Lund University has matched its previous record, with six researchers awarded the prestigious ERC Starting Grant. They are Eleni Karageorgiou from the Faculty of Law, Camilo Ronderos from the Faculties of Humanities and Theology, Anders Reinholdt from the Faculty of Science, and three researchers from the Faculty of Engineering: Axel Henningsson, Kim Cuong Le, and Susanna de Rezende.
The ERC Starting Grant is aimed at researchers at the beginning of their careers and is awarded solely on the basis of scientific excellence. Following evaluation by fellow researchers and in tough competition, these researchers and their projects have been ranked among the very best in Europe. In total, the European Union, through the European Research Council, is awarding EUR 705 million to 421 researchers across Europe.
Axel Henningsson, doctoral student at Solid Mechanics
What is your project about?
The project aims to understand how ductile rupture originates and develops inside metals. Using high-energy X-rays at large-scale synchrotron facilities, we will develop new methods that can follow the material's internal microstructure in three dimensions while it is being loaded. The aim is to create time-resolved 3D images, almost like movies, that simultaneously show how the crystal grains deform, how stresses and strains develop, and how microscopic voids form and grow until rupture.
What do you hope to achieve?
This project will make it possible to directly observe the mechanisms that govern how metals deform and fail. Current models are based partly on assumptions that are difficult to verify experimentally. By measuring the internal fields and microstructural changes that the models actually describe, we aim to test these assumptions and develop more reliable models of material failure. In the longer term, this could contribute to safer and more material-efficient structures. The experimental methods developed within the project will also benefit other areas of materials research.
What does this ERC grant mean to you?
For me, the grant is both a major recognition and a fantastic opportunity to build an independent research environment at Lund University. It gives me the resources and long-term stability needed to bring together a research group around an ambitious idea that would have been difficult to pursue within a smaller project. I am, of course, very happy, but I also feel a great sense of responsibility and a strong motivation to make the most of this opportunity.
Anders Reinholdt, researcher at the Department of Chemistry
Could you tell us a bit about your project N-VERT?
My background is in organometallic chemistry - the part of chemistry that explores what happens when metals form bonds with other elements. Metals can profoundly change the behaviour of the atoms they bind to, creating unusual types of bonding and reactivity. In my ERC project, we focus on a particularly striking example: a triple bond between nitrogen and the heavy metal osmium. Nitrogen has a strong tendency to attract electrons, so in a chemical bond it normally becomes the negatively polarized end. In the systems we are developing, this familiar behaviour is inverted: That is what gives us access to bonding types that are very challenging or even inaccessible. Ultimately, this could open new routes to molecules that cannot be made using conventional synthetic chemistry.
What are you hoping to achieve?
At the broadest level, this is fundamental science. I want to understand chemical bonding, structure and reactivity better - and, ideally, discover chemistry that I would not have imagined to be possible. Just as importantly, the project will provide a vibrant environment in which we can train the next generation of curious synthetic chemists. As an example, we want to study very simple, two-atom molecules containing unusual triple bonds.
What does the ERC Starting Grant mean for you?
The ERC Starting Grant is transformative for me because it gives me the opportunity to build a substantially larger research group and pursue an ambitious programme over several years here in Lund. It is also an important recognition of the work my group and I have done so far, and of the scientific potential of the ideas we now want to explore. I would like to express my gratitude to the people who have helped me prepare for the final interview. I received so much support from colleagues within the Department of Chemistry, the Faculty of Science and Lund University.
What is the most exciting thing you hope to discover?
The most exciting possibility is that we may be able to make some very simple nitrogen-based molecules that have never been prepared before. Making these molecules would therefore be only the beginning. If we can stabilise them, we can start asking what they react with and what new molecules they can form. Because their bonding is so unusual, they could
reveal types of chemical reactivity that we do not yet know. That sense of entering unexplored chemical territory is one of the most exciting parts of the project".
Why is this research important?
This is primarily basic research, so we cannot predict where the discoveries will lead. But a deeper understanding of how nitrogen can be activated and incorporated into molecules could, in the longer term, contribute to more efficient ways of making nitrogen-containing chemicals with lower energy requirements.
What will the ERC grant make possible that was not possible before?
The ERC Starting Grant comes with generous funding that will allow me to recruit several PhD students and build a group at the Department of Chemistry, large enough to investigate numerous ideas in parallel. That changes the kind of science we can do. In a smaller project, we would have to prioritize very strictly and focus mainly on the most obvious or safest directions. With the ERC funding, we can still pursue those questions, but we can also test more intriguing ideas - the experiments that may be less likely to work, but could lead to the most exciting discoveries.
Eleni Karageorgiou, currently senior researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights
The project awarded an ERC Starting Grant is CONPLEX, a five-year project examining the growing role of private consultancy firms in migration and asylum governance.
What do you hope to achieve?
I hope the project will shed light on an aspect of migration and asylum governance that has so far received little attention in legal research. By combining legal doctrinal analysis, history and empirical research, we aim a) to document how private consultancies, through their expertise, influence decision-making in the field of migration, and b) to develop a new way of understanding the interplay between private advisory authority and law-making and enforcement. Hopefully, the findings will also have relevance in other areas of public governance, including digitalisation, welfare, climate and health.
What does receiving an ERC Starting Grant mean to you?
