The ERC awards Starting Grants to talented early-career scientists, who have already produced excellent supervised work and are ready to work independently and show potential to be a research leader.
ERC Starting Grants in 2022
Dr. Jess Bier - research on how the digitalisation of container shipping is reshaping inequalities.
Shipping is currently undergoing rapid changes as it digitalizes its workflows. It is unknown if digitalisation will help or hinder worker equality, or for which groups. Jess Bier's research is the first ethnographic study of the digitalisation of shipping.
Jess Bier: "This project innovatively combines critical logistics and algorithm studies. We will study the on-the-ground implementation of digital infrastructures to better understand how it is reconfiguring four processes of racialisation: the displacement, classification, criminalisation, and related precarity of work."
Dr. Tom Emery - research on childcare and inequality.
Tom Emery's project is highly interdisciplinary, combining theories and methods from demography, sociology, economics, network analysis and social policy. He investigates how the use of formal childcare is spread across low-income populations.
Tom Emery: "The project will use state of the art, secure high performance computing facilities through ODISSEI to examine childcare arrangements amongst parents of young children. The big innovation in this project is that we not only look at how a couple arranges their own childcare, but we see how that is influenced by their neighbours, colleagues, and family members' own childcare arrangements. This type of analysis wasn't possible until very recently as it requires a lot of computing power and very high-quality data that are only available through the integrated infrastructure provided by ODISSEI".
Previous years
An overview of the winners.
Early roots of lying in families.
Genes, Policy, and Social Inequality.
An overview of the two winners:
Comprehensive anatomical, genetic and functional identification of cerebellar nuclei neurons and their roles in sensorimotor tasks.
For this ERC funded project Zhenyu Gao focused on deciphering the anatomical, physiological and molecular properties of cerebellar nuclei neurons. This effort will eventually help to understand how cerebellar outputs are determined by their differential functional demands of sensorimotor tasks, and shed light on the cerebellar control of different brain regions.
Developmental Origins: exploring the Nature-Nurture Interplay.
Klazina Kooiman (Erasmus MC, Department of Biomedical Engineering) - Diagnosing and treating bacterial infections on cardiac devices with ultrasound and microbubbles
Bacterial infections on devices that support cardiac function such as a pacemaker, an artificial cardiac valve, or a ventricular assist device, are life-threatening and difficult to diagnose and treat. Dr Klazina Kooiman’s research focuses on developing miniscule gas bubbles that attach themselves to the infection. These microbubbles will vibrate when exposed to ultrasound frequencies. This makes early-stage detection of the infection using an ultrasound possible, and the infection can then be treated. With this new multidisciplinary technique, we expect to see a breakthrough in the diagnosis and treatment of bacterial infections on devices used to support cardiac function.
Quantitative and qualitative social science: a unified logic of causal inference?
FATHERCHILD: the role of the father in child development
Unravelling mechanisms that cause bone marrow fibrosis