Silvia de Bianchi receives a Starting Grant

With the grant, Dr Silvia de Bianchi will conduct the project PROTEUS “Paradoxes and Metaphors of Time in Early Universe(s)”, in which she will be examining the main strategies reached by western philosophy in the representation of time in cosmology, with the objective of modifying current metaphysics and its relation with cosmology, after new findings in today's scientific debates on gravity and quantum cosmology. In order to do so, de Bianchi will work with a group of researchers from the fields of philosophy, mathematics and physics, and will promote the application of a new methodology which focuses on the relevance of the history of philosophy and the interaction between philosophers and scientists.

With a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Dr Silvia de Bianchi began working at the UAB in 2014 as a Marie Curie researcher at the Centre d’Història de la Ciència (CEHIC). This year she forms part of the Department of Philosophy as a Ramón y Cajal researcher. Before coming to the UAB she was researcher at the University College London, at Siegen University and TU Dortmund and at the École Normal Supérieure.

The ERC also awarded a Starting Grant to Elvan Boke, researcher at the Center for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG), a UAB-Sphere centre, for the project DORMAN TOOC YTE “Understanding the Balbiani Body. A super-organelle linked to dormancy in oocytes”.

Starting Grants are awarded according to scientific excellence criteria and each project received a total of 1.5 M Euros. This year, the ERC has awarded a total sum of 605M Euros to 406 researchers of 48 different nationalities.