5 November 2024
ERC Synergy Grants for the UKE and University of HamburgThe European Research Council Awards More than €20 million to 2 Projects
Photo: UKE / Elisabeth Piller
“The awarding of the ERC Synergy Grants to the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and the University of Hamburg is proof of the outstanding research that we produce as a University of Excellence in the areas of medicine and history. These prestigious awards not only strengthen our position in the international academic community but also create new possibilities for innovative research projects. I offer my heartfelt congratulations to Prof. Thomas Marlovits and Prof. Alan Kramer for this significant success and thank all those involved for their efforts and outstanding work,” said Prof. Hauke Heekeren, president of the University of Hamburg.
“By awarding a highly competitive ERC Synergy Grant to one of the four project locations at the UKE, the European Research Council has once again recognized our scientific work in university medicine. We are delighted with this distinction, which also involves the further strengthening of our international network. I congratulate Prof. Marlovits and his colleagues at the Center for Structural Systems Biology (CSSB) in the Science City Hamburg-Bahrenfeld for this great success,” said Prof. Dr. Blanche Schwappach-Pignataro, dean of the Faculty of Medicine and a UKE board member.
BLOCKADE—The Hidden Weapon. Blockade in the Era of the Two World Wars, Prof. Dr. Alan Kramer
Blockades were a common means of warfare in both the First and Second World Wars. They cut enemies off from vital resources such as food, oil, information, and capital far away from the battlefields. But what consequences did they have during and after the conflicts? Did blockades actually accelerate victory or defeat? And how did they shape relations following the war? The new ERC Synergy research project BLOCKADE—The Hidden Weapon. Blockade in the Era of the Two World Wars, which brings Prof. Alan Kramer to the University of Hamburg as principal investigator, tackles these questions. Kramer is professor emeritus at Trinity College Dublin and will take up a position as senior professor at the Faculty of Humanities.
“Blockades were a form of ‘slow violence’, a very effective means of weakening the enemy. However, they particularly affected the civilian population and sometimes had disastrous repercussions,” explains Prof. Kramer. Yet they often led to long-term learning processes and innovations that were later useful. Economic, cultural, and social historians will work together with experts in econometrics and digital humanities in order to assess the role and significance of the blockades. In addition to Kramer, researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim (Prof. Jonas Scherner), the University of Amsterdam (Dr. Samuël Kruizinga), and the University of Freiburg (Prof. Elisabeth Piller) are involved in BLOCKADE.
“It is particularly important to us to investigate not only at what happened in western Europe but also regions that have received little attention thus far, such as Japan, southeast Asia, South America, and Africa,” explains Kramer. The findings should provide a new framework for understanding the period between 1900 and 1960 and also help us to understand today’s blockades, their use as a weapon of war, and their often unintended consequences.
The project, which is expected to start in May 2025, will receive €9.9 million in funding from the European Research Council, of which €2.5 million will go to the University of Hamburg.
CombaT7—Central Roles of Mycobacterial Type VII Secretion Systems in Intra- and Inter-kingdom Warfare, Prof. Dr. Thomas Marlovits
In the CombaT7 project, Prof. Dr. Thomas Marlovits—a professor of structural and systems biology of bacterial infectious agents and director of the Institute of Microbial and Molecular Sciences (formerly the Institute of Structural and Systems Biology) at the UKE’s Center for Experimental Medicine—and 3 researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Newcastle University, and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne are investigating the central role of the type VII secretion system (T7SS) of mycobacteria.
Secretion systems release proteins to the outside and thus enable bacteria to actively shape their immediate environment. In doing so, they take on multiple functions: They are active in both the interaction between bacteria, by releasing numerous toxins that kill other bacteria, and the infection processes between host and pathogen. Such processes can lead to the development of tuberculosis caused by the pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis—one of the deadliest infectious diseases worldwide.
During the multiyear project, researchers want to gain a better mechanistic understanding of the various roles of the mycobacterial type VII secretion system and insights into how this system can be used to fight infections. They will also explore open questions on the physiology and virulence mechanisms of various relevant mycobacterial pathogens. “This project will not only improve our understanding of T7SS but will also reveal new ways to use the T7SS system,” says Prof. Marlovits, who conducts his research on bacterial infectious pathogens at the CSSB in Science City Hamburg-Bahrenfeld.
The project will receive funding from the European Research Council totaling €10.8 million, of which the UKE will receive around €3.2 million.
ERC Synergy Grants
ERC Synergy Grants are awarded by the European Research Council to groups of 2–4 researchers that want to solve ambitious research problems. There are currently 30 ERC grants running at the University of Hamburg, 8 of which are ERC Synergy Grants. This is the third ERC Synergy Grant and the thirty-seventh ERC grant overall that UKE researchers have been awarded in recent years.