ERC grants consolidation to lowland science stars

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the winners of its latest Consolidator Grant competition. Among the 301 lucky scientists and scholars are Raphael Jungers from KU Leuven, Clement Merckling from Imec, Mariëlle Stoelinga from University of Twente, Koen Vandewal from University of Hasselt and Stefan Witte from the Advanced Research Center for Nanolithography. Funding for these researchers, part of the Horizon 2020 program, is worth a total of 600 million euros. This support enables the new grantees to strengthen their own research lines.

In her project entitled “Caesar: integrating safety and cybersecurity through stochastic model checking”, UT professor Stoelinga aims to develop a new and superior model for making improved and integrated assessments that take both safety and security risks into account. It could be applied, for instance, to the Internet of Things, as well as emerging technologies such as drones or self-driving cars. KU Leuven’s Jungers was selected for his project “Learning to control”, in which he’s going to look at smart and data-driven formal methods for cyber-physical systems control.

Imec’s Meckling has been awarded a Consolidator Grant for working out his project called “Notice”. The ground-breaking idea of this project is the research of novel oxides and experimental realization of topological interfaces to generate Majorana fermions that will lead to fault-tolerant qubits devices – building blocks of the next-generation quantum computers. These “Majorana qubits” are expected to be immune to decoherence – a phenomenon that induces the loss of quantum information. UHasselt’s Vandewal’s project is to investigate charge-transfer states for high-performance organic electronics.