Scientists awarded share of €677 million to unravel scientific mysteries

Three early career researchers at the University of Birmingham have been awarded 2020 European Research Council Starting Grants to tackle some of the biggest scientific questions of our time. The funding, worth in total €677 million has been awarded to 436 laureates at universities and research centres across Europe. The fund is designed to help these early-career scientists and scholars to build their own teams and conduct pioneering research across all disciplines. The grants are part of the EU's Research and Innovation programme, Horizon 2020. The three University of Birmingham laureates are: Dr Davide Gerosa , School of Physics and Astronomy Dr Gerosa is leading an ambitious programme to use data-mining techniques to explore catalogues of thousands of gravitational wave events that will soon be available for scientific exploration. Called GWmining, the programme will develop a framework to analyse this data in exquisite detail, enabling scientists to make ever more detailed and accurate predictions and observations about some of the most extraordinary events in our Universe. Dr Matt Nicholl, School of Physics and Astronomy The KilonovaRank (KRANK) project, led by Dr Nicholl also aims to harness the power of big data in exploring large cosmic events. Dr Nicholl will be drawing together data from the Vera Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time, together with data from the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors and developing techniques to find the most energetic and extreme collisions, disruptions and explosions. The aim is to explore the fates of massive stars, the origins of the biggest black holes, and the sources of the heaviest chemical elements. Dr Richard Montgomery, School of Mathematics