The ERC Starting Grant gives me a unique opportunity to build my own research team over the next five years and to develop a research agenda that I have been thinking about for a long time. It is also, of course, a wonderful recognition of the project's idea and potential, and it provides the academic freedom to pursue ambitious questions, taking human rights and migration law research in new directions.
Kim Cuong Le, senior lecturer at Combustion Physics
Can you tell us a little about your project?
Soot aerosols are produced by incomplete combustion of carbon-based fuels. They contribute to atmospheric warming and can also have adverse health effects. However, characterizing soot is particularly challenging in the aerosol phase because of its small size, low concentration, and continuous transformation in the atmosphere.
My AEROSOL project aims to advance laser- and X-ray-based diagnostics to track soot from its initial formation to its atmospheric aging. Ultimately, I want to establish how changes in soot structure and morphology affect its optical properties and therefore its climate impact.
What do you hope to achieve?
I hope to achieve two major advances. First, I want to push soot measurements to currently inaccessible regimes, including sub-10 nm particles, single-particle diagnostics, and real-time remote measurements. Second, I want to establish an experimentally constrained link from soot formation and aging, through its structure and optical properties, to its climate impact.
The long-term outcome will be both new diagnostic capabilities and a more comprehensive understanding of soot across laboratory, chamber, and atmospheric scales.
What does the ERC Starting Grant mean to you?
The ERC Starting Grant would allow me to take the next major step in establishing my independent research direction. It would give me the resources to build a multidisciplinary team around my core expertise in optical diagnostics and combustion, and to expand my research from soot formation in the laboratory to atmospheric aging and climate-relevant applications.
More importantly, it would allow me to pursue a high-risk, interdisciplinary research vision that would be difficult to realize through smaller individual grants.
Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos, associate senior lecturer at General Linguistics
Can you tell us a little about your project?
My Project is called IRIS, which stands for "Irony re-examined in interactive settings." The driving force of the project is the observation that there is a tension between theories of how people use language, and the experimental work that has been conducted to test said theories. Theories in pragmatics (which is the field that studies how people use language) focus on how meaning is constructed during social interaction between a speaker and an addressee. However, experimental work in pragmatics studies people who are not part of a conversation but instead sit in a lab and hear or read about other people talking (so called "overhearers.") So, the goal of my project is to create a new type of experiment that uses cognitive pupillometry (or the measure of pupil dilation as an index of cognitive activity) to study the differences in comprehension between addressees and overhearers, using irony as a test case.
What do you hope to achieve? What practical applications might the results have?
In general, the project's goal is quite ambitious, namely, to revolutionize the way in which experimental work is conducted in the study of language use by centering the construction of meaning on social interaction. In particular, the project hopes to develop a new theoretical account of irony comprehension that considers the differences between addressees and overhearers in how they construct meaning.
There are at least two practical applications of the project's results. First, from a methodological perspective, the development of a new experimental paradigm to study inferential meaning should be useful to researchers around the world interested in studying language use. Second, if it is the case that addressees and overhearers understand inferential meaning in fundamentally different ways (as the project hopes to show), it will be incredibly relevant for studying things such as witness testimony: It will inform how much weight we should assign to witness reports from people who recall the content of conversations that they were a part of, versus people who merely recall conversations that they overheard other people having.
What does the ERC Starting Grant mean to you?
It means that I will finally get to develop a research program that I have been thinking about for a long time and that I believe will have profound consequences for the field of pragmatics.
Susanna de Rezende, associate senior lecturer, Department of Computer Science
Can you tell us a little about the project?
One of the big questions in computer science is to understand how hard different problems are for computers to solve. Some problems can be solved very quickly, while for others we do not know any efficient algorithm. Computational complexity theory tries to understand this difference: what are the possibilities and what are the limits of computation?
But there is a second, deeper question. Sometimes we believe that a problem is hard, because nobody has found an efficient algorithm. But we also cannot prove that no efficient algorithm exists. My project asks why this happens. Why is it so difficult not only to solve certain problems, but also to prove that they are hard?
What do you hope to achieve?
This project takes a step back and looks at the methods we use to prove that problems are hard. I want to understand the power and the limitations of these methods. When do they work? When do they fail? And can we explain why?
There has been a lot of progress on these kinds of questions in the study of computational models called circuits. My project brings this meta-level perspective to the field of proof complexity, which studies the length and structure of mathematical proofs. In simple terms, I want to understand the limits not only of computation, but also of our ability to reason about computation.
What kind of problems can it be about?
There is a wide range of problems that can be modelled mathematically. For example, scheduling flights, planning routes, allocating resources, or organising snow removal can all involve many variables and many constraints. We may want to find the most efficient solution, but as the number of variables and constraints grows, this problem can become extremely difficult.
My project is not about solving one specific scheduling or routing problem. Instead, it studies the mathematical foundations behind why some computational problems are hard, and why it can be so difficult to prove that hardness rigorously.
Some current technologies are based on the assumption that certain problems are difficult for computers to solve efficiently, including encryption systems used in e-commerce and online banking.
For some of these problems, we do not know any fast algorithm, but we also cannot prove that no fast algorithm exists. Still, modern cryptography often relies on the assumption that these problems are hard. If someone discovered a much faster algorithm, it could have major consequences for the security systems we use today.
What does an ERC Starting Grant mean to you?
It's a game changer. It gives me the freedom to pursue an ambitious, long-term, high-risk, high-gain project, and to build a dedicated team of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers working exclusively on this project. I'm very grateful for the opportunity!
