scrutinising the interstices between collective experience, social expectations and memory through the prism of historical sound studies, an umbrella term here used to combine a cross-disciplinary approach—urban studies, sensory history and history of the emotions—and Digital Humanities tools: Virtual Reality, digital cartography and semantic discourse analysis. It will forge a new theoretical framework by combining concepts of acoustic and emotional communities to analyse the social and cultural processes involved in the preparation, performance, reception and impact of the procession and the prevailing discourses that forged the significance of processional expression for the urban community. The main objective is to open up new ways to explore the impact of intangible but key features of processions such as acoustic space, soundscape competence, density of sensory experience and emotional response.
In addition to her position as an ICREA research professor at the UAB, Tess Knighton is Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. She is Series Founder and Co-Editor of the series Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music published by Boydell Press, and was for many years Editor of the Oxford University Press journal Early Music. Since her doctoral thesis on music and musicians at the court of Ferdinand of Aragon (PhD, University of Cambridge, 1984), she has been dedicated to researching the musical culture of the Iberian World and its socio-cultural context in the medieval and early modern periods, and has published widely in this field. Tess believes passionately in cross-disciplinarity and collaboration in research, and also in the need for digital humanities tools to enable management of archival and other data, and for opening up new analytical perspectives. Since taking up her ICREA Professorship in 2011, she has focussed on new research in Barcelona archives and developing the cross-disciplinary strands of her work, including sound studies, sensory history and history of emotions. Transfer of knowledge is also an integral part of her research activities, and she has organised several series of lectures for the Museu d'Història de Barcelona and given many radio and pre-concert talks in the UK and Spain.
Jordi Sort, REMINDS project
ICREA researcher at the UAB Department of Physics Jordi Sort has received an Advanced Grant to develop the project REMINDS, which stands for "Voltage-Reconfigurable Magnetic Invisibility: A New Concept for Data Security Based on Engineered Magnetoelectric Materials".
With the advent of Big Data, information is facing new, potentially more damaging, security threats. The current trend to enhance data protection is to use increasingly complex mathematical algorithms to encrypt information. This approach requires exponentially growing amounts of data, time and power resources. REMINDS proposes a radically new concept to boost data security: to act directly at material level, i.e., in the way information is stored. The project is built on the disruptive idea of using voltage to activate/deactivate magnetism, and it tackles novel strategies to control the mutual interactions between ferromagnetic (FM), antiferromagnetic (AFM) and ferroelectric (FE) materials. While data written in traditional ferromagnets can be read using conventional heads, AFM and FE materials are 'invisible' to magnetic sensors due to their lack of magnetic stray fields. REMINDS will develop advanced engineering protocols to hide data in the AFM or FE layers while the FM state is switched off; and retrieve the information whenever deemed necessary. Neuromorphic-inspired layouts (emulating the way human brain works) will be used to selectively apply these protocols to specific memory units that will incorporate stochastic physical phenomena. This will be the basis of new energy-efficient proof-of-concept data protection designs whose working principle will be tested at lab scale for potential applications in anti-counterfeiting and anti-hacking technologies. REMINDS is expected to revolutionize magnetoelectricity, forging an entirely new paradigm in data security. Its outcomes will bring ground-breaking scientific contributions to the fields of magnetism, spintronics, piezotronics and flexible electronics, and will have a huge socio-economic impact.
Professor Sort is an ICREA Research Professor working at the UAB Physics Department, who leads a research group of 20 people, internationally recognized for its front-line research in the fields of nanomagnetism and nanomechanics. Prof. Sort has made several groundbreaking contributions, highly relevant for the scientific community. He obtained unique results showing the possibility to tailor the magnetic behavior of materials at the nm-scale using various means, such as strain, ion irradiation or, more recently, electric field, drastically boosting energy efficiency in a variety of technological applications. He studied spin valve systems for magnetic read heads, and he was amongst the first to report on the transfer of information between ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic materials. He had the pioneering idea of merging nanoporous materials with spintronics to reduce power consumption in data storage systems (topic of his ERC Consolidator Grant and ERC Proof of Concept projects). In the past few years, he has gained world-wide recognition in the field of "magnetoelectricity". He is the Coordinator of the European Training Network "BeMAGIC". During his scientific trajectory, Prof. Sort has supervised 16 PhD students and 12 postdoctoral researchers. The quality and impact of Prof. Sort's work is impressive by all standards. He has issued 6 patents and has published more than 350 peer-reviewed papers (in Nat. Nanotechnology, Nat. Commun., Phys. Rev. Lett., etc.), which have been cited over 10,500 times according to Web of Science. He is also Editor of several journals (e.g., APL Materials, Nanomaterials). Prof. Sort is recipient of the "Jordi Porta Jue Award" (Catalan Physical Society, 2000), the "Best Young Researcher in Experimental Physics" Award (Spanish Royal Society of Physics, 2003), the "Science & Technology Prize" (Federation of European Materials Societies, 2015), and the "Duran Farell Award" (UPC, 2020), amongst others.
Karen Hardy, POWERFUL PLANTS project
Professor Karen Hardy, ICREA researcher at the UAB Department of Prehistory, has received an Advanced Grant to develop the project POWERFUL PLANTS, The Power of Plants as Food, Medicine and Raw Materials Before Agriculture.
This new project will use archaeological evidence, supported by experimental archaeology and ethnographic data, to investigate the social, cultural and genetic roles of plants before farming. Plants are essential to our physical, psychological and physiological wellbeing, providing us with energy, nutrients, medicines and raw materials. The depth of the human connection to plants suggests this has always been the case. Yet the role of plants before the emergence of agriculture around 10,000 years ago is virtually unknown. This project will adopt an interdisciplinary approach to investigate three areas - food, medicine and technology - in which the use of plants was pivotal in shaping human trajectories, with implications that are still evident today.
Karen Hardy has five children, born between 1989 and 2001. Until October 2005, she worked part time in Scotland while she took care of her children. She also conducted a research project on ethnographic material items from Papua New Guinea. This initiated her long-term interest in the use of plants first as raw materials, then as food and medicine, and introduced her to the value of ethnoarchaeology and experimental archaeology. She leads an international research group that characterises plant species using biomolecular compounds and microfossils from dental calculus samples. This has already resulted in significant new information including the earliest evidence of ingestion of starchy plants in the genus Homo 1.2 million years ago; the earliest evidence for ingestion of non-nutritional, medicinal plants in human history 49,000 years ago; the earliest evidence for ingestion of identifiable plant-based polyunsaturated fatty acids and inhalation of respiratory irritants 400,000 years ago; the first direct evidence for use of non-edible wood fragments as toothpicks in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic; and on the crucial role of carbohydrates in human evolution.
