Project acronym ACTIVENP
Project Active and low loss nano photonics (ActiveNP)
Researcher (PI) Thomas Arno Klar
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAT LINZ
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), PE3, ERC-2010-StG_20091028
Summary This project aims at designing novel hybrid nanophotonic devices comprising metallic nanostructures and active elements such as dye molecules or colloidal quantum dots. Three core objectives, each going far beyond the state of the art, shall be tackled: (i) Metamaterials containing gain materials: Metamaterials introduce magnetism to the optical frequency range and hold promise to create entirely novel devices for light manipulation. Since present day metamaterials are extremely absorptive, it is of utmost importance to fight losses. The ground-breaking approach of this proposal is to incorporate fluorescing species into the nanoscale metallic metastructures in order to compensate losses by stimulated emission. (ii) The second objective exceeds the ansatz of compensating losses and will reach out for lasing action. Individual metallic nanostructures such as pairs of nanoparticles will form novel and unusual nanometre sized resonators for laser action. State of the art microresonators still have a volume of at least half of the wavelength cubed. Noble metal nanoparticle resonators scale down this volume by a factor of thousand allowing for truly nanoscale coherent light sources. (iii) A third objective concerns a substantial improvement of nonlinear effects. This will be accomplished by drastically sharpened resonances of nanoplasmonic devices surrounded by active gain materials. An interdisciplinary team of PhD students and a PostDoc will be assembled, each scientist being uniquely qualified to cover one of the expertise fields: Design, spectroscopy, and simulation. The project s outcome is twofold: A substantial expansion of fundamental understanding of nanophotonics and practical devices such as nanoscopic lasers and low loss metamaterials.
Summary
This project aims at designing novel hybrid nanophotonic devices comprising metallic nanostructures and active elements such as dye molecules or colloidal quantum dots. Three core objectives, each going far beyond the state of the art, shall be tackled: (i) Metamaterials containing gain materials: Metamaterials introduce magnetism to the optical frequency range and hold promise to create entirely novel devices for light manipulation. Since present day metamaterials are extremely absorptive, it is of utmost importance to fight losses. The ground-breaking approach of this proposal is to incorporate fluorescing species into the nanoscale metallic metastructures in order to compensate losses by stimulated emission. (ii) The second objective exceeds the ansatz of compensating losses and will reach out for lasing action. Individual metallic nanostructures such as pairs of nanoparticles will form novel and unusual nanometre sized resonators for laser action. State of the art microresonators still have a volume of at least half of the wavelength cubed. Noble metal nanoparticle resonators scale down this volume by a factor of thousand allowing for truly nanoscale coherent light sources. (iii) A third objective concerns a substantial improvement of nonlinear effects. This will be accomplished by drastically sharpened resonances of nanoplasmonic devices surrounded by active gain materials. An interdisciplinary team of PhD students and a PostDoc will be assembled, each scientist being uniquely qualified to cover one of the expertise fields: Design, spectroscopy, and simulation. The project s outcome is twofold: A substantial expansion of fundamental understanding of nanophotonics and practical devices such as nanoscopic lasers and low loss metamaterials.
Max ERC Funding
1 494 756 €
Duration
Start date: 2010-10-01, End date: 2015-09-30
Project acronym HEMOX
Project The male-female health-mortality paradox
Researcher (PI) Marc Luy
Host Institution (HI) OESTERREICHISCHE AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTEN
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH3, ERC-2010-StG_20091209
Summary "From the 1960s to the 1980s a common wisdom about differences between males and females in health and mortality emerged which was summarised by the well-known phrase ""women are sicker, but men die quicker"". Recently this wisdom has been increasingly questioned. Nevertheless, the general idea of a paradoxical relationship between health and mortality among women and men persists until today. The purpose of this project is to decisively advance the understanding of the paradox by demonstrating that the reverse relationship between sex on the one side and health and mortality on the other is not as paradoxical as it seems. We hypothesise that two factors are mainly responsible for causing this intuitive contradiction. First, the overall reversal in sex morbidity and sex mortality differentials occurs because conditions that figure importantly in morbidity are not very important in mortality, and vice versa. Second, it is very likely that longevity is directly related to the absolute number of life years in ill health. Thus, women show higher morbidity rates not because they are female but because they are the sex with higher life expectancy. We will test these hypotheses in a ""natural experiment"" by analysing the relationship between health and mortality among Catholic nuns and monks from Austria and Germany in comparison to women and men of the general population. Cloister studies have a long scientific tradition and provided path-breaking knowledge for human medicine and demography, including the applicant s research during the last decade. This project follows the line of this tradition and will investigate the male-female health-mortality paradox in a longitudinal setting that is as close as one can get to an ideal long-term experiment in humans."
