Lucrative ERC grants for five LMU researchers 

• The funded projects deal with climate change adaptation, the traces that strokes leave in the immune system, the electronic structure of materials, stressed mitochondria, and the representation of brain networks in cancer patients.
• The grant comes with funding of up to two million euros for a period of five years.

Five LMU researchers have each been awarded a Consolidator Grant. Through this award, the European Research Council (ERC) supports excellent researchers with a grant of up to two million euros for a period of five years to help them expand and consolidate their innovative research.

The successful researchers were: quantum physicist Dr. Christian Schilling, radiologist and neuroscientist Professor Sophia Stoecklein, climate researcher Professor Matthias Garschagen, stroke expert Professor Arthur Liesz, and biochemist Professor Lucas Jae.

Prof. Dr. Matthias Tschöp, President of LMU, congratulates: "ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded to researchers who are capable of achieving significant scientific breakthroughs and shaping the research landscape. I am delighted that the European Research Council continues to recognize LMU's outstanding scientists, with five new appointments announced recently. This demonstrates that we conduct excellent research in various fields.“

The individual ERC-funded projects

Mapping Hidden Brain Networks in Cancer Patients

Professor Sophia Stoecklein is a radiologist and neuroscientist at LMU Klinikum. With her ERC Consolidator Project CONNECT (Cutting-Edge Neuroimaging for Functional Brain Network Evaluation in Cancer Patients), she aims to establish functional connectivity MRI as a clinically applicable technology for cancer diagnostics.

Malignant brain tumors integrate into neuronal networks and use their activity to support tumor growth - processes that remain invisible on conventional MRI. CONNECT will develop AI-based tools that detect early network changes and provide clues about tumor progression or the emergence of brain metastases. “CONNECT aims to make the communication between tumor and brain visible, and thereby usable for diagnosis and treatment”, says Stoecklein.

Goals and targets for climate change adaptation

Professor Matthias Garschagen is Chair of Human Geography with a Focus on Human-Environment Relations and coordinating lead author of the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Cities.

Although climate impacts are sharply increasing, current adaptation is not fast or deep enough. At the same time, we lack clear adaptation goals and targets and scientific methods for setting and evaluating them. Through his project GOALT (Goals and targets for climate change adaptation: Risks, opportunities, design, application and impact), Matthias Garschagen plans to close these gaps. He will develop a theoretical framework to explain under which conditions goals and targets can improve adaptation.

He will also investigate how actors negotiate and act on targets – drawing on a first of its kind global assessment, in-depth analyses, and novel gaming simulations in four coastal cities: Hamburg, Mumbai, Manila, and Cape Town. Building on this, he will create an integrated model to examine the desirability, feasibility, and impact of potential goals and targets and develop a comprehensive methodology to guide adaptation goal and target setting. The outcomes are expected to become a reference point for adaptation research.

Novel approach for calculating the electronic structure of materials

As well as leading the Theoretical Quantum Physics research group at LMU since 2019, Dr. Christian Schilling is a member of the MCQST Cluster of Excellence and leads the Quantum Algorithms consortium within the Munich Quantum Valley. His research focuses on frontier questions in quantum information, quantum chemistry, mathematical physics, and quantum computing.

Density functional theory (DFT) is a key tool for calculating fundamental properties of molecules and solids, such as their electronic structure. It is important for basic research and for industrial applications alike. However, it cannot adequately describe strongly correlated many-body systems, a limitation that is a major obstacle for the development of novel materials in areas such as energy generation and microelectronics.

For his ERC project beyondDFT (Systematic Framework of Functional Theories for Strongly Correlated Electrons), Dr. Christian Schilling is taking a different tack by using one-body reduced density-matrix functional theory (1RDMFT). His approach describes the electronic structure of materials in a novel manner and is based on a theoretical framework he has developed over the past years, which enables more accurate ground-state functionals and the targeted investigation of excited states.

How mitochondria raise alarms

Biochemist Lucas Jae is Associate Professor of Functional Genomics at LMU’s Gene Center Munich. His research investigates mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cell, looking at how they work and their role in human diseases.

The increase in human life expectancy and rise in late-life morbidities will be one of the main societal challenges of this century. Mitochondria play a key role here, as they have to elaborately interface with their cellular environment in order to detect and resolve dysfunctions. Lucas Jae has developed an approach for the investigation of mitochondrial stress responses and identified the key signaling pathway mediating perturbations.

In his new ERC project mitoSCALES (Scales of Mitochondrial Stress Response), Jae will deconstruct this signaling pathway, elucidate the molecular interplay of its components and how this relates to other cellular functions – an important precondition for decoding the role of these processes in human pathologies. His goal is to decipher mitochondrial stress responses to inspire tomorrow’s biomedical solutions for longer, healthier lives across the population.

Errant memory

Professor Arthur Liesz is leader of the Stroke Immunology research group at the Institute for Stroke and Dementia Research at LMU University Hospital. He is also a member of the SyNergy Cluster of Excellence. His research is chiefly focused on the interplay between the brain and immune system after a stroke.

Heart attacks and strokes often leave behind traces that extend far beyond the affected organ – and the immune system plays a surprisingly active role here. Still a young concept in immunology, trained immunity describes how the innate immune system develops a memory and can thus drive sustained inflammation processes after an injury. If this memory is dysregulated, it can fuel chronic systemic inflammation that affects distant organs. There is increasing evidence that sterile injuries like heart attacks and ischemic strokes can trigger such prolonged changes to the immune system.

In his research, Arthur Liesz has already demonstrated that these injuries trigger epigenetic reprogramming in the stem and progenitor cells of the bone marrow. In his ERC project TRAINED (The Role of Trained Immunity in Brain-Body Communication and Secondary Organ Dysfunction), he now plans to systematically decipher the underlying mechanisms and pave the way for novel therapies.