Imperial academics celebrate European grant success

Imperial researchers have won significant funding from the European Research Council (ERC) to further their pioneering research.

Dr Sam Asher (Business School), Dr Michele Shelly Conroy (Engineering), Dr Pierre-François Rodriguez (Natural Sciences) and Professor Claudia Clopath (Department of Bioengineering) were among 328 researchers from across Europe to be awarded in this year’s ERC Consolidator Grants.  

The grants aim to support outstanding scientists and scholars as they establish their independent research teams and develop their most promising scientific ideas.

The funding is provided through the EU’s Horizon Europe programme.

Culture and economic change in India  

Dr Sam Asher, Associate Professor of Economics at the Business School, will use his funding to research the relationship between economic development and cultural change in India. He aims to create the world’s first large-scale dataset on long-run cultural change, which will describe the evolution of cultural norms across nearly 5,000 social groups in India over the 20th century. Using generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Dr Asher and his team will extract data from over 50,000 pages ethnographic reports produced by the Anthropological Survey of India, between 1880 and 1990.

The research aims to generate evidence that can shed light on how economic forces drive cultural evolution, and how the cultural environment shapes people’s access to economic opportunities, particularly among marginalized groups. 

Dr Asher said: “So much of the progress that the world has made in the past one hundred years has come from long-term, slow cultural change, as attitudes around concepts like gender, class, and race have evolved. Economists are waking up to the importance of culture, but we're often limited by the quantitative data available to us. This grant will allow me to develop cutting edge tools to convert qualitative texts on cultural characteristics into long run data on cultural change, and to help to build a community of scholars working on issues like these around the world.”  

Transforming microscopy 

Dr Shelly Conroy, from the Department of Materials, has won a €2.7million grant to transform microscopy techniques. 
 
The five year project, called Dynamic Interfaces: Charge to Spin inside Mobile Ferroelectric (DISCO) aims to create advanced in-situ microscopy tools that use extremely precise electron probes to study tiny, moving interfaces inside materials called multiferroics. 

Dr Conroy explained: “These tools will help researchers better understand how these interfaces change and interact during motion by detecting signals like strain, charge, and spin, something current methods struggle to do. 
 
“The main challenges include developing in-situ techniques sensitive enough to capture these tiny changes and making sure the methods can be practically applied. By overcoming these hurdles, the project hopes to open up new possibilities for technologies like nano-electronics and quantum devices. 
 
“Long term we can then apply these microscopy techniques to the complex interfaces of batteries and other energy devices.” 
 
The grant will fund research staff and students. Dr Conroy also received funding for the UK’s first Helium cooled Transmission electron microscope holder which will enable the exploration of ultra-low-temperature magnetic phases with atomic-scale precision 
 
Dr Conroy will also collaborate with teams at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the USA. 

Dr Conroy added: “Being recognised by the ERC is incredibly meaningful to me. It signifies that my work has been acknowledged at the highest level of scientific excellence and innovation. It also reflects the trust placed in my ability to contribute new insights and push the boundaries in my Physics research field.”  

Understanding universality 

Dr Pierre-François Rodriguez, from the Department of Mathematics, has won a grant worth approximately €2million to help better understand universality. 
 
Scientists have observed that many things in nature behave in similar ways, even if they appear very different. For example, the way cracks spread during an earthquake is a lot like how certain chemicals in our bodies can break down gels, which can lead to diseases like cancer to spread. This idea is called universality. Dr Rodriguez is aiming to better understand this phenomenon and develop the theory that underpins it.  

Dr Rodriguez explained: “Universality is the guiding principle by which the behaviour of many physical systems ought to be largely independent of the specifics of the model considered and instead only depend on few key parameters.  
 
“This phenomenon is far from being well understood rigorously, but the empirical evidence is overwhelming. For instance, it is the reason why the propagation of seismic cracks that generate earthquakes can be compared to the way certain enzymes in our body cause gel degradation, thus leading to metastasis. The objective of this project is to develop the mathematical theory of such ‘critical phenomena’.” 

Dr Rodriguez, whose project is called Universality Classes for Strongly Correlated Random Fields (UniCorn), added: “It's a great honour to be recognized by the ERC in this capacity. It’s a fantastic opportunity both for me and my collaborators to contribute to this line of research under the comfortable umbrella of an ERC grant.”

Horizon Europe at Imperial

Open international collaboration is essential to Imperial's success: our academics work across 192 countries and European partners are critical to this: about 60% of Imperial’s research papers with a US collaborator also have a European co-author, as do 72% with Canada and 81% with Brazil. Participation in the EU research framework programmes is a springboard to productive partnerships across the world – strengthening the influence and impact of UK research. Imperial was the 8^th most successful higher education institution in Horizon 2020 and the programme has funded many collaborations, supporting our researchers to work with colleagues across Europe on vital issues: ranging from new diagnostic tools for childhood disease, an AIDS vaccine and combatting wildfires to quantum, data and climate technologies.

The UK is now fully associated to Horizon Europe and Imperial research can participate in and lead projects across the programme. Just recently, Imperial was named as part of a consortium looking to equip healthcare providers with resources to detect, diagnose and prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Imperial academics have also recently kicked off other Horizon Europe projects on revolutionary optimisation tools to drastically reduce emissions in the design of aero engines, research into exposure to endocrine disruptors and the effects on human health, and helping to better understand cloud-aerosol interactions to more accurately predict extreme weather events and support planning for climate adaption and mitigation.

To find out more about opportunities in Horizon Europe, please get in touch with the Research Office and the Enterprise Research Impact Management Office.