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The researchers are human geographer Johan Miörner, Camila Consiglio, researcher in systems immunology, and Jacob Vogel, who studies neurodegenerative diseases. Read more about their research projects below.

Johan Miörner: research project on decentralised infrastructure solutions

Project title: Socio-technical modularity and the decentralization of infrastructure (DECENT)
 

What is your research project about?

”The project is about decentralised and modular infrastructure solutions. Large-scale, centralised infrastructure systems—for energy, water, transportation, and food supply—have long been seen as the default model for modern societies. However, more and more cities are exploring alternative paths, using smaller, locally adapted systems such as local electricity grids, small-scale wastewater treatment, micromobility, and shorter food supply chains.

What problems are you trying to solve?

”We’ll study how decentralised and modular infrastructure solutions can gain traction despite facing strong barriers on paper, such as lock-ins in established systems or loss of economies of scale. The trend toward decentralisation is becoming increasingly clear, but we still lack both theories and systematic empirical knowledge about the driving forces and patterns behind it. 

More concretely, it’s about understanding how large infrastructure systems can be broken down into smaller, flexible modules that allow for local solutions. By combining knowledge of sustainable transitions, economic geography, and so-called modularity theory, we aim to understand both how decentralisation becomes possible—and how local conditions influence it.”

What types of infrastructure will you primarily investigate, and what is the goal of your research?

”We will compare different types of wastewater management, mobility, and food supply in high- and middle-income cities, and then attempt to formulate a new theory of infrastructure decentralisation. The goal is to better understand the role that small-scale, locally adapted solutions can play in sustainable infrastructure transitions, and to challenge the centralised model that has dominated since the early 20th century.”

What does an ERC Starting Grant mean for your project?

”Receiving an ERC Starting Grant means I can build my own research team and lead an ambitious project over several years. The funding allows us to take bigger risks and think long-term. It provides the resources needed to develop new theoretical perspectives while also conducting comparative empirical studies across several countries.”

Camila Consiglio: Understanding the role the immune system plays in fertility 

Project title: Fertilimmune
 

Can you briefly tell us about your research project and the problems you aim to solve?

“Infertility affects 1 in 6 adults worldwide. Current infertility therapies overlook its underlying causes, resulting in pregnancy success rates as low as 30%. It is becoming increasingly clear that reproduction and immunity are deeply intertwined, making the immune system a promising target for fertility treatment. Yet, major knowledge gaps still exist in how the immune and the reproductive systems regulate one another, and impact pregnancy outcomes. My ERC Starting Grant project “fertiliMMUNE” aims to uncover mechanisms of human immune-reproductive crosstalk and define novel targets for fertility treatment.”

What inspired you to start working on your research?

What inspired me to start working on my research is the interesting observation that the immune system functions quite differently between men and women. For instance, immune-mediated diseases show clear sex differences, with men experience more severe infections and higher cancer rates, while women have stronger vaccine responses and greater risk of autoimmunity. Over the past 10 years, my research has been building on understanding mechanisms of sex differences in immunity, where sex hormones such as testosterone and estrogen have emerged as powerful regulators of immune cell function. fertiliMMUNE therefore aims to uncover how sex hormone–driven immune mechanisms shape fertility and pregnancy outcomes, ultimately defining novel targets for immune-informed fertility treatments that can improve success rates and reduce the heavy burden of infertility.

What does the ERC grant mean to you?

The ERC starting grant represents a unique opportunity to pursue this ambitious, high-risk research that would not be possible through other funding mechanisms. The questions at the heart of fertiliMMUNE—understanding how the immune-reproductive crosstalk shape immunity and reproduction in humans— are complex and require a multidisciplinary approach, extensive resources, and a dedicated team working together over several years. With the support of the ERC, I can bring together diverse expertise, build the necessary infrastructure, and lead a research program with the depth and continuity needed to tackle these challenges. The ERC starting grant will make it possible for us to advance our understanding of immune–reproductive crosstalk, and pave the way for more precise, equitable, and effective fertility treatments that could transform care for millions of people worldwide.

Jacob Vogel: Simulations of Alzheimer’s disease at the individual level

Project title: TauTime

Can you briefly describe your research project and what inspired you to start working on it? 

“In this project, we will take known or hypothetical biological mechanisms describing how Alzheimer’s disease (AD) spreads through the brain and combine it with data measured from real human AD patients, and build this into a computational simulation of the full AD process. This simulation can serve as means of performing certain types of mechanistic experiments that would not be possible to do in actual humans. We will also work to individualize these simulations (sort of like the popular digital twin concept) in order to forecast the future progression of the disease at the individual patient level.”

What is the specific problem or need that you and your team members are trying to solve or address with your research? 

“The motivation for this project came from how hard it has been to model AD in vitro or in animal models. It is such a complex disease and, as far as we know, only humans get it. But of course, mechanistic experimentation is often not possible in humans. So, it has for a long time been a goal of mine to create a mechanistically accurate computer simulation of the AD process in humans, built using human data. We already have basic models that work surprisingly well. The goal for the ERC project is to advance these models to a point where they can be used to two things: 1) generate and test new mechanistic hypotheses, but in a context that we hope will be relevant to human disease and treatment; and 2) forecast the future progression of an individual patient, in a manner that could aid ongoing clinical trials or even patient management in memory clinics.”  

What does a ERC Starting Grant mean for this particular project?

“The ERC StG is a very generous award and so what it means most directly for the project is that we will have access to the personnel and compute resources that will really be necessary to do this project the right way. This is very encouraging, because we want this model to not just be successful as a proof-of-concept, we want it to be meaningful and useful to society. That sort of thing takes a lot of time and resources, this award will provide that. More broadly, it means that there is interest among other European scientists in human AD research, and in computational and data science approaches to medical and life sciences.”