Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)

The Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) is a PhD-granting research institution located in Klosterneuburg, 18 km from the center of Vienna, Austria. In the 15 years since the start of its operations, ISTA has grown to over 80 research groups in the life sciences, mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry, system sciences, and related areas. ISTA has one the highest success rates in ERC grant applications and currently has 34 active ERC grants in diverse research areas (20 in the “Physical Sciences & Engineering” and 14 in the “Life Sciences” domains).
The Institute employs professors on a tenure-track model, post-doctoral researchers, and PhD students.

The Graduate School of ISTA offers fully funded PhD positions to highly qualified candidates with a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree. While dedicated to the principle of curiosity-driven research, ISTA aims to deliver scientific findings to society through technological transfer and science education. The President of the Institute is Martin Hetzer, a renowned molecular biologist, and former Senior Vice President at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, USA.

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Active ERC grants

Physical sciences & engineering:

  • Randomness and structure in combinatorics – Kwan
  • Bridging Scales in Random Materials – Fischer
  • Random matrices beyond Wigner-Dyson-Mehta – Erdoes
  • Spectral rigidity and integrability for billiards and geodesic flows – Kaloshin
  • Cavity Quantum Electro Optics: Microwave photonics with nonclassical states – Fink
  • A quantum hybrid of atoms and milligram-scale pendulums: towards gravitational quantum mechanics – Hosten
  • Non-Ergodic Quantum Matter: Universality, Dynamics and Control – Serbyn
  • Orbital Chern Insulators in van der Waals Moiré Systems – Polshyn
  • Gaining leverage with spin liquids and superconductors – Modic
  • VULCAN: matter, powered from within – Palacci
  • Tribocharge: a multi-scale approach to an enduring problem in physics – Waitukaitis
  • Non-Equilibrium Protein Assembly: from Building Blocks to Biological Machines – Saric
  • ab initio PRediction Of MaterIal SynthEsis – Cheng
  • FastML: Efficient and Cost-Effective Distributed Machine Learning – Alistarh
  • Computational Discovery of Numerical Algorithms for Animation and Simulation of Natural Phenomena – Wojtan
  • The design and evaluation of modern fully dynamic data structures – Henzinger M.
  • Vigilant Algorithmic Monitoring of Software – Henzinger T.
  • Formal Methods for Stochastic Models: Algorithms and Applications – Chatterjee
  • Young galaxies as tracers and agents of cosmic reionization – Matthee
  • Organisation of CLoUdS, and implications for Tropical cyclones and for the Energetics of the tropics, in current and in a waRming climate – Muller

Life Sciences:

  • Design of Nucleic Acid-Templated Ordered Protein Assemblies – Praetorius
  • A molecular atlas of Actin filament IDentities in the cell motility machinery – Schur
  • Synthetic and structural biology of Rab GTPase networks – Loose
  • Structure and mechanism of respiratory chain molecular machines – Sazanov
  • Mechanisms and biological functions of H3K27me3 reprogramming in plant microspores – Feng
  • Design Principles of Branching Morphogenesis – Hannezo
  • Mechanisms of tissue size regulation in spinal cord development – Kicheva
  • 60-Hz light entrainment to unlock mental health conditions – Siegert
  • Action Selection in the Midbrain: Neuromodulation of Visuomotor Senses – Jösch
  • Development and Evolution of Tetrapod Motor Circuits – Sweeney
  • Toward an understanding of the brain interstitial system and the extracellular proteome in health and autism spectrum disorders – Novarino
  • Learning the shape of synaptic plasticity rules for neuronal architectures and function through machine learning – Vogels
  • Understanding the evolution of continuous genomes – Barton
  • Cyclic nucleotides as second messengers in plants – Friml