Funding Physicist at Universität Heidelberg Receives ERC Consolidator Grant
Press Release No. 142/2024
3 December 2024
Funding for Astrid Eichhorn – a further grant goes to the Central Institute of Mental Health
For her investigations into the fundamental building blocks of the universe Prof. Dr Astrid Eichhorn, a scientist at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of Heidelberg University, is to receive valuable funding from the European Research Council (ERC). An ERC Consolidator Grant will go to the physicist in order to probe the quantum nature of gravity with her team. Over a period of five years, she will receive two million euros in funding. A further ERC grant of this kind goes to PD Dr Gordon Feld, who does research into sleep and memory at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim and teaches at Ruperto Carola’s Institute of Psychology.
With her research, Prof. Eichhorn aims to better understand the interplay of fundamental building blocks of our universe – space-time, the elementary particles of the Standard Model of particle physics, dark matter and dark energy. In her ERC-funded project “Probing the Quantum Nature of Gravity at All Scales” (ProbeQG) she wants to primarily explore how to test fundamental theories on the quantum structure of space-time through experiments and observations. The central challenge is that the quantum properties of space-time manifest on tiny length scales – about 17 orders of magnitude below the scales that can be directly examined experimentally by the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator of the European research center CERN. The main idea of the ProbeQG project is to identify “lever arms”. These are systems that translate the effects of quantum gravity on tiny scales into effects that are experimentally accessible. To that end, Prof. Eichhorn wants to build a bridge between the theory of asymptotically safe quantum gravity and particle physics, the physics of black holes and cosmology.
Astrid Eichhorn studied physics at Heidelberg University and earned her doctorate at the University of Jena. Research stays in Canada and the United Kingdom took her to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo and Imperial College London. At Ruperto Carola’s Institute for Theoretical Physics she led an Emmy Noether Group on the fundamental quantum structure of space-time and matter from 2016 to 2020. From 2019 she served first as associate professor and from 2023 as full professor at the Centre for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology at the University of Southern Denmark. This year the scientist was appointed to a professorship for theoretical physics at Heidelberg University.
Dr Feld’s project, entitled “Tracking Memory During Sleep: Understanding How Replay of Complex Information Affects Memory and Mental Health” (MemoryTracker), is about how memories are processed during sleep and their potential capacity for treating mental disorders. His research focuses on discovering how current research findings can be transferred – inter alia with the aid of modern neuroscientific methods – into practical psychotherapeutic options. The European Research Council has allocated approximately two million euros to fund the studies over five years. Since 2019, Gordon Feld has headed the Emmy Noether Group “Psychology and Neurobiology of Sleep and Memory”, which is located in the Department Clinical Psychology at the Central Institute of Mental Health. The researcher also teaches at Heidelberg University’s Institute of Psychology.
The European Research Council awards the ERC Consolidator Grant to outstanding researchers with the aim of consolidating their academic independence. The central criterion for funding is scientific excellence.
