FWF START Awards: €1.2 million each for up-and-coming top researchers from Linz, Salzburg, and Vienna
The application volume amounted to approximately €146 million, of which around 48% percent came from the natural sciences and technology, 29% from biology and medicine, and 23% from the fields of humanities and social sciences. The eight funded projects, two of which are led by women, come from a wide variety of disciplines and will each receive up to €1.2 million in funding. The FWF START Awards are aimed at up-and-coming researchers, giving them the opportunity to plan their research in the long term and with a high degree of financial security.
The new START Award winners at a glance
Understanding how aquatic microbes affect the climate
Barbara Bayer
Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science, University of Vienna
Microorganisms in aquatic ecosystems continuously produce the greenhouse gas methane, then consume it. The environmental microbiologist Barbara Bayer wants to find out exactly which processes are behind this, and how the overfertilization of lakes and oceans influences the natural methane cycle. In her START project, she will be quantifying methane production in surface waters and identifying which microorganisms are involved. One goal is to gain a mechanistic understanding of how over-fertilization of aquatic ecosystems affects the processes of the natural microbial methane cycle.
Barbara Bayer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science at the University of Vienna, where she studied biology and ecology. In 2019, she received her PhD from the Department of Limnology and Bio-Oceanography at the University of Vienna and then worked for two years as a research fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Exploring how skin cells interact with each other
Stephanie J. Ellis
Max Perutz Labs, University of Vienna
Cell and developmental biologist Stephanie J. Ellis investigates how skin cells keep tabs on the “fitness” of their neighbors and weed them out if necessary. The principles behind this quality control process are not yet fully understood. In her FWF START project, she aims to clarify why some cells of a cell colony perish while others survive. Using skin as a model organ, Ellis wants to investigate what differentiates evolutionarily “fit” cells from their less fit neighbors. She will be applying groundbreaking new technologies in her research.
Stephanie J. Ellis completed her PhD in cell and developmental biology at the University of British Columbia in Canada in 2014. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University in New York City until 2021 and has been awarded a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Grant, a New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Fellowship, and the NIH Pathway to Independence Award. Since 2022, Ellis has been a junior group leader at the Max Perutz Labs in Vienna and teaches as an assistant professor at the University of Vienna.