Batty about research

EARLIER THIS month the European Research Council, which funds blue-sky research, announced its “starting grant” awards. In the current economic climate, the ERC’s investigator-driven or “bottom-up” approach offers something of an oasis that allows researchers to identify new opportunities in any field of research.

It’s a competitive arena, but for those who manage to secure the funding it can mean a big chunk of change that lets them build their research teams and go after frontier questions that could yield important answers.

This year the ERC earmarked around €800 million in grants for over 530 early-career researchers in Europe. Ireland’s performance in bagging just four of those grants has been criticised, but for the recipients here, it offers them the chance to pursue an idea that would likely not have been funded from the national purse.

“I have wanted to do this for 15 or 20 years,” says Dr Emma Teeling, whose five-year €1.5 million ERC grant will see her look to bats for clues about healthy ageing.

“If you want to try and understand the ageing process or halt it, as a zoologist I think you need to go and look to mother nature and see is there anything out there that doesn’t age. And bats appear not to age the same way as other mammals.”

Despite expending three times more energy than similar-sized mammals, bats can live up to nine times longer than expected, according to Dr Teeling, a lecturer at the school of biology and environmental science in UCD. “There are only 19 mammals that live longer than man given their body size, and 18 of these are bats,” she says.

Her project will track a population of wild bats in France over the course of years and take tiny samples of blood to perform genetic analyses and see what tricks the flying mammals might have up their sleeves.

Dr Teeling, who will use techniques she has developed in previous research funded by Science Foundation Ireland, hopes to compare what is happening with bats to what goes on in other mammals and work out at least part of the successful formula. Then future research could look at modifications to emulate the bats’ healthy longevity.

“This is the basic science that could potentially drive something magnificent such as halting or reversing ageing,” she says.

Another ERC awardee with genes in mind is Prof Aoife McLysaght, who will use her €1.3 million grant to look for disease-related genes that are conspicuous by their absence.

“Not every disease is genetic but some diseases have a genetic component,” says McLysaght, an associate professor of genetics at Trinity College Dublin. “And some diseases are caused by having an aberrant copy of a gene, others are caused by having the wrong amount of a gene.”

Prof McLysaght is looking for genes that have not been turning up in the wrong dose over evolutionary time, on the basis that if they don’t stick around they are not tolerated. “You don’t see the duplication not because it never occurred, but because it never survived,” she says, explaining that if extra copies of those genes are turning up in disease today, they may be the ones to look into.

Having five years of funding to dig into the work is an important consideration, for McLysaght. “It gives you a certain continuity and an ability to plan,” she says. “With a three-year grant you almost need to start applying for funding again in the middle of year two. But with a five-year one, you get a good few years where you can concentrate on putting your head down and doing the work.”

ERC awardee Dr Debra Laefer at University College Dublin echoes the benefit of having a good chunk of time and resources to tackle her big question. “It is tremendous, there’s a big sigh of relief,” she says, outlining plans to build up her team and concentrate her energies into one direction rather than several projects, which she compares to “trying to read five novels at once.”

Her ERC-funded project will develop a technique to model and analyse the urban environment. “We did the first comprehensive aerial laser scanning of the downtown area in Dublin,” says Dr Laefer, describing an area from the Liffey south to the northern edge of St Stephen’s Green and between Trinity and George’s Street. “Now, five years later, the technology has changed a lot, it is better and we have an opportunity to refine those techniques and really do some amazing stuff.”

The new project will develop algorithms to computationally model buildings from the scans in three dimensions and help to understand the physical and mechanical behaviours of the structures.

“We are going to be providing an asset to researchers and urban planners and others working in this field,” says Dr Laefer, who is lead principal investigator at the urban modelling group in UCD’s school of civil, structural, and environmental engineering.

Moving from the huge scale to the tiny, Prof Stefano Sanvito will be using his ERC funds – just shy of €1.5 million – to help guide people who want to make devices from organic materials. At the moment we tend to rely heavily on inorganic materials, yet using organic compounds for electronics, sensors and energy storage can open up new opportunities. Picking the right organic materials to use is important, and the new project will screen materials and develop a resource to help people choose.

“The nature of ERC projects is to perform very exploratory and highly ambitious research,” says Sanvito, who is an associate professor at Trinity’s school of physics and deputy director of CRANN.

“(ERC funding) is really a tool to be able to realise your wildest idea, and for a researcher it’s the best-case scenario possible.”

CRANN is now home to multiple ERC awardees, including Prof Valeria Nicolosi, who is working on ultra-thin materials that are just a single atom thick.

She won an ERC grant last year and decided to move from Oxford University to Trinity to carry out the work, which aims to improve energy storage by using “two-dimensional” materials that offer plenty of surface area for their volume.

“The smaller you go down in scale the more surface area you will get and the material will get more reactive as well,” says Prof Nicolosi, who previously worked in Trinity and decided to come back. “It was not an easy decision – being a lecturer in Oxford might be the dream of many scientists,” she says. “But for nanoscience, for what I do, Ireland has got a lot to offer.”

Ireland has invested heavily in the life sciences and materials science, and this is reflected in the areas where we tend to win ERC funding, according to Dr Diarmuid O’Brien, executive director of CRANN.

He argues against the view that separates fundamental research and applied science, saying the two can co-exist even through the same person. “If you look at the ERC holders in recent years one assumes that by definition they are excellent in what they do in fundamental science. Meanwhile, many of them are involved in programmes with industry too,” he says. “If you trust the system by investing in excellence, either in fundamental or applied research, you will get everything you need to get back out.”

The nature of ERC projects is to perform very exploratory and highly ambitious research