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Professors Emmanuelle JAVAUX (Faculty of Sciences) and Gaëtan KERSCHEN (Faculty of Applied Sciences) have each just been selected to receive highly coveted ERC Starting Grants from the European Research Council. Close to a total of 3 million Euros are being invested in the two researchers' very high level research projects, exploring unexpected and audacious pathways in the study fields of the early evolution of life on Earth (E. Javaux) and controlling vibratory phenomena on aeroplane structures (G. Kerschen).

The ERC Starting Grants are one of the major instruments deployed by the European Research Council to fund exploratory research projects in Europe, stimulating scientific excellence and the creativity of researchers who are at the early stages of their careers. The extremely selective process (a 12% success rate for applications presented during the 2011 call for projects) only retains the best researchers and very high level research projects, know as high gain, high risk, in other words projects in which the researchers demonstrate both their skills and their audacity in tackling very new research pathways which are likely to, should they prove successful, greatly enrich knowledge of the area concerned.

The ERC also funds very experienced researchers (ERC Advanced Grants) as much as fledgling researchers (maximum 12 years after a doctorate degree) working at a high level (ERC Starting Grants). The funding can reach a maximum of 1.5 million Euros for an ERC Starting Grant, and 3.5 million Euros for an ERC Advanced Grant. ERC Synergy Grants can also be attributed for exceptional projects submitted by a small number of researchers working together.

Created in 2007 by the EU, the European Research Council (ERC) channels its activities into the battle against ‘the European brain drain’ (in ensuring significant funding and independence within research) and the strengthening of the international attractiveness of European research (by attracting foreign researchers to join European teams). The ERC benefits from a budget of 7.5 billion Euros for the 2007-2013 period, and has for five years funded 2,500 high level researchers in Europe.

At the University of Liège, four researchers to date are benefiting from an ERC Starting Grant in the fields of Sciences and Technologies:

As the 'Principal Investigator':

• Liesbet GERIS, Lecturer (Biomechanical engineering, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department, Faculty of Applied Sciences). BRIDGE - Biomimetic process design for tissue regeneration: from bench to bedside via in silico modeling (begun 12/2011 – 1,191.440 Euros).
• Emmanuelle JAVAUX, Professor (Paleobotany, palaeopalynology and micropaleontology, Department of Geology, Faculty of Applied Sciences). ELiTE – Early Life Traces and Evolution, & Implications for Astrobiology (1,470,800 Euros).
• Gaëtan KERSCHEN, Professor (Space Structures and Systems Lab, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department, Faculty of Applied Sciences). NOVIB - The Nonlinear Tuned Vibration Absorber (1,320,000 Euros).

As a partner

• Alberto BORGES, FNRS Research Associate (Chemical Oceanography, Department of Astrophysics, Geophysics and Oceanography). AFRIVAL – African river basins: Catchment-scale carbon fluxes and transformations (project piloted by the Catholic University of Leuven, begun 12/2010 ­–1,745,262 euros). 

In addition the ULg is expecting decisions over the coming weeks and months concerning some dozen applications for ERC Starting Grants, ERC Advanced Grants and ERC Synergy Grants.

ABOUT THE ERC STARTING GRANTS OBTAINED BY ULg RESEARCHERS

NOVIB - The Nonlinear Tuned Vibration Absorber – Pr Gaëtan Kerschen

To reduce aeroplanes’ consumption levels, and thus their emissions, it is necessary to reduce their mass. But reducing their mass leads to exposing them even more to structure instabilities and vibrations. These vibration problems remain a major challenge for both civil and military aviation. They limit the performances of these aircraft, when they do not quite simply threaten their integrity.

Today, few aeroplanes are equipped with vibration absorbers because the absorbers currently used are designed on the basis of linear calculation whilst the phenomenon of aeroelastic flutter which they need to overcome is intrinsically a non-linear phenomenon. Contemporary absorbers are thus largely ineffective in dealing with aeroelastic flutter.

Professor Gaëten Kerschen’s project offers to reverse the paradigm: as aeroelastic flutter is fundamentally a non-linear phenomenon, why not try to design an absorbing system which is itself non-linear? ‘It’s a little like inventing a very complicated method to counter an even more complicated phenomenon,’ points out Gaëten Kerschen. But at the outcome of this research, beyond the new fundamental knowledge reaped in the field of engineering, a solution might have been discovered to what currently forms one of the major obstacles to the development of less heavy, and thus more economical, aeroplanes. Moreover, the results could of course be applied to many other areas of aviation.

With a total of 1,320,000 Euros over five years, NOVIB is pursuing three successive objectives:

1. Studying the theoretical aspects of this new concept of non-linear absorbers and suggesting a mathematical model.
2. Carrying out numerical simulations which validate this model.
3. Designing and testing in the ULg’s wind tunnel, together with Professor Grigorios Dimitriadis, a vibration absorber prototype based on this new concept.

Four doctoral researchers and two post-doctoral will be recruited by Pr Gaëtan Kerschen to carry through this project over the next five tears.

