ERC grant awarded to Prof. Niels Taatgen

The number of Starting Grants that the European Research Council (ERC) has awarded to researchers from the University of Groningen this year has risen to nine. This week it was announced that the application of Prof. Niels Taatgen of the Department of Artificial Intelligence will also be honoured with an ERC grant. Taatgen has been awarded EUR 1.5 million for five years of research.

Taatgen has been awarded his ERC grant for research into how people can multitask better (‘Towards Safe and Productive Human Multitasking’). His starting point is that people are in principle able to multitask, but that this can sometimes go wrong due to several tasks needing the same part of the brain at the same time. The project will concentrate in particular on the issue of why people seem to want to do many things at the same time, and what circumstances control whether this is safe and productive or not. To this end behaviour experiments will be conducted and computer simulations of humans while multitasking will be designed. These will then be studied with the help of fMRI brain processes.

More information: Prof. Niels Taatgen

In 2011 six more ERC Starting Grants were awarded to researchers at the Groningen Faculty of Science and Engineering (formerly known as the Faculty Mathematics and Natural Sciences):

Dr. Sybren Otto (Stratingh Institute for Chemistry)

Self Replication in Dynamic Molecular Networks

Prof. Caspar van der Wal (Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials)

Quantum Optics with Spins in Solid State: The Power of Ensembles

Prof. Gerard Roelfes (Stratingh Institute for Chemistry)

Modular assembly of DNA-based systems; bio-inspired artificial allosteric assemblies

Prof. Antoine van Oijen (Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials)

Single-molecule studies of the DNA replication machinery

Prof. Dirk Slotboom ( Groningen Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute )

Minimalist multipurpose ATP-binding cassette transporters

Dr. Wesley Browne ( Stratingh Institute for Chemistry )

Shedding light on catalyst systems towards a bright future for green oxidation chemistry