Eva Schinnerer awarded with 2.5 Mio Euro ERC Advanced Grant

In order to understand the formation and evolution of the universe, conditions, efficiencies, and regulations of star formation in galaxies need to be explored. For a consistent picture, research has to be carried out over several orders of magnitude - from local star formation regions in our own Milky Way to cosmological scales across appropriate samples of galaxies and extensive look-back times. Within the framework of an international collaboration, detailed observations of nearby spiral galaxies with ALMA and deep observations of the COSMOS Deep Field will be combined and analysed. In particular the new ALMA observatory offers excellent insights into the properties of molecular clouds, which are the building blocks for new stars.

The European Research Council has now awarded 2.495 million Euro for the project.  Among other things, the voluminous Grant will allow the implementation (starting this month) of a scientific group consisting of several postdocs which will closely work together with the current group members of the award winner.The ERC provides different grant schemes within the ERC Frontier Research Grants scheme. All grant applications must demonstrate the ground-breaking nature and ambition of the projects, as well as the excellence of the investigators.

Between 1995 and 1999, Eva Schinnerer was at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching in the group of Reinhard Genzel and earned her PhD at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich in 1999. Afterwards, she worked as postdoc at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena and at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro. In 2004 she became a staff scientist at MPIA in Heidelberg. Currently, she heads a group of three postdocs and five PhD students.