Five young researchers who joined the Technion during the 2021-2022 academic year are recipients of prestigious 2023 starting grants from the European Research Council (ERC). These grants are awarded to talented early-career scientists who completed their doctoral degrees only two to seven years ago, and have already produced excellent work, showing great promise.  

Charlotte Vogt, assistant professor in the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry, works to solve problems of climate change and pollution by improving or inventing more sustainable processes. Metal nanoparticle-based catalysts are essential to shifting societal reliance away from fossil-fuel resources, but most are found by slow, trial-and-error processes. This grant will allow Prof. Vogt and her team to better identify metal nanoparticle catalyst dynamics that could produce green energy.  

Assaf Zinger, assistant professor in the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering is forging novel pathways toward targeted drug delivery and disease detection of multiple cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, and traumatic brain injuries. This ERC grant will allow Prof. Zinger and his team to engineer human breast milk biomimetic nanoparticles, dubbed “MILKOSOMES,” with the aim of shuttling oral medicines into the body that under other conditions could not be distributed properly. 

The other ERC grant recipients are Prof. Ben Engelhard of the Department of Neuroscience in the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine who will be exploring new theories in brain-learning behavior; Dr. Hila Peleg in the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science who will be developing a new exploratory program synthesis for coders; and Prof. Yuval Shagam in the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry who will be working on applications for quantum-controlled chemistry experiments and quantum information technology.