Major European starting grants awarded

The European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants for 2020 have been awarded to 436 researchers from across Europe. The awards will help individual researchers to build their own teams and conduct world-leading research across all disciplines, creating an estimated 2,500 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and other staff at the host institutions.

The successful Cambridge researchers are:

• Jessica Fintzen for p-adic Groups, Representations, and the Langlands Program

• Alice Hutchings for Interdisciplinary Cybercrime Project

• Guy Jacobs for Movement networks and genetic evolution among tropical hunter-gatherers of island Southeast Asia

• Luca Magri for Physics-constrained adaptive learning for multiphysics optimization

• Amanda Prorok for Scalable Co-optimization of Collective Robotic Mobility and the Artificial Environment

• Maria Ubiali for Physics Beyond the Standard Proton

The ERC-funded research will be carried out in 25 countries across Europe, with institutions from Germany (88 grants), the UK (62), the Netherlands (42) and France (38) to host the highest number of projects. The grants, worth in total €677 million, are part of the EU Research and Innovation programme, Horizon 2020.

Peter Hedges, Head of the University Research Office at Cambridge, said:

“The continuing success of UK researchers, and in particular Cambridge researchers, in winning ERC funding demonstrates the world-leading position that our country holds in research and innovation. We are delighted that many of our successful ERC fellows are non-UK nationals, given the importance that Cambridge places on attracting the very best talent from around the world.”

Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, said:

“With European Research Council grants, the EU is leveraging the talent and curiosity of some of the best young researchers in Europe. Their ideas are set to break fresh ground and open new ways to deal with pressing challenges in the areas of health, energy and digital technologies, as well as many other fields. Our ambition to effectively tackle current and future crises depends on our strong will to continuously and increasingly support top research at the frontiers of our knowledge.”

President of the European Research Council (ERC), Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, added:

“The present health crisis showed that despite spectacular progress in research over the past decades, there still remain plenty of unsolved scientific mysteries, as well as lessons to be learnt from the past. Therefore, the best strategy to tackle it is to enable some of the brightest minds to pursue their most innovative ideas, in order to create opportunities for serendipitous discoveries. This is what the European Research Council is for. It’s clear that, if Europe is to be competitive globally, it needs to give excellent prospects to the next generation of researchers as these ERC Starting Grants do, and to invest much more in top blue sky research.”

Researcher profile

Among Cambridge’s successful awardees this year is Dr Alice Hutchings, a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science & Technology and Deputy-Director of the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre.

Alice is a strong advocate for interdisciplinary research. With a background in criminology, her research focus is on cybercrime. Her ERC-funded project, iCrime, will research cybercrime offenders, their crimes, criminogenic cyberspaces, and evaluate interventions designed to prevent and disrupt cybercrime.

Dr Hutchings said: “My experience is that the University is supportive of interdisciplinary research, and I am grateful for the opportunity to help build upon this major strength.

“The research staff and doctoral students engaged in the project will integrate skills and tools from computer science, criminology, and related disciplines. For example, from computer science we will use machine learning to classify massive datasets; tools to automate the detection of, and measure change in, criminal infrastructure; and technical knowledge about complex cybercrimes and how to prevent them.

“Criminology provides frameworks for theorising about offenders’ involvement in crime and how crimes may be prevented, as well as methodologies to evaluate the effects of interventions designed to disrupt crime.”

Researcher profile

Dr Guy Jacobs is Lecturer in Human Evolutionary Genetics and Bioinformatics in the University’s Department of Archaeology.

Guy did his undergraduate studies in biological anthropology at Cambridge before moving to the University of Southampton to complete a PhD in complex systems simulation, exploring computational models of natural selection and invasive species dispersal. He then left for Singapore, carrying out postdoctoral work at the Complexity Institute, Nanyang Technological University, where he joined a collaboration with the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology analysing patterns of genetic diversity in island Southeast Asia. He became interested in the social rules structuring movement in different groups and their evolutionary effects, firstly focusing on marriage practices such as matrilocality and patrilocality and then on mobility among traditionally hunter-gatherer groups on the island of Borneo.

Having rejoined in Cambridge in 2020, his ERC grant will now let him investigate the potential adaptive role of movement, both in terms of redistributing human variation and in structuring the transmission of allied biology – our co-evolving microbiome, with all its health associations.

“While migration is recognised as a fundamental process structuring genetic evolution, we know very little about how movement choices impact biological diversity at local scales in traditional societies, including hunter-gatherer groups. These choices – where people decide to go, when, and with whom – are part of the adaptive context of our species, and impact ongoing health, most obviously through disease transmission.

“This highly interdisciplinary project will work with the Eijkman Institute and communities in Indonesia to study ongoing movement patterns and social networks, as well as human genetic and microbiome diversity. Our aim is to understand the functional impact of movement on human adaptation and health in island Southeast Asia. It’s an exciting and pioneering study, and I’m hugely grateful to the ERC, Cambridge, my global collaborators, and the communities involved in our projects for helping to make it happen.”