Summary
"From the 1960s to the 1980s a common wisdom about differences between males and females in health and mortality emerged which was summarised by the well-known phrase ""women are sicker, but men die quicker"". Recently this wisdom has been increasingly questioned. Nevertheless, the general idea of a paradoxical relationship between health and mortality among women and men persists until today. The purpose of this project is to decisively advance the understanding of the paradox by demonstrating that the reverse relationship between sex on the one side and health and mortality on the other is not as paradoxical as it seems. We hypothesise that two factors are mainly responsible for causing this intuitive contradiction. First, the overall reversal in sex morbidity and sex mortality differentials occurs because conditions that figure importantly in morbidity are not very important in mortality, and vice versa. Second, it is very likely that longevity is directly related to the absolute number of life years in ill health. Thus, women show higher morbidity rates not because they are female but because they are the sex with higher life expectancy. We will test these hypotheses in a ""natural experiment"" by analysing the relationship between health and mortality among Catholic nuns and monks from Austria and Germany in comparison to women and men of the general population. Cloister studies have a long scientific tradition and provided path-breaking knowledge for human medicine and demography, including the applicant s research during the last decade. This project follows the line of this tradition and will investigate the male-female health-mortality paradox in a longitudinal setting that is as close as one can get to an ideal long-term experiment in humans."
Max ERC Funding
999 999 €
Duration
Start date: 2011-04-01, End date: 2016-09-30
Project acronym HOR.MOON
Project Moonlight-dependent Hormones Orchestrating Lunar Reproductive Periodicity and Regeneration
Researcher (PI) Florian Raible
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAT WIEN
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), LS8, ERC-2010-StG_20091118
Summary The moon governs reproductive cycles in a broad range of marine animals, including cnidarians, polychaetes, crustaceans, echinoderms and fishes. Even outside the animals, lunar reproductive cycles have been described, such as in brown algae or foraminifers. Despite their fundamental nature, and decades of classical observations, close to nothing is known about the molecular processes that underly these lunar reproductive cycles.
We will take advantage of the recent advance in molecular resources and tools in the bristle worm Platynereis dumerilii, which has long served as a key model for classical experimental studies on lunar periodicity. The combination of modern techniques with well-founded classical observations will allow us to decipher, for the first time, the hormonal cues that are regulated by the lunar cycle and are responsible for the orchestration of gonadal maturation and trunk regeneration.
The project builds on established methodology, as well as on the first results of a successful pioneer screen and has three major aims:
(1) the functional investigation of two hormones we recently identified to be under lunar cycle control.
(2) the extension of our successful pioneer screen to understand to which extent other neurohormonal components change over the lunar phase.
(3) the identification of the elusive inhibitory brain hormone that directly acts on the gonads to inhibit premature maturation.
Together, these experiments will lead us to first significant insights into the molecular nature of the hormonal network that underlies moonlight-dependent periodicity and regeneration.
Summary
The moon governs reproductive cycles in a broad range of marine animals, including cnidarians, polychaetes, crustaceans, echinoderms and fishes. Even outside the animals, lunar reproductive cycles have been described, such as in brown algae or foraminifers. Despite their fundamental nature, and decades of classical observations, close to nothing is known about the molecular processes that underly these lunar reproductive cycles.
