The ERC Starting Grant is intended for early-career researchers and the only selection criterion is academic skill. The researchers and their projects have been ranked highest in Europe after review from their peers and despite fierce competition. This year, 494 European research projects – of which four were awarded to Lund University – received a share of EUR 780 million.
From the Faculty of Social Sciences, Lisa Flower, associate senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology, has been granted EUR 1.5 million for her project Virtutrials.
Congratulations! What is your research going to focus on?
“I want to explore the difference between physical and virtual meetings and how participation via video link affects those involved in a trial. There is a perception that people should meet face-to-face in court and that the entire legal process might be negatively impacted by e.g. the participation of witnesses or defendants via video link, for example. I want to investigate whether this is true, how the legitimacy of trials and the rituals surrounding them are affected by the absence of all those involved in the courtroom, and how participating via video link affects perceptions of reliability and emotion, such as remorse.”
How common is it for people involved in legal proceedings to participate via a video link?
“As in other parts of society, participating online is becoming increasingly common. The technology to enable virtual reality trials with avatars is under development, which would completely remove the physical interactions that take place in a trial.”
What do you hope the project will achieve?
“Trials must be structured in a fair way. When we finish our project, we will know if and how a trial can be made fair even when not everyone involved is present in the courtroom.”
What does the ERC Starting Grant mean to you?
“It’s a fantastic opportunity, a game changer. I will be able to devote five years to this and also employ four doctoral students. Among other things, we will conduct ethnographic fieldwork at around 50 court hearings and quantitative analyses of verdicts from virtual trials. I hope to put Lund University on the map for research on virtual justice.”
In addition to the digitisation of the courtroom, Lisa Flower has also researched emotions and feelings in court and how they are displayed in a Swedish courtroom ‒ Read more about her research (link to the Research Portal)
From the Faculty of Science, Øystein Opedal, associate senior lecturer at the Department of Biology, has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for his project POLLCLIM.
Congratulations, Øystein! Can you tell us a little about your project?
“The project aims to better understand how plants adapt to new pollination environments, such as declining pollinator populations or local changes in the diversity of pollinator species. We know quite a lot about how plants adapt to pollinators, but most of our knowledge comes from specialised systems, where one plant species interacts with one or a few select pollinator species. We are interested in a more general model, so we are focusing our study on one species – Viscaria vulgaris or sticky catchfly – as it has a highly generalised pollination system, i.e. it’s a plant species that interacts with a multitude of functionally diverse pollinator species. Through extensive fieldwork and experiments, we will evaluate how one plant species can adapt to up to 50 different pollinator species simultaneously.”
What do you hope to achieve?
“By studying sticky catchfly, we will be able to collect a dataset that is larger and more complete than any other similar dataset, and I am confident that this will reveal new patterns and relationships that have been difficult to uncover in more typical, less comprehensive datasets. By developing and presenting a new framework for these kinds of studies, I also hope that the project will stand as an important example to inspire other projects with similar themes.”
What does the grant mean for you?
“First of all, this is a welcome confirmation that the work we are doing stands up well in international competition, and that our colleagues agree that our work is both important and well designed. In practical terms, this project will allow us to recruit new staff members and increase the scope of our work, thus enabling us to make the project more comprehensive. We will be able to gather enough data more quickly to address more detailed questions, which are often difficult to approach in the context of more typical projects.”
From the Lund University School of Economics and Management, Ingrid van Dijk, associate professor in Economic History and associate senior lecturer, has been awarded the grant for her project “Relative Health: Long-Run Inequalities in Health and Survival Between Families and Across Generations”.
Can you tell us about your ERC project?
“How have inequalities in health and survival developed over time? A child is born into a family – what are their chances of a long, healthy life, given how well their relatives are doing in terms of their health and survival? The project will focus on health and survival, or mortality, depending on how you choose to look at it. What are the mechanisms behind how long people live? We have very few tools to study such questions over time. In my project, I propose we study these developments using similarities between relatives and changes in how distinct families are from each other in their health and survival.
“I will use data from Sweden, the Netherlands and one U.S. state (Utah). We start in the 1800s and end around the present day for Sweden and Utah, and in the 1960s for the Netherlands. We will also use survey data for a further 60 countries from around the world.”
What do you hope to achieve?
“One of the aims of the project is to take a broad perspective on inequality, health and survival. Mortality is an important indicator of inequality. It is not just about how long we live. Is it only the lucky few and the rich who benefit?
“In previous studies, life expectancy has been related to income, education or social class. For all these things, there is a social gradient in health outcomes, that is to say, the best educated and most affluent live longer. But perhaps these indicators are not the best instruments to measure changes in inequality. In some contexts, education may be more important, and in others income. In this ERC project, I want to look at how similar people are, to look at social inequality a bit more broadly, not just in relation to these specific social characteristics but to all of them. We are often quick to think of genetics in these cases, but there is also a social side to similarities between relatives.”
What does the grant mean to you?
“I appreciate that the ERC gives researchers a great deal of flexibility and the academic freedom to really think about their ideas. I look forward to studying these really interesting and important issues in the coming years. And to recruit a team to do it with!”
From the Faculty of Humanities, Karolin Obert, researcher in general linguistics, received a grant for her project “Walk and Talk”.
Can you tell us a little about your project?
“We will study how we use language and how it is affected when we move around.
“My research team and I will analyse the language of four linguistic communities in different parts of the world. They are all hunter-gatherers and therefore traditionally more mobile than we are. To collect data, we will accompany them on a large number of walks, recording audio and video as we do so. I will be working with an indigenous language community in Amazonas, Brazil.
“The materials we collect will then be analysed and compared. One question might be how speakers linguistically compensate for the fact that they do not see each other’s faces and gestures, for example when walking in a line. We are conducting research in different parts of the world to study the impact of different linguistic, social and natural environments.”
What is the aim of this research?
“As a linguist, you study different parameters that may explain linguistic diversity. In this case, we are looking at speech and movement. Movement is a very important part of these people’s daily lives, and therefore it can influence language in ways that have the potential to highlight similarities and differences between languages.”
What practical benefits does your research have?
“These languages are a window on lesser-known knowledge systems, including those that may have been important in human prehistory. Ultimately, the research helps to preserve and protect these endangered languages and systems.
“They may not have street names or signs with the names of towns, but audio and video recordings show that they live here and have a history here. These linguistic communities are made visible and their cultural specificity and value are emphasised. This concrete knowledge has proved useful in communicating with local authorities, for example.”
What does the ERC Starting Grant mean to you?
“So much. I will have more stability around me and in my research. It gives me the freedom to shape my own project while gaining experience in leading a research team. But, above all else, it’s exciting. No one has done this before.”