Three Open Competition ENW-M grants awarded to Utrecht University researchers

Three researchers at Utrecht University’s Faculty of Science each receive up to €400,000 in funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). The grants are part of NWO’s Open Competition Domain Science-M programme, which aims to initiate new, innovative, and fundamental research projects.

A total of 21 research proposals were awarded in NWO’s Open Competition Domain Science-M programme. These M-grants are intended for realising curiosity-driven, fundamental research of high quality and scientific urgency. The M-grant offers researchers the possibility to elaborate creative and risky ideas and to realise scientific innovations that can form the basis for the research themes of the future.

Dr. Elisa Chisari and Prof. Henk Hoekstra 

Plan B-modes: cosmology and astrophysics from new galaxy shape patterns

New telescopes will be mapping the shapes and orientations of billions of galaxies on the sky throughout the next decade. In this project, cosmologists Elisa Chisari and Henk Hoekstra aim to investigate the physical mechanisms that give rise to specific whirlpool patterns in the shapes and orientations of galaxies on the sky. Such mechanisms could unveil a wealth of information about the physics of the early Universe, as well as the physics of how galaxies form and evolve. To catch these whirlpool patterns, a careful assessment of similar patterns generated by instrumental effects will be needed. Chisari and Hoekstra will use data from the next generation of telescopes to measure them and compare them to physical models. Chisari is an associate professor at the String Theory, Cosmology and Elementary Particles group at Utrecht University. Hoekstra is professor of Observational cosmology at Leiden University.

Dr. Nora Gigli Bisceglia

Salt and Peptides: The Secret Recipe for Plant Stress Survival

Soil salinity, intensified by global warming, threatens plant survival and crop yields. Biologist Nora Gigli-Bisceglia’s research focuses on how plants respond to salt stress, a major problem made worse by global warming and soil salinity. She recently discovered that salt changes the structure and composition of plant cell walls, which contributes to stress. Interestingly, these changes also trigger the production of small plant peptides that, when applied externally, can help reduce the effects of salt. However, it is still unclear how these peptides are released and how they function. Using a mix of molecular, biochemical, and physiological methods, her project aims to better understand these processes and help develop new ways to improve crop resilience.

Michal Wrochna

Quantum field holography on anti-de Sitter spacetimes 

Anti-de Sitter spacetimes are a geometric setting of fundamental importance in contemporary high energy physics. This significance stems largely from the conjectured holographic correspondence, which raises deep mathematical questions about whether entire physical theories can be determined by data defined at the boundary of spacetime. A regime of particular relevance that this project aims to approach with mathematical methods are quantum fields propagating on a fixed asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetime. The main objective of this project of mathematician Michal Wrochna is to give a general construction of quantum fields on anti-de Sitter spacetimes without any symmetry assumptions, and compute associated renormalized quantities describing the behaviour of quantum matter.