Career News
ERC Grants for Viennese Researchers
Kristin Teßmar-Raible receives Starting Grant, Monika Henzinger an Advanced Grant
ERC Advanced Grants, on the other hand, allow established research leaders of any nationality and any age to pursue ground-breaking projects that open new directions in their research fields. It is considered the "flagship" grant for basic research in Europe. Both grants are stretched over a five-year period.
Prof. Monika Herzinger has just received an Advanced Grant for her fundamental research into algorithmic problems and their applications in computational sience. "Algorithms are like recipes for computers and can be communicated via various programming languages", Prof. Henzinger explains. "Computers need recipes for each and every function. But some algorithms are faster, some are slower, some need more memory space, some need less. In algorithm research, we try to find the most efficient algorithm for each function."
Computational science is an interdisciplinary field including applications in biology, chemistry, physics, applied mathematics and computer science. Computers are employed either to solve problems or to simulate complex processes. Prof. Henzinger and her team are already working on applications in biology, in computer-aided verification, this being an automatic analysis of software and hardware systems, and in internet advertising. With her future projects, she aims to develope further applications in computational science. For her, computer-aided research is like a pracital tool: "The natural sciences profit greatly from progress in computer science, and vice versa. And all of these new insights together change the way we see the world. So ultimately, we use computers to try to understand the world around us", Prof. Henzinger concludes. (© University of Vienna, AcademiaNet)