Climate change and first microseconds of the Universe – two projects receive over 200 million kronor
Two researchers at Stockholm University have been awarded the European Research Council's most prestigious grant, the ERC Synergy Grant 2025. Gustaf Hugelius, professor of Physical Geography at Stockholm University, is coordinating a project that has been awarded just over €12.5 million over six years. Axel Brandenburg, professor at Nordita, is part of a project that has been awarded almost €10 million, also over six years. Gustaf Hugelius is the first researcher at Stockholm University to be the administrative coordinator for an ERC Synergy Grant project.
Peatlands in the face of climate change
Gustaf Hugelius, together with Christina Biasi, University of Innsbruck, Pierre Friedlingstein, University of Exeter, and Philippe Ciais, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat – CEA, leads a project to investigate how peatlands in the northern hemisphere responds to climate change and future warming. These peatlands contain huge amounts of carbon and nitrogen, which, if released, could amplify global warming making climate stabilisation targets significantly harder to meet than current models predict.
Gustaf Hugelius. Photo: Niklas Björling.
“It’s very exciting to have this opportunity! An ERC Synergy Grant makes it possible to design an ambitious, long-term project where we work together to solve research questions that would be too complex for individual research groups,” says Gustaf Hugelius, Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University.
In the ERC project Northern Peatlands in the face of climate warming and abrupt changes (CLIMPEAT), researchers will draw on expertise from many different scientific fields to create detailed maps showing the properties that make peatlands particularly vulnerable to climate change. The researchers will also conduct the most extensive field experiment to date, in which frozen peatlands in northern Finland will be thawed and monitored. By combining large amounts of data from field sampling and satellites with AI, new models will be constructed and used to recreate past and future changes in northern peatlands. All with the aim to improve our understanding of how these areas affect the global climate.
Thawing permafrost peatland collapses into a lake. Rogovaya, Northwestern Russian Arctic. Photo Gustaf Hugelius.
The first microseconds of the Universe
Axel Brandenburg, together with Andrii Neronov, Université Paris Cité and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Franco Vazza, University of Bologna, and Chiara Caprini, CERN and University of Geneva, leads a project investigating the first microseconds of the Universe. Those first instants hold the key to understanding some of the most fundamental physical processes such as how the Universe became hot and uniform after an episode of rapid expansion, how the forces of nature split apart, and how matter, antimatter, and dark matter first appeared.
Axel Brandenburg. Photo: private.
“The grant allows us to shed light on the Universe’s first microseconds using cosmological magnetic fields, a project so broad that any of us alone would be unable to reach results without the help of others”, says Axel Brandenburg, Nordita (Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics), Stockholm University.
In the ERC project Probe of the first microseconds of the Universe with cosmological magnetic fields (COSMOMAG), the researchers aim to develop a new way to shed light on the Universe’s first microseconds using cosmological magnetic fields. These fields can carry information about physical processes that took place right after the Big Bang. The scientific team will combine data from various types of observations – including radio, gamma rays, and gravitational waves – with advanced simulations, to link today’s cosmic magnetic fields to the physical processes that created them in the first moments of the Universe.
COSMOMAG is one of the project presented more closely on the ERC web
About the ERC Synergy Grant
The European Research Council (ERC) provides substantial and long-term funding for cutting-edge research in all fields of science. The ERC is part of the EU’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. The ERC Synergy Grant is aimed at small groups of excellent researchers with research projects with high synergy effects. A Synergy Grant is a grant of up to €14 million for a period of up to six years.
Read more about the ERC Synergy Grant 2025
Last updated: 2025-11-06
Source: Communications Office