Two researchers at Uppsala University receive ERC Advanced Grants
Joseph Minahan, Professor of Theoretical Physics, and Christer Betsholtz, Professor of Tumour and Vascular Biology, have each been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant. Photo: Linda Koffmar and Göran Ekeberg
Professor Christer Betsholtz, Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, and Professor Joseph Minahan, Department of Physics and Astronomy and Department of Mathematics, have each been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant by the European Research Council. The grant is for EUR 2.5 million over a five-year period.
Christer Betsholtz, Professor of Tumour and Vascular Biology, has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant to study the function of the arachnoid barrier in the mammalian brain. Scientists have known about the existence of this molecular barrier, which is the middle of the three meninges that protect the brain, since the 1970s. However, its function and role in diseases such as traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s disease and brain tumours have not been clarified.
Now Betsholtz and his research team will try to do precisely that thanks to the ERC grant. By creating animal models in which they can selectively knock out the arachnoid barrier, they can study the effects that this has. The research team has previously used these methods to knock out parts of another of the brain’s protective barriers, the blood-brain barrier, and examined the results.
“I am very happy and grateful for the support for this project. Hopefully, it will lead to new fundamental insights into the barrier functions of the meninges in health and disease,” says Betsholz.
Strong forces holding the protons together
Joseph Minahan, Professor of Theoretical Physics, has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant to study the strong forces holding the building blocks of protons together. His project is called Integrable Gauge Theories at Finite Temperature (IGTaFT).
The strong force that binds quarks inside a proton has a property called confinement. This means that the quarks cannot exist on their own but have to be inside some other particle. However, if a gas of protons is heated to a critical temperature, which can be achieved by high-energy heavy ion collisions, it will undergo a phase transition and behave like a gas of free quarks. This process is known as de-confinement.
“The purpose of IGTaFT is to study this de-confinement in more tractable models that have a property called integrability. Integrability allows us to make exact predictions about de-confinement that we hope can be applied to the physical world. Over the past two years, we have made significant progress in studying this problem. The ERC Advanced Grant will allow us to continue this research in the coming years,” says Minahan.
The grant will make it possible to recruit a total of five postdoctoral researchers and two doctoral students.
Åsa Malmberg
European Research Council (ERC)
The European Research Council, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. Every year, it selects and funds the very best, creative researchers. The ERC awards four types of grants: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants.
The ERC Advanced Grant is designed for well-established principal investigators who are scientifically independent and whose research track-record identifies them as leaders in their field.