Two more Portuguese researchers awarded ERC Studentships

This March, the European Research Council (ERC) announced the award of two more Studentships for research carried out in Portugal. The research projects of Cristiana Bastos, principal investigator at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) at the University of Lisbon, and Luís Oliveira e Silva, full professor at the Physics Department and president of the scientific council at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), were awarded the ERC's most prestigious Studentship - the Advanced Grant.

The Advanced Grants are the highest value Studentships awarded by the European Research Council, which were conceived by this institution to ensure that leading researchers of any age and nationality continue to develop innovative and challenging research projects within Europe.

Cristiana Bastos' project is entitled "The Colour of Work: The Racialized Lives of Migrants" and focuses on racism, racialization, borders and migration, by studying the intercontinental flows of workers in the post-abolition of slavery and the dynamics of inclusion/tension/competition that were established locally, accompanied by conceptual formations that are sometimes presented as racial science. From the Portuguese point of view, it takes a look at expansion in an entirely different way to the one that prevails to this day, replacing the narrative of caravels and discoveries with that of work, hardship and social conquests. But the aim of the project is broader and, as the evaluators, who unanimously pointed out its originality and ambition, pointed out, it opens up new frontiers in the current state of knowledge, bringing together different scientific fields, methodologies, points of observation and theoretical goals. The Advanced Grant awarded to the project is worth 2.2 million euros.

Cristiana Bastos is an anthropologist. She coordinates the Identities, Cultures, Vulnerabilities research group at the Institute of Social Sciences. She graduated from the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities (FCSH-UNL) and received her PhD from the City University of New York. Her interests lie at the intersection of anthropology, history and social studies of science, materializing in lines of research on population dynamics, transnational mobility, colonial biopolitics, medicine and empire, and the social history of health and well-being.

The Studentship awarded to Luís Oliveira e Silva recognizes the importance of his exploratory work into the mechanisms that allow laser light to be converted into matter and antimatter, a direct illustration of Einstein's famous formula E=mc2. Using the world's largest supercomputers, the project, called InPairs, will also study the collective properties resulting from the interaction of photons, electrons and positrons in the presence of ultra-intense fields. These extreme environments can be found in some of the most spectacular events in the Universe, such as neutron stars and pulsars. It is also intended to identify how to reproduce these extreme conditions in the laboratory, for example in the focus of ultra-intense lasers, and to explore the use of such configurations to produce high-quality gamma-ray sources. The Advanced Grant awarded to Luís Oliveira e Silva is worth 1.950 million euros. The researcher had already been awarded this ERC Studentship in 2010, to the value of 1.6 million euros, making him the first researcher working in Portugal in the field of physical sciences and engineering to be awarded an Advanced Grant twice.

Luís Oliveira e Silva has a degree in Engineering Technology Physics and a PhD in Physics from IST, did his post-doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles (USA), and leads the theory and numerical simulation team of the Lasers and Plasmas Group at the Institute of Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion (IST), an FCT-funded institution where the InPairs project will be developed.