KU Leuven Researchers Five ERC Consolidator Grants

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded its Consolidator Grants. This year, five KU Leuven researchers may receive such a grant: Thomas Elias Cocolios, Liesbet Geris, Kris Myny, Bram Van de Poel and Marian Verhelst.

ERC Consolidator Grants are grants for outstanding researchers who obtained their PhD seven to 12 years ago. The grants are awarded for a period of five years and can amount to up to EUR 2 million.

Thomas Elias Cocolios: Understanding the atomic nucleus better
Associate Professor Faculty of Science, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Institute for Nuclear and Radiation Physics

How does the interaction within atomic nuclei provide the complex structure of atoms?
Are there limits to the number of protons or neutrons in an atomic nucleus? How and where in the universe do the chemical elements originate?

Professor Thomas Elias Cocolios’ NSHAPE project will try to answer these key questions by testing the most advanced nuclear models with highly sensitive, high-resolution and hyper-accurate measurements of the shape of atomic nuclei. The result will be a better understanding of the strong forces at play in the atomic nucleus.

In particular, NSHAPE will investigate octopole-deformed nuclei (which are pear-shaped, with more matter on one side than the other) and proton-unbound systems (where the nuclear force can no longer retain the last proton).

NSHAPE will use techniques from atomic, nuclear and particle physics and set up experiments at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), GANIL (Caen, France) and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI, Villigen, Switzerland).



Kris Myny: building a universal chip platform
Associate Professor Faculty of Engineering Technology (Campus Diepenbeek); Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT)


Chip technology apparently only seems to be evolving in one direction: smaller, more complex and more powerful. With the ORISON project, Kris Myny, professor of microelectronics, wants to broaden that horizon. “Not all new applications require high-quality computer chips with a huge number of transistors. Think, for example, of IoT chips ( Internet of Things ) that do not require large computing power, but must function on a large scale and for a long time.”

Myny wants to develop a new chip platform by combining the technology of the classic ( non-complex ) calculation chip with thin-film transistors used in flexible electronics. “The objective is to develop a universal technology that offers new possibilities for numerous applications. Consider, for example, medical applications, such as smart plasters and lab-on-a-chip, where it is important that energy consumption is low for long-term use and where innovative control electronics can reach different voltage levels. In addition, the technology also offers possibilities for augmented reality with higher resolution and therefore sharper images.”



Bram Van de Poel: how plants learned to live on land
Associate Professor at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering; head of Plant Biotechnology department; founding member of the KU Leuven Plant Institute


Why do avocados ripen faster when you store them next to apples? How do crops protect themselves against stress factors such as too much or too little water? And how did plants become the most abundant species on Earth?

The answer: ethylene. Plants produce this gaseous hormone during stress and during the growth process. “We already know how many plants produce ethylene. This knowledge is widely applied by farmers and traders: green bananas, for example, are treated with ethylene to allow them to ripen further in the shop. But we do not yet know the mechanism for algae, mosses, ferns and other ‘lower’ plants. More than 450 million years ago, plants only lived in water, so how did they manage to grow on land and protect themselves against the challenges of that new environment? In other words, how did they start producing ethylene to protect themselves against stress on the land? We are going to find out with the help of liverwort, one of the oldest land plants.”



Marian Verhelst: new approach to crack the hardware lottery …
Professor Faculty of Engineering; Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT); member of Leuven.AI


With the research project BINGO, Marian Verhelst, professor of microelectronics, wants to provide an answer to the problem known in her field as the hardware lottery . It is not the case that the best algorithms have the best chance of success, but those that are most compatible with the hardware available at that time. The production of computer chips takes much longer than the development of new algorithms, which slows down technological progress.

That is why Professor Verhelst wants to investigate a new strategy within the field of artificial intelligence. “It is very time-consuming and complex to make a processor chip that matches a full AI algorithm. In this project, we want to look beyond AI algorithms to see which computational tasks are essential. We then develop small specialized processor chips, or chiplets , for all specific sub-tasks . You can compare it to Lego: we make a warehouse of basic processor building blocks from which you can choose and which you can quickly assemble on a carrier according to the requirements of a new algorithm. If this approach proves successful, we can accelerate the development of AI and possibly also make the chip market more accessible to smaller players.”


Liesbet Geris: better treatment of osteoarthritis thanks to digital twins
Part-time professor at the Department of Biomechanics of the Department of Mechanical Engineering & the Skeletal Biology and Engineering Research Center of the Department of Development & Regeneration of KU Leuven and full professor at the GIGA In Silico Medicine at the University of Liège.

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a very common disease, affecting one in eight adults worldwide and expected to increase by 60 percent over the next two decades. There are currently no disease-modifying drugs on the market for this condition. The INSTAnt CARMA project will use so-called digital twins (a digital model of the knee joint in this case) to study the origin and progression of OA and to develop therapies. These can be endogenous (drugs) and exogenous (tissue engineering) therapies. “Based on our own previous work and recent developments in the scientific field, we are confident that INSTANT CARMA will advance the adoption of in silico-will further accelerate testing strategies in the development of medical therapies in general and osteoarthritis in particular,” says Professor Geris.