Since its establishment in 2006, the ES Department has become a reference in climate- and air quality-related research in Europe and beyond, as well as in health and other societal impacts of climate change.

The Global Health Resilience (GHR) group, within which the candidate would work, works on co-designing policy-relevant decision-support tools to enhance surveillance, preparedness, and response to global health challenges. The GHR group applies cutting-edge approaches to understand the links between climate change, socio-economic inequalities, and infectious disease emergence and spread, from local to global scales. It contributes to international initiatives to ensure these digital tools have a downstream impact to strengthen global health resilience to emerging threats.

Frontier Research
Climate change, environmental degradation, and socio-economic inequalities can increase the risk of infectious disease outbreaks and lead to excess mortality and morbidity. The goal of the Global Health Resilience (GHR) group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center is to co-design decision-support tools to enhance surveillance, preparedness, and response to global health challenges, including climate-sensitive infectious diseases.

At the GHR group, the researchers apply a transdisciplinary approach, co-developing solutions at the interface of epidemiology, climate science, planetary health, biology, statistical modelling, machine learning, and data science.

Their cutting-edge methodological research aims to understand the links between environmental change, socio-economic inequalities, and infectious disease emergence and spread from global to local scales.

Through a co-creation process, they develop indicators, impact-based forecasting models and early warning systems at sub-seasonal to decadal time scales, which help to anticipate future risk in collaboration with public health, disaster risk management, and humanitarian agencies all over the globe.

Moreover, the group works closely with climate scientists, software engineers and knowledge integration experts from across the Earth Sciences Department, as well as researchers specialising in disease intelligence data generation.

These collaborations ensure integration with the latest technology and novel data streams to strengthen decision-support tools for public health decision-makers that ultimately build resilience to emerging health threats and protect the most at-risk communities.

The research of the GHR group contributes to global initiatives to ensure digital tools have a downstream policy impact to strengthen global health resilience to emerging health threats.

PROGRESS: Reading provenance from ubiquitous quartz: understanding the changes occurring in its lattice defects in its journey in time and space by physical methods .
ERC-funded project developing a new, beyond state of the art, provenance and multi-scale time analysis method for rock samples, based on analyzing quartz – an abundant mineral, whose structure and defects can record time as they trap charge during interaction with natural radioactivity.

Institute of Interdisciplinary Research in Bio-Nano-Sciences.
The main BBU facility for experimental interdisciplinary research, with a focus on bio-, nano-sciences, and on the interface of biosystems with artificially or naturally nanostructured systems. Transferring the experimental results into industry is also one of the institute’s main goals.

Strengthening the Research Capacities for Extreme Weather Events in Romania – SCEWERO.
Horizon-funded project aiming at developing AI-enhanced abilities to forecast extreme heat and precipitation events using emerging technologies. The goal is to redesign the thresholds for early warnings in Romania for heat events, currently undervalued, and to increase the communities’ resilience when facing such extreme events.

The PsyTech-MATRIX PLATFORM – Platform for Robotics/Robotherapy and Virtual Reality Enhanced Therapy.
Platform hosting laboratories and technologies underlying the integration of psychology and technology as means of evidence-based mental health services. It focuses on stress control, enhanced cognitive-behavioral therapies for children, adolescents and parents, and makes use of digital affective technologies and therapeutic robots.

RESTORY – Recovering Past Stories for the Future: A Synergistic Approach to Textual and Oral Heritage of Small Communities.
Horizon-funded project focused on the challenges faced by small and middle-sized communities of past and present in sustainably managing and reusing a limited amount of human and material resources, with the aim of helping citizens and researchers understand the drives behind (re)use and (re)adaptations.

NOTA – Note-taking and Notebooks as Channels of Medieval Academic Dissemination across Europe.
ERC-funded project studying medieval university learning by delving into deep creative reflections on the motivation and technical aspects involved in producing notebooks of the 14th and 15th centuries, when paper entered universities, aiming to elucidate their role in knowledge transfer.

Some research areas to highlight:

Cutting edge quantum research
Chalmers is building Sweden’s first quantum computer and developing quantum algorithms for application in massive simulations in the research centre WACQT. Also being studied are new quantum materials for quantum technologies, quantum sensing and quantum optics.

Materials research for green transition
At Chalmers, there is experimental and theoretical research in the field of energy. This includes the conversion of solar energy and energy storage in novel batteries to large-scale transport of energy, with significant breakthroughs in structural batteries and floating solar energy. The research is conducted on renewable raw materials, lightweight materials and reduced environmental impact of materials.

Optimisation of human health
Chalmers has a field of research that focuses on optimisation of human health. This includes cutting edge research in the development of improved diagnostics, prevention of resistant bacterial infections, including through the development of materials such as graphene and gels, new methods for drug delivery and precision nutrition.

