Personal ERC Grants totaling over 7 million euros

The European Research Council (ERC) has recently announced that it will award three additional researchers from TU Dresden with generous funding as part of the ERC Grants program. These come in addition to the three ERC Grants already allocated since the beginning of the year. The ERC Grants from the EU – the most renowned funding body for top research in Europe – support the best researchers in implementing the most brilliant ideas. The ERC was part of “Excellent Science” – the first pillar of the EU’s “Horizon 2020” program for research and innovation (H2020, 2014–2020). It has since been incorporated into the “Excellent Science” pillar of the European Union’s new program for research and innovation “Horizon Europe” (2021–2027).

ERC Grants are 100% grants, which means that they cover all costs incurred as part of a project – personnel costs, consumable supplies, travel, publication costs, equipment, subcontracts, etc. This makes it possible to establish or consolidate entire research groups.

Prof. Triantafyllos Chavakis, Director of the Institute of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine at TU Dresden’s Carl Gustav Carus Faculty of Medicine, has achieved particular success with the receipt of an ERC Advanced Grant amounting to 2.49 million euros over a period of five years. This comes in addition to his previous successes having been awarded ERC Starting and ERC Consolidator Grants. He and his team are researching mechanisms for the emergence of metabolic inflammation.

Chronic inflammation is an underlying effect of many illnesses. In patients with obesity and metabolic syndrome, chronic inflammation promotes the emergence and advancement of metabolic disorders such as diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, considered widespread diseases on account of the proportion of the population affected. The inflammation associated with such metabolic disorders is also called metabolic inflammation.

But how does metabolic inflammation in metabolic syndrome become chronic, no longer restricted to the fatty tissue and liver, but rather affecting more and more organs? And how can metabolic inflammation predispose people to comorbidity? These are the questions Prof. Chavakis seeks to investigate in his funded project. He will follow an innovative method, where both local (at the level of the tissue in question, meaning the fatty tissue and the liver) and holistic mechanisms will be explored. These holistic mechanisms also include training the immune response, for instance by adapting long-lasting progenitor cells amongst the inflammatory cells in the bone marrow. This project thus seeks to better understand chronic metabolic inflammation. This is also an important prerequisite for preventing, attenuating or even fully hindering negative effects of chronic metabolic inflammation in the future.

Prof. Stefan Kaskel from the Faculty of Chemistry and Food Chemistry can also celebrate another success in this funding line. Following his first ERC Advanced Grant in 2017, he has once again received an ERC Advanced Grant, this time totaling 2.38 million euros over five years for his project “IONOLOGIC.” The Chair of Inorganic Chemistry at TU Dresden and his team are pursuing the “Ultracapacitor Logic Gates” (IONOLOGIC) project to break new ground in computer architectures based on signal processing in physiological nervous systems. This relies on ions and chemical information, and is therefore optimized to expend very little energy. The IONOLOGIC project aims to develop ion-based computer technologies that reduce computers’ energy consumption and enable on-chip energy management in autonomous microelectronic components and biological interfaces.

These successes place Prof. Chavakis and Prof. Kaskel among the top researchers worldwide.

A research group working under the medical and tumor specialist Prof. Peter Friedl from Radboud University’s Nijmegen Medical Center (Netherlands) has also received an ERC Advanced Grant for its submitted proposal. Their stated mission is to develop novel chemoimmunotherapies against tumor diseases on the basis of innovative, experimental methods and mathematical modeling. One of the group’s researchers is Prof. Andreas Deutsch from TU Dresden’s Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing. His portion of the grant amounts to 379,000 euros over five years.

“These ERC Grants represent immense success for TU Dresden,” enthuses Prof. Ursula M. Staudinger, Rector of TU Dresden. “They join the ranks of the outstanding successes seen from this highly intense competition for funding, for example those from 2015 and 2019.”

Prof. Angela Rösen-Wolff, Vice-Rector Research at TU Dresden, underscored this statement, adding, “These terrific individual achievements of the ERC Grant recipients represent great success for TU Dresden and substantiate the excellent foundation for international, competitive, cutting-edge research at our university. I would like to offer my sincere congratulations to the ERC Grant recipients and wish them continued success with their research projects!”

TU Dresden was also pleased to announce the success of four other researchers in acquiring ERC Grants awarded several weeks ago. One ERC Consolidator Grant of over two million euros for the next five years was awarded to Prof. Stefan Kaiser from the Faculty of Physics for a new method for researching superconductors. The Chair of Ultrafast Solid State Physics and Photonics at TU Dresden seeks to develop a new form of spectroscopy – Higgs spectroscopy – and thus achieve a better understanding of quantum materials, in particular high-temperature superconductors. With the “T-Higgs” project, Stefan Kaiser will use terahertz lasers to induce Higgs oscillations in superconductors. Higgs oscillations emit a signal containing characteristics of the superconductor that can be read using the new method of spectroscopy, thus leading to a deeper understanding of how superconductors work. “The ERC Grant enables me to develop the new method of Higgs spectroscopy and to put together a team that will find an answer to this fascinating question,” Stefan Kaiser says, explaining his project.

Prof. Michael Sieweke from TU Dresden’s Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) has been awarded an ERC Proof of Concept Grant for his research on fighting tumors with macrophages. There is a lot of hope that new cell therapies could combat cancer, but the previous treatments are ineffective against solid tumors. Prof. Michael Sieweke and his group are attempting to overcome this problem with macrophages – specific immune cells that penetrate tumors and attack them from the inside. The transnational project emerged from the basic research associated with Prof. Michael Sieweke’s ERC Advanced Grant and aims to rejuvenate macrophages and to combat geriatric disorders including cancer. It is receiving a total of 150,000 euros in support over the next 18 months.

An ERC Starting Grant of up to 1.5 million euros was given to the researcher Dr. Erika Covi. The European Research Council is promoting her pioneering research project MEMRINESS at NaMLab gGmbH, a full subsidiary of TU Dresden.

Within the project (Memristive Neurons and Synapses for Neuromorphic Edge Computing), Dr. Erika Covi and her team will use the physical properties of newly emerging memristive components to develop neurons and synapses that provide the necessary primitives inspired by the brain in order to develop power-saving and memory-efficient intelligent edge devices capable of learning online together. The newly developed neurons and synapses will be validated in a hardware spiking neural network and in three collaborative scenarios with increasing complexity.

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