RAN Newsletter 01/2025 Heidelberg scientists receive ERC grants

Prestigious grants from the European Research Council (ERC) were awarded to two researchers at Heidelberg University at the end of 2024: Prof. Dr. Astrid Eichhorn received an ERC Consolidator Grant to research the quantum nature of gravity with her team; Dr. Venera Weinhardt was awarded an ERC Synergy Grant for a pioneering biomedical project.

For her investigations into the fundamental building blocks of the universe Prof. Dr Astrid Eichhorn, a scientist at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of Heidelberg University, is to receive valuable funding from the European Research Council (ERC). An ERC Consolidator Grant will go to the physicist in order to probe the quantum nature of gravity with her team. Over a period of five years, she will receive two million euros in funding

With her research, Prof. Eichhorn aims to better understand the interplay of fundamental building blocks of our universe – space-time, the elementary particles of the Standard Model of particle physics, dark matter and dark energy. In her ERC-funded project “Probing the Quantum Nature of Gravity at All Scales” (ProbeQG) she wants to primarily explore how to test fundamental theories on the quantum structure of space-time through experiments and observations. The central challenge is that the quantum properties of space-time manifest on tiny length scales – about 17 orders of magnitude below the scales that can be directly examined experimentally by the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator of the European research center CERN. The main idea of the ProbeQG project is to identify “lever arms”. These are systems that translate the effects of quantum gravity on tiny scales into effects that are experimentally accessible. To that end, Prof. Eichhorn wants to build a bridge between the theory of asymptotically safe quantum gravity and particle physics, the physics of black holes and cosmology. The European Research Council awards the ERC Consolidator Grant to outstanding researchers with the aim of consolidating their academic independence. The central criterion for funding is scientific excellence.

Heidelberg scientist Dr Venera Weinhardt has received an ERC Synergy Grant for a pioneering biomedical research project in collaboration with teams in Ireland and the United Kingdom. The European Research Council (ERC) is granting this highly endowed funding to advance soft X-ray microscopy. This innovative imaging technique along with other innovations will be used to investigate the hepatitis E virus. The synergetic project is at the interface of physics, structural biology, and infection biology and is coordinated at University College Dublin. To fund the six-year-long research studies, the ERC is making available approximately six million euros, of which just under 1.8 million euros are for Dr Weinhardt’s research at the Institute for Molecular Systems Engineering and Advanced Materials of Heidelberg University.

Viral pathogens, such as the hepatitis E virus, change the inner structure of the cells they infect. Visualizing and quantifying these changes at the level of individual cell components is, according to Dr Weinhardt, a challenge in current research. The goal of the ERC project “Nanoscale X-ray tissue imaging: understanding the pathophysiology of hepatitis E infection” (NanoX) is to make soft X-ray microscopy usable for this. This technique is used to image cultivated cells but has not yet been used to examine cells in the complicated three-dimensional architecture of tissue with its complex cell-cell interactions. Together with Dr Nicola Fletcher (Dublin) and Prof. Dr Maria Harkiolaki (Warwick), the Heidelberg scientist is working on several technological innovations in this context. They are a microbiopsy tool for rapid, targeted tissue sampling, high-tech 3D imaging with nanometer-resolution, and novel AI-based data analysis approaches to uncover hidden patterns and structures at the subcellular level. With unprecedented detail and complexity, these innovations are intended to provide insights into the pathogenesis of the hepatitis E virus, which causes an infection with no specific therapies or vaccines available. The ERC Synergy Grants fund collaborative projects that, due to their complexity, are carried out by several scientists and their groups, in order to achieve breakthroughs that would not be possible in individual projects.