Microwave and antenna technology
At Chalmers, there are close collaborations with industry leaders for certain research, including improvement of hardware, such as transmitters and receivers for 6G, integration of gallium nitride technology and space components required to perform in extreme conditions. Researchers are developing the wireless systems of the future for everything from cancer treatment to self-driving cars, fast mobile networks and space antennas. Chalmers’ cleanroom and Gigahertz lab are world-class research environments.

Sustainable energy systems
At Chalmers, there is research on electric power generation and distribution to increase renewable and variable electricity in the power system, as well as research into materials and diagnostics for high-voltage networks. Within energy, road transport is the dominant field of research, but there are also studies looking into hydrogen, electric and hybrid vehicles, how a vehicle’s energy impacts design and environmental impact, as well as industrial combustion and gasification processes, carbon capture and energy systems analysis.

About the city of Gothenburg
Gothenburg is an open and welcoming city on the west coast, with a buzzing city centre, a picturesque archipelago and great travel connections to all the capital cities nearby. The city is leading the way in technology and logistics, being the hub for Northern Europe’s automotive industry and the main port for northern Europe. It also boasts thriving industry clusters and two highly ranking universities.

At Kavli INsD, our exceptional team of 38 faculty members and over 450 researchers represents diverse backgrounds in structural biology, biochemistry, pathology, chemistry, physics, physiology, and engineering. United by our shared focus on the nanoscale—the scale of proteins, viruses, and DNA—we are at the forefront of unravelling the mysteries of the most fundamental unit of life: the cell.
Together, we are shaping the future of nanoscience, fostering an inclusive and collaborative working culture, and driving breakthrough discoveries that have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the world around us.
Because our institute covers two very important and highly topical subjects – research culture and interdisciplinarity we believe press coverage would be highly beneficial to publicize these messages.

Our institute also includes four current ERC Advanced, Starter and grantees (Professors Dame Carol Robinson and Molly Stevens, Professors Philipp Kukura and Andrew Baldwin. Importantly our research is also translational with both Refeyn and OMass therapeutics forming on the back of ERC Proof of concept funding.

For details please explore https://kavlinano.ox.ac.uk/research-themes.

Research Themes
1. Understanding biological function and regulation requires characterising biomolecules, and their structures and interactions. Developing new ways to study biomolecules is a major focus of our research, and the tools we develop underpin much of our work (e.g mass spectrometry, next-generation imaging, novel bioanalytic technologies, and biosensors and probes)

2. Advanced diagnostics & personalised medicine – our long-term goal is to democratise and personalise healthcare with ultrasensitive, cost-effective, user-friendly and mobile-connected diagnostic technologies.
Engineering & exploring the bio-material interface – we design biomaterials that influence the behaviour of cells at the interface of living and non-living matter by tweaking the surface chemistry and texture.
Bioelectronics & regenerative engineering – we have a growing portfolio of cutting-edge biomaterials designed to repair tissues, enhance regeneration and deliver drugs to targeted areas of the body.
Digital medicine & big data – we are harnessing the computational power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to enhance understanding of molecules, materials, and processes.

3. Infectious disease poses a huge unmet global medical need leading to ‘spillover’ events – where pathogens move from wildlife or livestock to people – become more common, increasing the frequency of pandemics. We therefore urgently need to strengthen our pandemic preparedness. We are working on SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses, Dengue, Zika, Malaria, Hepatitis B & C

3. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major global health threat. In AMR, microbes such as bacteria develop the ability to survive exposure to the antibiotic drugs that are used to treat and prevent infections. Through the rise of resistance, medical procedures become riskier and common infections untreatable. It has become clear that tackling AMR requires a diverse range of actions, which include developing new antibiotics as well as rapid diagnostics that require understanding the modes of action of existing antibiotics and the mechanisms that fuel resistance, to identify new targets for novel antibiotics and to devise ways to rapidly detect the presence of drug resistance.

4. Neurodegenerative diseases and motor neuron disease, represent an increasing healthcare burden for an ageing global population. Largely untreatable, these diseases are already a leading cause of disability and their prevalence is rising. Our research aims to understand the fundamental biological processes that underlie normal brain development and are responsible for neurodegeneration, and to inform the development of treatments.

5. Amidst a persistent lack of direct evidence linking biological mechanisms to depression symptoms we are charting differences at the molecular level of receptors and transporters at the blood-brain barrier, to also develop effective biomarkers for anhedonic depression to better inform therapeutic intervention.

They are part of the network Climate Change Graz, an association of more than 100 researchers who investigate which economic, production-related, social, political and legal changes are necessary for a profound and sustainable transformation. In addition to scientific excellence the goal is to raise awareness of the urgency and personal concern, especially among opinion leaders and multipliers. And, in a further step, to initiate the creation of new framework conditions that can lead to changes in the behaviour of organisations, companies and people.
There are four research groups at the Wegener Center tackling questions such as: How is global warming developing? How are individuals and society affected by climate change? How do we achieve the net-zero target?