We will take advantage of the recent advance in molecular resources and tools in the bristle worm Platynereis dumerilii, which has long served as a key model for classical experimental studies on lunar periodicity. The combination of modern techniques with well-founded classical observations will allow us to decipher, for the first time, the hormonal cues that are regulated by the lunar cycle and are responsible for the orchestration of gonadal maturation and trunk regeneration.
The project builds on established methodology, as well as on the first results of a successful pioneer screen and has three major aims:
(1) the functional investigation of two hormones we recently identified to be under lunar cycle control.
(2) the extension of our successful pioneer screen to understand to which extent other neurohormonal components change over the lunar phase.
(3) the identification of the elusive inhibitory brain hormone that directly acts on the gonads to inhibit premature maturation.
Together, these experiments will lead us to first significant insights into the molecular nature of the hormonal network that underlies moonlight-dependent periodicity and regeneration.
Max ERC Funding
1 500 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2010-12-01, End date: 2016-07-31
Project acronym LUISE
Project An integrated socioecological approach to land-use intensity: Analyzing and mapping biophysical stocks/flows and their socioeconomic drivers
Researcher (PI) Karlheinz Erb
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAET KLAGENFURT
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH3, ERC-2010-StG_20091209
Summary Land-use intensity is an essential aspect of the human use of terrestrial ecosystems. In the course of history, intensification of land use allowed to overcome Malthusian traps and supported population growth and im-proved diets. It can be anticipated that intensification will become even more decisive in the future, in the light of a growing world population, surges in biofuel consumption, and the simultaneous mandate to protect the world’s forests. Despite its importance, there is a lack of comprehensive, consistent, systematic, and spa-tially explicit metrics of land-use intensity. In consequence, the causal understanding of the factors, mecha-nisms, determinants and constraints underlying land intensification is unsatisfactory. This is due to the main-stream in land use research that predominantly operates with nominal scales, subdividing the Earth’s surface into discrete land cover units. This hampers the analysis of gradual changes, in particular those which are not related to changes in land cover. Intensification leads exactly to such changes. The overall goal of LUISE is the conceptualization and quantification of land use intensity and to contribute to an improved causal under-standing of land intensification. By applying and significantly extending existing methods of the material and energy flow analysis framework (MEFA), the full cycle of land intensification will be studied: Socioeco-nomic inputs to ecosystems, structural changes within ecosystems, changes in outputs of ecosystems to soci-ety, and the underlying socioeconomic constraints, feedbacks, and thresholds, from top-down macro perspec-tives as well as applying bottom-up approaches. The anticipated new empirical results and insights can allow further conceptualizations and quantifications of land modifications (land change without land cover change), and improve the understanding of the dynamic and complex interplay of society and nature that shapes spatial patterns as well as changes of land systems over time.
Summary
Land-use intensity is an essential aspect of the human use of terrestrial ecosystems. In the course of history, intensification of land use allowed to overcome Malthusian traps and supported population growth and im-proved diets. It can be anticipated that intensification will become even more decisive in the future, in the light of a growing world population, surges in biofuel consumption, and the simultaneous mandate to protect the world’s forests. Despite its importance, there is a lack of comprehensive, consistent, systematic, and spa-tially explicit metrics of land-use intensity. In consequence, the causal understanding of the factors, mecha-nisms, determinants and constraints underlying land intensification is unsatisfactory. This is due to the main-stream in land use research that predominantly operates with nominal scales, subdividing the Earth’s surface into discrete land cover units. This hampers the analysis of gradual changes, in particular those which are not related to changes in land cover. Intensification leads exactly to such changes. The overall goal of LUISE is the conceptualization and quantification of land use intensity and to contribute to an improved causal under-standing of land intensification. By applying and significantly extending existing methods of the material and energy flow analysis framework (MEFA), the full cycle of land intensification will be studied: Socioeco-nomic inputs to ecosystems, structural changes within ecosystems, changes in outputs of ecosystems to soci-ety, and the underlying socioeconomic constraints, feedbacks, and thresholds, from top-down macro perspec-tives as well as applying bottom-up approaches. The anticipated new empirical results and insights can allow further conceptualizations and quantifications of land modifications (land change without land cover change), and improve the understanding of the dynamic and complex interplay of society and nature that shapes spatial patterns as well as changes of land systems over time.
