Historian Eric Burton, mathematician Alexander Glazman and physicist Elisabeth Gruber have been awarded one of the ASTRA Prizes of the Austrian Science Fund FWF, which were presented yesterday evening in Vienna. With funding of around one million euros each, the ASTRA Prizes are the highest award for young scientists in Austria.
An international jury selected the winners after a highly competitive selection process. At the award ceremony in Vienna, a total of 18 prizes were presented to young researchers from all over Austria. The ASTRA program of the Austrian Science Fund FWF aims to enable advanced postdocs to make the leap to the top of their field of research. The prizes were awarded for the first time this year and replace the previous career support provided by the START prizes and the Elise Richter Program.
Nine additional scientists, including ecologist Simon Vitecek and physicist Gerhard Jung from the University of Innsbruck, received the "Merit Award": start-up funding for researchers who qualified for the ASTRA Hearing but were not selected for the full FWF-ASTRA Prize.
The winners of the ASTRA Awards
Eric Burton, Department of Contemporary History
Coloniality in the Alps: Rethinking Tyrol's global entanglements
The project Provincializing Coloniality reinterprets the complex history of 20th-century Tyrol through a decolonial lens, demonstrating how regions lacking colonial ties and located far from imperial capitals were nevertheless integral to the network of imperial relationships. Historian Eric Burton examines local cultural practices, institutions such as colonial goods stores, or settler colonialism, as well as forms of transnational solidarity and political interventions opposing colonialism and apartheid. Drawing on archival research and oral history interviews, the project, with its focus on provincial coloniality, highlights Tyrol's transnational dimensions and opens up new perspectives for a productive and context-sensitive interweaving of regional and global history.
Alexander Glazman, Department of Mathematics
Exploring the geometry of phase transitions
Statistical physics models are large systems of interacting particles. These models describe phase transitions that appear in various sciences. The aim of mathematician Alexander Glazman's project is to determine these transitions and the models' exact behavior at transition points. Specifically, the focus is on the geometry of interfaces separating different states in two-dimensional systems. The goal is to reveal emergent symmetries in the limiting case through random fractals. The main idea is to find a universal structure underlying many different models.egt.
Elisabeth Gruber, Department of Ion Physics and Applied Physics
Bringing the chemistry of the universe into the laboratory
The interstellar medium, the vast space between stars, is a cosmic laboratory with a complex chemistry. It consists of gas and dust, mainly concentrated in clouds and nebulae exposed to cosmic radiation. Here, molecules, atoms, ions, electrons, and photons interact, forming new molecules, from simple diatomic compounds to more complex organic compounds. In her project, physicist Elisabeth Gruber recreates these extreme conditions in the lab using helium nanodroplets - tiny, ultracold clusters of helium atoms. Within them, atoms and molecules are trapped and cooled, enabling controlled interactions and the formation of larger systems. She applies and develops advanced experimental techniques to study these molecules and their reaction pathways. By mimicking space chemistry at the molecular level, this project will identify molecular ions and reveal their reaction pathways, offering insights into the chemical complexity of our universe.
