In the third call of starting grants for research promoted by the European Council this year, 427 elite researchers were given distinctions, 24 of them in Spain. Of these, 11 conduct their research in Catalonia and 4 are attached to UPF.

The grants are awarded following a thorough selection process conducted by a group of independent scientists valuing the most innovative proposals and the researchers with the greatest talent. UPF was awarded grants in all fields of expertise covered by the programme: social sciences, life and physical sciences and engineering.

Research to be promoted going forward

In relation to life sciences, Tomás Marqués-Bonet, a member of the Evolutionary Biology Unit of the CEXS, will engage in research to identity and characterise structural variation in ape genomes. Tomás Marqués holds a degree in biology from UB and a PhD in Biology from UPF (2007). He has just completed a postdoctoral stay at the University of Washington (Seattle, USA) with a Marie Curie grant from the European Union. As indeed he affirms, "I am taking part in consortiums to sequence the genome of the Neanderthal and several apes. Mi interests focus on studying the evolution of the number of copies of variable regions of genomes and their relationship with evolutionary biology and illness".

As regards social sciences and humanities, and more specifically the category on the complexity of the human mind, Salvador Soto Faraco, ICREA researcher and the coordinator of the Multisensory Research Group of the Department of Communication and Information Technologies (DTIC) at UPF since 2009, will focus on the study of multisensory integration in relation to attention. He holds a PhD from UB (1999) and he furthered his studies on multisensory integration at the universities of Oxford (United Kingdom) and British Columbia (Canada).

As Salvador Soto states, "I am interested in the neural mechanisms of behaviour and the principles underlying the integration of multisensory information. As is the case with other animals, humans benefit from a wide range of sensory systems such as hearing, touch, sight, smell or taste. These senses enable us to portray the world and, in order to choose, perceive and react to information in a coherent manner, the brain must coordinate these different sources of sensory information efficiently".

In the field of social sciences, Fernando Ariel Broner, a researcher at the UPF Research Centre for International Economics (CREI), will look into the capital flows being established at an international level, as well as emerging markets. He is a mathematician and physicist and studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he obtained his PhD in Economics (2000). He has been a lecturer at the UPF Department of Economics and Business since 2005, as well as at the CREI, a centre attached to UPF and in which Pompeu Fabra University holds a stake.

Lastly, in the field of physical and engineering sciences, Albert Guillén Fàbregas, an ICREA researcher, will soon join the UPF Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC). He studied at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) and his project, "Finite-Length Information Theory", will focus on non-asymptotic aspects in Shannon's information theory, which establishes the fundamental limits of information processing systems.

As Albert Guillén explains, "Shannon's information theory studies the limits of information processing systems, which can only be attained with infinite-length sequences. In practice, information processing is based on finite-length sequences and, as a result, a detailed analysis of the impact the length of sequences has on communication or comprehension systems is important both theoretically and practically".

This project will provide new tools and techniques for addressing pending problems in areas where the information theory is relevant, such as bioinformatics, computer sciences, economics and computational neurosciences.

The European Research Council is formed by elite scientists and is responsible for funding scientific research projects in the European Union. For this call of starting grants, as part of the seventh EU Framework Programme, 580 million euros have been allocated to foster the research careers of 427 leading researchers. Each chosen project will benefit from up to two million euros in funding for a five-year period.