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Three researchers from Lund University become Wallenberg Academy Fellows 2019

Jan Marcus Dahlström, Vladislava Stoyanova and Per Anders Rudling
Jan Marcus Dahlström, Vladislava Stoyanova and Per Anders Rudling

The Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation has announced 29 new Wallenberg Academy Fellows. Three of them come from Lund University. The five-year grant provides the young researchers with opportunities to make important scientific breakthroughs by providing long-term research funding in Sweden.

Vladislava Stoyanova:

The Borders Within: The Multifaceted Legal Landscape of Migrant Integration in Europe

Many migrants arrived in Europe in 2015, and given the instabilities in many parts of the world more people might look for a safe place. Wallenberg Academy Fellow Vladislava Stoyanova will examine the impact of various laws and regulations on migrants’ integration in host societies.

The integration of asylum-seekers and refugees is affected by many different areas of law: migration law, refugee law, human rights, EU law, discrimination law, labor law, family law and welfare law. Legislation governs many areas of migrants’ lives: what is necessary to have the right to stay in a country and with what type of residence permit; how and when can family reunification be allowed; when is the right to work and the right to social benefits granted.

Associate Professor Vladislava Stoyanova from Lund University will analyse the laws and regulations that affect migrants’ integration. The questions at the core of her analysis are: How do these legal frameworks establish a balance between the differing interests of the migrants and the welfare society? What demands do these legal frameworks place on facilitating integration? And how do the legal frameworks limit immigration controls that can be introduced by individual states and which may play a negative role in integration?

Human rights law will be at the heart of this analysis, particularly the right not be discriminated against.

Per Anders Rudling:

Migration and exile have affected the image of Ukraine

Long-distance nationalism describes how people who have fled their home country can be influenced by or have an influence on political events there. Wallenberg Academy Fellow Per Anders Rudling is studying how Ukrainians who fled to Canada and the US after World War Two have influenced history writing about Ukraine.

The emergence of large immigrant communities is often accompanied by a political mobilisation in these groups. This is often unproblematic, but there are also potential conflicts, such as when election campaigns are run on religious or ethnic grounds.

To gain perspective on how long-distance nationalism can work, Per Anders Rudling, Visiting Senior Fellow at the National University of Singapore is studying how the image of Ukraine has been influenced by people who fled to Canada and the US towards the end of World War Two. Through cultural associations, schools, youth organisations and the media, this Ukrainian émigré community has developed a collective memory of the homeland, heavily centered on the great famine of 1932-33 (largely caused by Stalin’s policies) and the anti-Soviet resistance in the immediate post-war years. Other aspects of the recent history, such as local collaboration in the Holocaust and the massacres of the Polish minority in western Ukraine, have been omitted. 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this memory culture was reexported to Ukraine, where it has come to form the basis of a new national memory. This has complicated relations, not least with Poland, but also with Israel. Using the Ukrainian post-war émigrés as a case study, Rudling’s research aims at contributing to our understanding of similar contemporary processes of long-distance nationalism, and how it shapes collective memory in an era of mass migration. As a Wallenberg Academy Fellow, Rd. Rudling will work at Lund University.

Jan Marcus Dahlström:

How to measure an attosecond?

One attosecond is to one second what one second is to the age of the universe. Wallenberg Academy Fellow Jan Marcus Dahlström is developing a type of atomic clock that can measure attoseconds and be used in experiments involving extreme electromagnetic forces.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1999 rewarded femtosecond spectroscopy, in which researchers study chemical reactions that occur in the space of a few femtoseconds (10-15 seconds). Now – two decades later – researchers in physics and chemistry are attempting to study processes that take place on the attosecond scale (10-18 seconds), including the photoelectric effect, in which electrons are emitted from a material that is illuminated with electromagnetic radiation.

Previously, ultrashort laser pulses have been used to measure the ejected electrons, photoelectrons. The problem is that the laser pulses and photoelectrons interact, so determining the time structure of the short laser pulses is impossible.

To measure time at the attosecond scale, Associate Professor Jan Marcus Dahlström at Lund University is developing a new kind of “clock”, in which he uses atoms with electrons that can be in something called a superposition state. He will investigate how the clocks affect each other, how they are affected by vacuum fluctuations in the electromagnetic field, how long it takes for a group of clocks to decompose and how this process can be controlled. The project will provide new opportunities for understanding the inner workings of matter.

Jan Marcus Dahlström is already part of a large-scale research project from the Knut och Alice Wallenberg Foundation that has led to an improved understanding of the photoelectric effect:

https://www.lu.se/article/snurrig-upptackt-ger-nya-insikter-om-fysikaliskt-fenomen?ref=pressrelease

Jan Marcus Dahlström is also Principal Investigator of a Swedish Foundations Starting Grant from Olle Engkvists Stiftelse, where he is stuying how these atomic clocks can be prepared and used to study relativistic effects in atoms:

https://www.lu.se/article/forskning-pa-gang-varldens-mest-exakta-tidtagarur

For more information about the other Wallenberg Academy fellows: https://kaw.wallenberg.org/