Cells, Data, Stars: Three New ERC Projects at ISTA

A combined 4.8 million euros in ERC Starting Grants will go to scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). Awarded to early career researchers by the European Research Council (ERC), Starting Grants help researchers launch and develop projects, build capable teams, and pursue cutting-edge research. All three of ISTA’s ERC winners wholly embody the Institute’s curiosity-driven mission: they aim to find out how cells keep time, improve the way we date our stars, and optimize the extraction of relevant information from our ever-growing data.

ERC Starting Grants are for Europe-based researchers who have finished their PhD within the last two to seven years. Those who made it through the rigorous selection process receive up to 1.5 million euros, useable over a period of up to five years. In some cases, additional funds are awarded for relocation or new equipment.

How to make less mean more? Helping medicine find the needle in the haystack

Marco Mondelli, part of the faculty at ISTA since 2019, is originally from Siena, Italy. The 35-year-old computer scientist completed his PhD at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) before doing his postdoc at Stanford University. In 2019, Mondelli won the Lopez-Loreta Prize and came to ISTA to assemble his group. Having now secured 1.66 million euros with the ERC Starting Grant, Mondelli’s team is primed for further expansion.

Mondelli’s project, “INF²,”is about simplifying the way we extract information from data—not only to do more with less, but to make less mean more. “Classical statistical methods are just not designed for high-dimensional problems,” says Mondelli, “my project presents a way forward.” INF² uses a ‘mean-field’ approach to approximate complex, high-dimensional data into low-dimensional equivalents that still characterize the data exactly.

The project has many potential applications: from data compression using auto-encoders to large language models becoming better able to learn from context. Mondelli specifically highlights the project’s potential relevance for personalized medicine—a significant portion of the project is dedicated to genome-wide associate studies (GWAS), which identify parts of patient genomes that are associated with diseases. This is accomplished by linking the health records of hundreds of thousands of people to millions of DNA pairs. Mondelli is confident his team will make these analyses faster and more accurate.

Though Starting Grants are awarded to individual scientists, Mondelli is quick to thank both ISTA and his growing team at the Institute. “ISTA has been a fantastic environment to start a faculty position. I would like to thank all the PhD students and postdocs that I have had the privilege to work with. The preliminary work at the basis of my ERC project was mostly with them.”

What do mammals and algae have in common? Understanding time keeping in cells

The second Starting Grant recipient, having joined the Institute just this past April, is Alicia Michael. Originally from the US state of Washington, the 36-year-old is a biochemist by training. Before coming to ISTA, she did her PhD at UC Santa Cruz and worked as a postdoc at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research and the University of Basel. After now securing 1.62 million in ERC funding, Michael looks to answer fundamental questions about how genes are activated. 

Using circadian rhythms as a ‘lens’ to study gene regulation, Michael’s project, “ChromaChrono” will build on several of her team’s already-successful methodologies. “On a fundamental level, we’re trying to understand how genes are turned on and off,” says Michael. Her team’s research of circadian rhythms—the biological clock inside organisms—is a means to that end. Ultimately, gene regulation, Michael argues, “is a fundamental aspect of biology, of how DNA is a blueprint for life.”

ChromaChrono will use an assortment of approaches, including ISTA’s cryo-EM capabilities to examine proteins’ interactions with DNA on a structural level, as well as cryo-electron tomography. The latter is used to examine in more detail what these interactions looks like within the cell. Michael’s project will study multiple eukaryotic organisms. Besides mice and humans, the team will continue their relationship with ‘Chlamy’ (Chlamydomas reinhardtii), a single-celled algae with strong circadian rhythms. This range of study comes with many advantages, both scientific and technical. The diversity of examined cells aims to compare and contrast organisms and draw parallels in how these processes work in different systems.

Michael is currently searching for postdocs with an interest or expertise in tomography and will soon also begin recruiting PhD students for her expanding team.

What do the songs of our stars tell us? Magnetic fields and aging in the Universe

ISTA’s third ERC Starting Grant recipient is Lisa Bugnet, the Institute’s first astrophysicist. When Bugnet arrived at ISTA in 2023, she became at 28 years old—according to publicly available information—Austria’s youngest professor. Raised in Les Côtes d’Arey, France, Bugnet received her PhD in 2020 from the Paris Cité University after just three years. She then had a two-year stint as a Flatiron Fellow at the prestigious Flatiron Institute in New York City. Now, as the soon-to-be recipient of around 1.5 million euros in ERC grant funding, the 29-year-old and her team at ISTA will address a critical knowledge gap that continues to stunt our understanding of the universe: our ability to accurately date magnetic stars.

Following Bugnet’s predictions on the sounds of magnetic stars, recent discoveries have revealed the presence of stable magnetic fields in the radiative cores of several red giant stars far below their visible surfaces. Bugnet’s project, “Calcifer,” seeks to understand what role these large hidden magnetic fields play in the evolution of our stars, which have been largely ignored until now. The project is likely to change some of our most basic assumptions about stellar evolution. “When we think about the Sun, we see this very stable ball of plasma,” explains Bugnet. However, there is little that is stable when it comes to stars. At some point, like all other stars in its size range, our sun will evolve into a red giant. While we know that this will happen in about five billion years, current models of this timeline have been unable to take the effects of magnetic fields into account. Bugnet aims to change this by using asteroseismology—the study of oscillations in stars through the sounds and other waves they produce—to probe magnetic fields below the surface of stars. This way she aims to establish more comprehensive constraints about when and how the fields will impact the evolution of stars like the Sun. “We will build the first coherent and comprehensive picture of the magnetic evolution of stars,” says Bugnet. 

Part of the funding will be allocated to expanding her team by four new researchers. “Bringing together a group that covers young stars, giant stars, and end-of-life compact white dwarfs is challenging. But it is important to bridge communities and see magnetic fields as an important aspect of the evolution of stars,” explains Bugnet.

ISTA: high success with ERC grants

Despite opening its doors only in 2009, the Institute is one of the most successful research institutions in Europe when it comes to ERC grants. While the average success rate for ERC frontier grants typically falls between 8 and 15%, ISTA can boast an impressive 48%. With Bugnet, Michael, and Mondelli’s selection, 80% of ISTA’s professors have now received one or more ERC grants.