Six new Studentships for Portuguese scientists

The European ResearchCouncil (ERC) has awarded six new Studentships total of €11.1 million to Portuguese researchers working at FCT Units. These Studentships, known as Starting Grants, are intended for researchers at the beginning of their careers, with 2 to 7 years of experience. In the recently published list of results, this program awarded a total of €677 million to 436 European scientists. The Studentships for five years and allow the recipients, from different scientific fields, to form their own research groups to develop their projects approved for funding. 

The researchers and national projects included in the Call Grants 2020 Call are:

Ricardo Agarez, from the Interdisciplinary Center for History, Cultures, and Societies at the University of Évora, with the ReARQ project .IB – Built Environment Knowledge for Resilient, Sustainable Communities: Understanding Everyday Modern Architecture and Urban Design in the Iberian Peninsula (1939-1985), which aims to focus on the adaptation and revaluation of existing buildings rather than new construction, saving economic and material resources.

Elias Barriga, from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, with the project MOVE_ME: Mechanical and Electrical Guidance of Collective Cell Migration in vivo;

Sónia Cruz, from the Center for Environmental and Marine Studies (CESAM) at the University of Aveiro, with the project KleptoSlug – Kleptoplasty: The sea slug that got away with stolen chloroplasts, which focuses on the process of kleptoplasty in sea slugs of the order Sacoglossa;

Bárbara Gomes, from the Center for Innovative Biomedicine and Biotechnology (CIBB) at the University of Coimbra, with the project EOLinPLACE – Choice of where we die: a classification reform to discern diversity in individual end-of-life pathways, a study on citizens' experiences regarding where they prefer to die and where they actually die;

Albino Oliveira Maia, from the Champalimaud Foundation, with the project CalorieRL: Reinforcement learning from post-ingestive calories: from body to brain in health and disease, which will investigate food choice in humans;

Paulo Rocha, from the University of Coimbra, with the GREEN project : Generating Energy from Electroactive Algae, which aims to generate clean and sustainable energy through communication between algae;

Filipe Calvão, Portuguese researcher working at the Institut de Hautes Études Internationales et du Développement in Switzerland on the SYNTHLIVES project – Synthetic Lives: The Futures of Mining.