Max ERC Funding
887 121 €
Duration
Start date: 2010-10-01, End date: 2016-06-30
Project acronym MEDEA
Project Microbial Ecology of the DEep Atlantic pelagic realm
Researcher (PI) Gerhard Herndl
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAT WIEN
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), LS8, ERC-2010-AdG_20100317
Summary The project aims at elucidating a major enigma in microbial ecology, i.e., the metabolic activity of prokaryotic communities in the deep sea under in situ pressure conditions, rather than under surface pressure conditions, as commonly done. Analysis of the global data set of prokaryotic abundance indicates that about 40% of prokaryotes reside in depth below 1000m depth with a phylogenetic composition different from that in surface waters. Using a recently fabricated high-pressure sampling and incubation system in combination with advanced tools to assess phylogenetic diversity, gene expression and single-cell activity, we will be able to resolve this enigma on a prokaryotic community level as well as on a phylotype level. This detailed knowledge on the distribution of the auto- and heterotrophic activity of deep-sea prokaryotes under in situ pressure conditions is essential to refine our view on the oceanic biogeochemical cycles, and to obtain a mechanistic understanding of the functioning of deep-sea microbial food webs.
Summary
The project aims at elucidating a major enigma in microbial ecology, i.e., the metabolic activity of prokaryotic communities in the deep sea under in situ pressure conditions, rather than under surface pressure conditions, as commonly done. Analysis of the global data set of prokaryotic abundance indicates that about 40% of prokaryotes reside in depth below 1000m depth with a phylogenetic composition different from that in surface waters. Using a recently fabricated high-pressure sampling and incubation system in combination with advanced tools to assess phylogenetic diversity, gene expression and single-cell activity, we will be able to resolve this enigma on a prokaryotic community level as well as on a phylotype level. This detailed knowledge on the distribution of the auto- and heterotrophic activity of deep-sea prokaryotes under in situ pressure conditions is essential to refine our view on the oceanic biogeochemical cycles, and to obtain a mechanistic understanding of the functioning of deep-sea microbial food webs.
Max ERC Funding
2 500 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2011-07-01, End date: 2016-06-30
Project acronym NANOPHYS
Project Nanophysiology of fast-spiking, parvalbumin-expressing GABAergic interneurons
Researcher (PI) Peter Jonas
Host Institution (HI) INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGYAUSTRIA
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), LS5, ERC-2010-AdG_20100317
Summary In the present proposal, we plan to examine the dendrites, axons, and presynaptic terminals of fast-spiking, parvalbumin-expressing GABAergic interneurons using subcellular patch-clamp methods pioneered by the PI, imaging techniques, and computational approaches.
The goal is to obtain a quantitative nanophysiological picture of signaling in this key type of interneuron. By incorporating realistic BC models into dentate gyrus network models, we will be able to test the contribution of this important type of GABAergic interneuron to complex functions of the dentate gyrus, such as pattern separation, temporal deconvolution, and conversion from grid to place codes. The results may lay the basis for the development of new therapeutic strategies for treatment of diseases of the nervous system, targeting interneurons at subcellularly defined locations.
Summary
In the present proposal, we plan to examine the dendrites, axons, and presynaptic terminals of fast-spiking, parvalbumin-expressing GABAergic interneurons using subcellular patch-clamp methods pioneered by the PI, imaging techniques, and computational approaches.
The goal is to obtain a quantitative nanophysiological picture of signaling in this key type of interneuron. By incorporating realistic BC models into dentate gyrus network models, we will be able to test the contribution of this important type of GABAergic interneuron to complex functions of the dentate gyrus, such as pattern separation, temporal deconvolution, and conversion from grid to place codes. The results may lay the basis for the development of new therapeutic strategies for treatment of diseases of the nervous system, targeting interneurons at subcellularly defined locations.
Max ERC Funding
2 500 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2011-06-01, End date: 2017-02-28
