14 DAY TRIAL // Two investigators from the Durham University, in the United Kingdom, secured a Advanced Investigator Award each. This selection, made by the European Research Council (ERC), will ensure that the scientists receive up to £4million (€4.7million) in grant money for advanced studies.
All this money will go towards research that will seek to answer some of big questions in science today, such as for example how the Universe evolved, or how the human cell work on the inside.
Despite being everyday issues for the international scientific community, these mysteries have not been cleared before. The Durham researchers that got the grant money will each take on one of these fields.
The director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) at the university, professor Carlos Frenk, was awarded £1.9 million of the new grant money. His research will focus on testing a number of theories about dark matter and dark energy.
He will also look into studies showing how the Universe evolved, and will attempt to make more sense of the processes that led to the development of the earliest galaxies. How these structures came to be is still a matter of intense debate.
Most importantly, his investigation will provide a much-needed critical test to a theory on cold dark matter that the researcher and his team have been working on for many years now.
Frenk and his team will use datasets from the international Pan-STARRS1 project for the job. They will process the info using the “Cosmology Machine” supercomputer at the ICC.
“Cosmology is at a crossroads. We have a theory about how the Universe works that seems to fit, but at the price of two great mysteries: the early mechanism that seeded galaxies just after the Big Bang and the nature of the dark matter and dark energy responsible for cosmic evolution,” he says.
The second Durham researcher to get accolades is David Parker, a professor with the Department of Chemistry at the university. He was awarded £2.1million in grant money by the ERC.
His work will deal with the development of tiny molecular probes that can be used to monitor the bioactive chemical agents that play the most critical roles inside all living cells.
“By looking inside a cell we can learn a lot about the chemical changes that are taking place. We have the chemical expertise to create the light-emitting probes that are needed to meet these challenges,” the team leader explains.
“The probes will be engineered to reach particular compartments of plant and animal cells and relay an optical signal back to the observer, allowing local biochemical changes to be observed,” he adds.