126 million DKK for the next generation of research leaders

Villum Foundation has just awarded 126 million DKK to 14 early-career researchers and their groundbreaking ideas. With this grant, the researchers will have the chance to lead their own research project for the first time. 

Giulia Perotti

Chemistry meets Astrophysics: pathways to life-enabling ingredients during planet formation
Understanding how planets become habitable is a key challenge in astrophysics. This project investigates how life-enabling molecules, such as water and organics, form and evolve in planet-forming disks around young stars.

By combining cutting-edge astronomical observations with state-of-the-art simulations and chemical models, it aims to reveal how these ingredients are incorporated into forming rocky planets and link these processes to our Solar System and exoplanets.

The grant will enable the recruitment of two Ph.D. students and a postdoc.

Shingo Kono

A Novel Approach to Scalable Quantum Computing
Despite major progress, scalable superconducting quantum computing remains significantly challenging. One of the main obstacles is the readout architectures, which must extract weak quantum signals while blocking unwanted backward-propagating thermal noise.

This project addresses this challenge by developing novel hybrid quantum systems that combine magnetic crystals with superconducting circuits, enabling time-reversal symmetry breaking to fundamentally improve the readout architectures. The grant will fund two PhD students and one postdoc.

Andrew Chael

Imaging Black Holes
Supermassive black holes launch narrow jets that transport matter energy to enormous distances at nearly the speed of light. These jets can shape the evolution of entire galaxies, but the source of their power – either the energy of infalling gas, or magnetic fields extracting the black hole’s own energy - remains unknown.

In the next five years, increasingly sensitive data from the Event Horizon Telescope will allow us to directly image the launch point of extragalactic jets close to black holes. However, we currently lack crucial analysis tools, models, and simulations necessary to understand these observations.

Supported by a Villum Young Investigator grant, I will build an interdisciplinary team at the Niels Bohr Institute to produce and interpret the next generation of black hole images and better understand how black holes power extragalactic jets throughout the Universe.