Along with the FWF Wittgenstein Award, the FWF START Awards are among Austria’s most prestigious and highly endowed scientific awards. The FWF START Awards give excellent, up-and-coming researchers the opportunity to pursue their research with long-term planning horizons and financial security. The six winning projects come from all disciplines and will receive funding of up to €1.2 million each.
Emanuela Bianchi is a physicist at the TU Wien, Vienna University of Technology. At the Institute of Theoretical Physics, she works on the properties of the surfaces of materials. Her START project Heterogeneously Charged Colloids for Material Development deals with the question of how to develop functional materials capable of self-organization.
As a civil engineer at TU Wien, Josef Norbert Füssl is studying the properties of wood as a construction material. With the START Prize funding he intends to use Making Wood Predictable through Computational Methods as his project‘s title, thus contributing to the increased future use of this natural building material.
Philipp Haslinger works at the Atomic Institute of TU Wien. With his START project Atomic Interferometry in an Optical Resonator, the physicist wants to improve atomic interferometers, which can measure forces with the highest precision, for instance the Earth’s acceleration and the phenomenon of dark energy.
Physicist Oliver Hofmann works at the Institute of Solid State Physics, Graz University of Technology. In his project MAP-DESIGN he studies the structure of materials, in particular how their components arrange themselves in relation to each other. This knowledge can be used to develop new materials based on quantum mechanical computer simulations.
In his project Sequential Emergence of Functional Multidiversity, Robert Junker deals with the question of how different ecosystems and their diversity of species develop. The biologist works at the Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Salzburg. Biodiversity is essential to the preservation and sustainability of ecosystems.
Gina Elaine Moseley works at the Department of Geology, University of Innsbruck. In her Northeast Greenland Speleothem Project she is researching Northeast Greenland’s climate history through sinter deposits in caves (speleothemes) up to 600,000 years old. This is one of the Arctic regions that is likely to suffer the greatest impact from climate change.