Contact : Gaëtan Kerschen, +32 4 366 48 52 | g.kerschen@ulg.ac.be

ELiTE – Early Life Traces and Evolution, & Implications for Astrobiology – Pr Emmanuelle Javaux

To study the origins, evolution and distribution of life in the Universe – which is the subject area of astrobiology – it is useful, even vital, to know beforehand the different stages of the early evolution of life on Earth. ‘It’s a bit like a jigsaw puzzle,’ explains Emmanuelle Javaux. ‘We already have a good number of the pieces but you have to put them in the right order. Plus there remain many grey areas, and scientific controversies are proliferating.’ Up until recently, for example, the first unambiguous morphological traces of life had been dated to 2.7 billion years ago, but a study published in Nature in 2010 – and to which Emmanuelle Javaux contributed – made a big splash by pushing back this date to 3.2 billion years ago, the discovered microfossils suggesting in addition an unexpected biological complexity for this epoch. Other clues, primarily geochemical, suggest a much older origin of life, towards 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago, but remain disputed. More complex microfossils, decorated with large appendices, bear witness to the evolution of the eukaryote cell and its cytoskeleton, before 1.45 billion years ago (another study published by Emmanuelle Javaux and her colleagues in Nature in 2011).

The greatest difficulty in micropaleontology resides in recognising real traces of life, in their dating and characterisation. Clear criteria and reliable methods are required. That is what enables the evolution of life to be reconstructed, and in particular here the emergence and evolution of biological complexity, the ultimate goal of the very ambitious ELiTE project, which is pursuing four objectives.

1. Characterising very ancient traces of life (from 0.5 to 3.5 billion years ago) and their conditions of preservation.
2. Identifying these traces of life: what types of life are concerned? (Which groups of prokaryotes – such as cyanobacteria – or eukaryotes?).
3. Suggesting a chronology of the major stages in the evolution of biological complexity, in particular the evolution of the domain of the eukaryotes (which consists of multicellular organisms such as animals, plants and fungi, and above all a majority of unicellular organisms – protist organisms) and the role of cyanobacteria (oxygen producers and the ancestors of the chloroplasts) in this evolution.
4. Examining the environmental (oxygenation, glaciations, tectonic, etc.) and biological (innovations, interactions) causes of the evolution of life in the Precambrian era (from 0.544 to 4.56 billion years ago).

It is on the basis of unique fossil materials with their origins in Southern and Central Africa, Russia, China, the USA, etc. and current material analogous to ancient life traces that the ELiTE project team will work (3 doctoral researchers, 3 post-doctoral researchers, 1 spectroscopist), together with numerous researchers across the world (Europe, the USA, Australia, Canada, etc.), including Annick Wilmotte at the ULg (a cyanobacteria specialist). The ELiTE project has funds of 1,470,800 Euros for the next five years.
 
Contact: Emmanuelle Javaux, +32 4 366 54 22 | ej.javaux@ulg.ac.be

BRIDGE – Biomimetic process design for tissue regeneration : from bench to bedside via in silico modeling – Pr Liesbet Geris

Tissue engineering is the interdisciplinary field which combines biomedical and engineering sciences in the search to replace sick or malfunctioning organs by living implants. Despite two decades of research, tissue engineering is faced with problems regarding the quantity and the quality of the generated products. The protocols and procedures followed in the laboratories are primarily based on trial and error; they require a huge amount of manual interventions and lack clear early time-point quality criteria to guide the process. As a result, these processes are very hard to scale up to industrial production levels.

The BRIDGE project, which Liesbet Geris has been developing since 2011, together with the Catholic University of Leuven, aims at applying the methods of in silico modeling (computational) to the biomedical field of tissue regeneration, and more specifically that of bone tissue. It is a question of understanding better the biomimetic processes at work, of stimulating them in silico in order to, eventually, control them in vivo in innovative healthcare protocols for the patients.

The BRIDGE project is in particular aiming at:

1. The proof-of-concept of the use of an in silico blue-print for the design and control of modular and robust manufacturing processes.
2. The in silico identification of a limited set of in vitro biomarkers, which is predictive for in vivo bone formation.
3. Optimised culture conditions derived from models to increase the modular robustness of in vitro processes and the quality and quantity of in vivo results.
4. The incorporation of congenital defects (niche patients) in the in silico design of manufacturing processes, constituting an extra validation of BRIDGE’s in silico approach and a necessary step to achieve personalised healthcare.

‘The research in tissue engineering on the one hand, and in the mathematical modelling of biological processes on the other, have progressed over the last two decades. With the BRIDGE project we are integrating them for the first time in a systematic manner in order to design and control the processes of bone tissue engineering,’ states Liesbet Geris.

The BRIDGE project, begun in December 2011, has been granted funds of 1,191,440 Euros for a duration of five years. Two doctoral students are working on the modelling part of the project; a postdoctoral researcher and a laboratory technician are developing the experimental aspects together with the Catholic University of Leuven.
 
Contact: Liesbet Geris, +32 4 366 95 87 | liesbet.geris@ulg.ac.be

AFRIVAL - African river basins: Catchment-scale carbon fluxes and transformations – Alberto Borges

AFRIVAL is a project which is being developed by the Department of Life Sciences and the Environment at the Catholic University of Leuven and the University of Liège’s Chemical Oceanography Unit. The five year funding (1,745,262 Euros, of which 729,840 has been earmarked for the ULg) will allow the role played by tropical rivers in the carbon cycle to be explored on a catchment scale. The project benefits from a wide scale of analytical approaches to better understand the biogeochemistry of these systems, markers such as stable isotopic signatures and the Carbon 14 dating of various carbon pools, biomarkers and measurements of processes such as respiration rates, primary production rates and CO2 air-water fluxes. Fieldwork within the framework of AFRIVAL will take place in Kenya, Zambia, Mozambique, Niger, Gabon, Madagascar and the Congo Basin (Democratic Republic of Congo). This project is being built upon the basis of previous joint projects in tropical estuaries and mangroves in South East Asia and Eastern Africa.

 
Contact: Alberto Borges, +32 4 366 31 87 | alberto.borges@ulg.ac.be