ERC Starting Grants to researchers in linguistics and neuro-oncology

In total, 421 researchers in Europe receive €1.5 million each to develop their research and build up their research teams. Twenty-two of these researchers have a Swedish host university, and two of these grants have come to Uppsala University.

Eline Visser is an associate senior lecturer in linguistics at the Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University. She has received the grant for the ALD project: Automating Language Documentation.

Almost half of the world’s 7,000 languages are at risk of disappearing, and the work to document them takes a great deal of time. In the ALD project, she is investigating how large language models (LLM) can help researchers to document endangered languages more efficiently, and to develop tools and methods that other language researchers can use.

“It feels fantastic to receive the ERC Starting Grant as an endorsement that documenting languages should be prioritised. We intend to see how we can use machine learning, and especially large language models, in documenting previously undocumented languages. Then we’ll make our methods available to linguists, which they can use without them needing to have a lot of technical knowledge,” says Eline Visser.

Verónica Rendo is associate senior lecturer in neuro-oncology at the Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Uppsala University. She has received the grant for the RESET-DMG project: Decoding the transcriptional and evolutionary maps of diffuse midline glioma to overcome treatment resistance.

This project is investigating why diffuse midline glioma, a kind of brain tumour that mainly affects children, can become resistant to treatment. The researchers are working to understand how tumour cells change and adapt to survive treatment, with the goal of being able to predict and arrest resistance before it develops, thereby improving current treatment outcomes.

“Words cannot describe how happy I feel about this. This grant represents a fantastic opportunity to expand my research group and have the resources to conduct pioneering research aimed at understanding why children with diffuse midline glioma – one of the deadliest forms of paediatric cancer – do not respond to treatment. Ultimately, I hope that this work will help us develop better and less toxic treatment methods that selectively target the cancer cells while sparing the healthy cells in the brain,” says Verónica Rendo.

Anders Berndt