The University of Graz is located in the south-east of Austria. Founded in 1585, it is the second oldest and – with almost 30,000 students and nearly 5000 employees – also the second largest university of the country. It has six faculties – Humanities, Catholic Theology, Natural Sciences, Law, Social and Economic Sciences as well as Environmental, Regional and Educational Sciences. Their key objective is to conduct research at the highest level in these areas. Journalists in residence will have the opportunity to gain insights in all of them.

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

Politecnico di Torino residency program involves ERC researchers in the following research areas:

Computational Electromagnetics (CEM): we investigate the scientific field at the origin of all new modeling and simulation tools to tackle the design challenges of emerging and future technologies in applied electromagnetics- ERC Project 321 From Cubic3 To2 Linear1 Complexity in Computational Electromagnetics.
The Grand Challenge of 321 project is to investigate and exploit a dynamic Fast Direct Solver for Maxwell Problems that would run in a purely linear complexity for an arbitrary number and configuration of degrees of freedom. It will thus solve a scientific problem that the CEM scientific community has been seeking for 20 years.
Host researcher: Francesco Paolo Andriulli

Regenerative Medicine for cardiac tissues: our research will allow direct reprogramming of cardiac cells using in vitro models of human fibrotic heart tissue, followed by in vivo studies – ERC project BIORECAR Direct cell reprogramming therapy in myocardial regeneration through an engineered multifunctional platform integrating biochemical instructive cues.
Through the BIORECAR project, it is expected to get new knowledge on still unexplored regenerative medicine tools that may lead to successful direct reprogramming of human Cardiac fibrotic tissues.
Host Researcher: Valeria Chiono

Nature inspired production of asymmetric materials: symmetry is a key structural feature in natural systems and allows for self-organization and unidirectionality of chemical transformations. We aim to produce materials bearing different functionalities on the two opposite sides – ERC Project JANUS-BI All-liquid phase JANUS BIdimensional materials for functional nano-architectures and assemblies.
The JANUS BI project will deliver fundamentally new abilities to engineer nanomaterials so as to provide “bottom-up” nanoscale-platforms where a tight control over the structural and functional properties is exerted, of major importance for the progress of human ability to mimic natural systems.
Host Researcher: Teresa Gatti

Nanoparticles for innovative therapies to fight cancer: We develop safe and biomimetic nanoparticles, able to travel in the blood stream upon injection and to find their own way to target cells, activated remotely and on-demand against cancer – ERC Project TrojaNanoHorse Hybrid immune-eluding nanocrystals as smart and active theranostic weapons against cancer.
The TrojaNanoHorse project pushes forward the boundaries of the nanomedicine field, proposing innovative tools for cancer treatment which overcome the conventional features of smart drug delivery systems.
Host Researcher: Valentina Cauda

Coupling acoustic and aerodynamic flows for advanced acoustic liners: We work to model how an acoustic wave interacts with an acoustic absorbing surface in the presence of a flow to design novel noise reduction technologies useful in many fields of application from automotive to aerospace– ERC Project LINING Acoustic fLow InteractioN over sound absorbing surfaces: effects on ImpedaNce and drag.
The LINING project pushes the boundaries of our current knowledge by explaining the physical reasons behind unexpected results found in measurements by many labs around the world. Such knowledge can improve the current design approach and pave the way towards more complex geometries, i.e. meta-material, for which the impact of the flow is potentially more relevant than in current technologies.
Host Researcher: Francesco Avallone

Innovative diagnosis methods for cancer and viruses: We develop a novel and cutting-edge diagnostic platform to detect and quantify cancer and viral bio-markers in bodily fluids, making simpler, faster and more economical the diagnosis of many diseases – ERC Project ANFIBIO: Amplification-free Identification of Cancer and Viral Biomarkers via Plasmonic Nanoparticles and Liquid Biopsy.
ANFIBIO seeks to implement a breakthrough concept of DNA and RNA identification that takes inspiration from sequencing technologies and leverages direct SERS sensing and machine learning approaches to deliver a sensitive, accurate, and low-cost platform for the detection of biomarkers of clinical relevance.
Host Researcher: Laura Fabris

Physical principles for a better use of sun energy: We will enhance the capacity of solar energy conversion extending the width of wavelengths that are converted to the full spectral range delivered by the Sun – ERC Project PADEIA Plasmon induced hot electron extraction with doped semiconductors for infrared solAr energy.
PAIDEIA project answers fundamental questions in physics and materials processing of heterojunctions and addresses the grand challenge of secure, clean and efficient energy at the same time.
Host Researcher: Francesco Scotognella

The project will result in global map layers that will allow the identification of critical nutrient run-off sites and carry out the related planning. All the analysis will take place on a global scale, and the results will be tested on pilot sites in Europe and elsewhere. The project will be based on open-source software, so that the resulting data cube solution and machine learning models will be accessible and available for further development by all.