Four ERC Consolidator Grants to Stockholm University
Four researchers at Stockholm University receive the prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant 2023. They are in the areas of economics, social psychology and analytical chemistry.
Consolidator Grants are the European Research Council´s (ERC) prestigious grants for researchers with 7-12 years of experience since completion of PhD. Consolidator Grants may be awarded up to € 2 million for a period of 5 years.
This year Consolidator Grants are awarded to 14 researchers at Swedish universities. Four of these grants go to researchers at Stockholm University, making Stockholm University most successful among Swedish universities in this year´s round.
Four researchers at Stockholm University will receive the 2023 Consolidator Grants:
Johanna Rickne, professor in economics
Johanna Rickne at the Swedish Institute for Social Research receives a grant for the project Research Program on Sexual Harassment Prevention (RE-SHAPE).
Sexual harassment is a severe and highly prevalent workplace hazard. Despite its prevalence and severity, little is known about how to effectively prevent the practice.
This project will extend the empirical and theoretical research frontiers on sexual harassment prevention. It will evaluate existing and new prevention methods with large field experiments in the labor market, study policy-relevant determinants of harassment, and document the potential costs and benefits of harassment prevention in organizations. The project uses quantitative methods in the form of field experiments, survey experiments, and statistical analysis of observational data.
“I am very happy to have received this grant. It means a lot for my chances to pursue this line of research in the coming years,” says Johanna Rickne.
Konrad Burchardi, associate professor in economics
Konrad Burchardi at the Institute for International Economics receives a grant for the project Agricultural Productivity and Technology Adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa (ADAPT).
Agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa is exceptionally low, exposing millions of households who live from agriculture to low incomes and periods of hunger. Konrad Burchardi's three-part project will develop and apply novel empirical methods to quantify the extent of misallocation of inputs in Sub-Saharan agriculture; it will trial and evaluate new approaches to encourage the efficient adoption of modern agricultural inputs; and it will develop new techniques to measure agricultural output in such settings at low costs, which holds the potential to catalyse future research on agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa.
“Agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa has been largely stagnant over the past half century, exposing large fractions of the population to low incomes and periods of hunger. Modern inputs such as chemical fertilisers and hybrid seeds have enabled large increases of agricultural productivity elsewhere, but have hardly been adopted in Sub-Saharan Africa. This project studies novel approaches to study and encourage the efficient adoption of modern inputs, that is the adoption by those farmers and only those farmers who stand to gain from those inputs, and it will develop new methods for research on agricultural productivity in developing countries,” says Konrad Burchardi.
Sabina Cehajic-Clancy, associate professor in social psychology
Sabina Cehajic-Clancy at the Department of Psychology receives the grant for the project Healing societies: The impact of social context on intergroup reconciliation (HEAL).
The recent increase in intergroup conflicts emphasize the importance of finding effective ways to reconcile members of adversary groups. The overarching aim of this project is to systematically examine the influence of the social context on effectiveness, processes and durability of well-established reconciliation interventions. In the project there will conduct large-scale longitudinal (online and field) studies in four European countries affected by conflict. These studies will test and compare the effectiveness, processes and durability of established and context-adapted reconciliation interventions on intergroup attitudes and real-life behaviours of ethnic majorities and minorities living in different social contexts. The project will further develop and empirically evaluate the first theoretical framework for intergroup reconciliation.
“Finding effective ways to reconcile people and in that way prevent intergroup conflict is one of the most challenging question of our time. In this project, I aim to identify effective reconciliation interventions for different social contexts and avoid the fallacy of ‘one approach fits all’. Only by effectively changing intergroup dynamics, can we truly understand the psychology of intergroup relations,” says Sabina Cehajic-Clancy.
Anneli Kruve, associate professor in analytical chemistry
Anneli Kruve at the Department of Materials and Environmental Chemistry and Department of Environmental Science receives a grant for the project Machine Learning and Mass Spectrometry for Structural Elucidation of Novel Toxic Chemicals (LearningStructurE).
Nearly half a million known chemicals have been deemed relevant for exposure studies and an even larger number of their transformation products are likely to co-occur in the environment. The aim of LearningStructurE is to turn the discovery of novel chemical structures from serendipity to routine. As a steppingstone in this pursuit, the project will combine the fundamental understanding of chromatography and high resolution mass spectrometry with machine learning to pinpoint novel toxic chemical structures based on their empirical analytical information. LearningStructurE will pave the way for exploration of the unknown chemical space detected from environmental samples, and thereby improve our understanding of the emissions, chemical processes transforming the emitted chemicals, and close the gap in measured and explained toxicity.
“Only a fraction of toxicity measured for environmental samples is explained by the chemicals identified in these samples. High resolution mass spectrometry is a very powerful tool for characterizing the chemicals in these complex mixtures. In this project my group is going to advance the computational mass spectrometry to understand which of the chemicals detected with mass spectrometry are causing the toxicity in the environmental samples and we will develop a set of methods to identify these chemicals,” says Anneli Kruve.
Read more on the ERC Consolidator Grants.
Last updated: November 24, 2023
Source: Communications Office