Dr Natalia Chepiga, soon to join the Department of Physics, is one of 11 researchers at the University of Oxford to have been selected to receive prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants, each worth €1.5 million for a period of up to five years.
The ERC is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. Their Starting Grants, part of the Horizon Europe programme, are designed to support exceptional researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch their own projects, build research teams, and pursue their most promising ideas. This year, the scheme attracted 3,928 proposals, with just 478 (12%) of these being funded.
Dr Natalia Chepiga’s ERC-funded project will develop new methods to computationally model quantum systems, focusing on the phenomena that occur between different quantum phases of matter. This could lead to the discovery of many new quantum phase transitions, in particular those that do not conform to known rules. These theory predictions could also be verified on available quantum simulation platforms.