Five LMU researchers have been awarded Consolidator Grants by the European Research Council. Their projects deal with climate change, strokes, quantum physics, mitochondria, and cancer diagnosis.
Five LMU researchers have each been awarded a Consolidator Grant. Through this award, the European Research Council (ERC) supports excellent researchers with a grant of up to two million euros for a period of five years to help them expand and consolidate their innovative research.
The successful researchers were: quantum physicist Dr. Christian Schilling, radiologist and neuroscientist Professor Sophia Stoecklein, climate researcher Professor Matthias Garschagen, stroke expert Professor Arthur Liesz, and biochemist Professor Lucas Jae.
Prof. Dr. Matthias Tschöp, President of LMU, congratulates: "ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded to researchers who are capable of achieving significant scientific breakthroughs and shaping the research landscape. I am delighted that the European Research Council continues to recognize LMU's outstanding scientists, with five new appointments announced recently. This demonstrates that we conduct excellent research in various fields.“
The individual ERC-funded projects
Mapping Hidden Brain Networks in Cancer Patients
Professor Sophia Stoecklein is a radiologist and neuroscientist at the Department of Radiology at LMU Klinikum. The central goal of her research is to develop and validate biomarkers based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that enable personalized diagnostic and treatment strategies for patients with neurological diseases.
Recent advances in cancer neuroscience have shown that malignant brain tumors such as glioblastoma do not grow in isolation. Instead, they extend far beyond the visible lesion and engage with brain-wide neuronal circuits. They form synaptic connections with neurons and use their activity to support their growth. These network processes significantly influence disease progression. So far, no imaging method has translated these findings into clinical practice.
With her ERC Consolidator Project CONNECT (Cutting-Edge Neuroimaging for Functional Brain Network Evaluation in Cancer Patients), Stoecklein aims to establish functional connectivity MRI as a quantitative imaging tool for use in cancer diagnostics.
As part of the project, a comprehensive reference database with thousands of fMRI datasets will be built. Based on this resource, the team will develop an AI-supported method capable of detecting, mapping, and quantifying network deviations in individual patients. The project will also investigate the biological mechanisms underlying these abnormalities, by analyzing structural pathways and molecular signatures from tumor samples. In two clinical cohorts, the team will then evaluate the clinical potential of this approach.
As network changes often occur before a tumor becomes visible on standard imaging, CONNECT may help detect progression or the development of brain metastases at an earlier stage. In addition, the method may identify regions where tumor-brain interactions are particularly strong and thus provide a target for more precise and network-oriented therapies.
“We tend to focus on what we can see, yet crucial processes unfold beyond the visible. CONNECT aims to make the communication between tumor and brain visible, and thus accessible for diagnosis and therapy,” Stoecklein says. “Our imaging approach may also extend to other brain network disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease.”
Goals and targets for climate change adaptation
Professor Matthias Garschagen is Chair of Human Geography with a Focus on Human-Environment Relations and coordinating lead author of the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Cities.
Even though climate impacts are sharply increasing, current adaptation is not fast or deep enough. This applies particularly to adaptation frontiers such as coastal cities. At the same time, we lack the knowledge as to whether and how adaptation goals and concrete targets – used in climate change mitigation and other policy fields – can improve the situation. We also lack a coherent scientific method to evaluate and set targets, despite increasing calls from adaptation advocates and practitioners.
With his project GOALT (Goals and targets for climate change adaptation: Risks, opportunities, design, application and impact), Matthias Garschagen plans to close these gaps. First, he will seek to establish a new theoretical framework to explain under which conditions goals and targets can improve adaptation action. Secondly, he will create empirical knowledge on how actors negotiate and act on concrete targets – drawing on a first of its kind global assessment, in-depth analyses, and novel gaming simulations piloted in four coastal cities: Hamburg, Mumbai, Manila, and Cape Town. Building on this, he will develop an integrated model to examine the desirability, feasibility, and impact of potential goals and targets under various conditions. Using the generated insights, he will then develop the first comprehensive methodology to guide adaptation goals and targets and examine its transfer to other contexts. “I expect that GOALT outcomes will become a reference point for adaptation research and allow for a step-change in adaptation policy and action,” says Garschagen.
Novel approach for calculating the electronic structure of materials
As well as leading the Theoretical Quantum Physics research group at LMU’s Faculty of Physics since 2019, Dr. Christian Schilling is a member of the MCQST Cluster of Excellence and leads the Quantum Algorithms consortium within the Munich Quantum Valley. His research focuses on frontier questions in quantum information, quantum chemistry, mathematical physics, and quantum computing.
Density functional theory (DFT) is a key tool for calculating fundamental properties of molecules and solids, such as their electronic structure. It is important for basic research and for industrial applications alike. However, it has weaknesses: it cannot adequately describe strongly correlated many-body systems, a limitation that results in unreliable predictions of their properties and behavior. This is a major obstacle for developing novel materials in areas such as energy generation and microelectronics.
For his ERC project beyondDFT (Systematic Framework of Functional Theories for Strongly Correlated Electrons), Christian Schilling is taking a different tack by using one-body reduced density-matrix functional theory (1RDMFT). His approach describes the electronic structure of materials in a novel manner. It is based on a theoretical framework he has developed over the past years, which refines existing and constructs new functional theories more efficiently. In particular, it provides a pathway for incorporating electron spin and explains how important excited states can be targeted.
For his model, Schilling uses his own conceptual advances in 1RDMFT and innovative methods from entanglement theory. In this way, he aims first to achieve more accurate functional approximations for ground states and then to develop functional models for excited states. In the course of beyondDFT, he also plans to design a scheme that compresses quantum correlations, significantly accelerating 1RDMFT algorithms and thus reducing computing costs.
“BeyondDFT is preparing the ground for a fundamental transformation in electronic structure theory,” says Schilling. “The framework has the potential to establish itself as a new standard tool for electronic structure calculation in physics, chemistry, and the materials science.”
How mitochondria raise alarms
Biochemist Lucas Jae is Associate Professor of Functional Genomics at LMU’s Gene Center Munich. His research investigates mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cell, looking at how they work and their role in human diseases.
The increase in human life expectancy and associated rise in late-life morbidities will be one of the main societal challenges of this century. In the cell, mitochondria play a key role in the aging process and in the development of age-related diseases. As the sole endosymbiotic organelles of the human cell, mitochondria must elaborately interface with their environment – inside the cell and beyond – for the effective detection and resolution of mitochondrial dysfunction.
Lucas Jae’s research has opened up a path for the systematic investigation of the stress response of human mitochondria. Combining genome-wide screening with methods from synthetic biology and biochemistry, he has managed to identify the key signaling pathway mediating mitochondrial perturbations. In his new ERC project mitoSCALES (Scales of Mitochondrial Stress Response), Jae will elucidate the molecular triggers of this pathway, the biochemical interplay of its components, and how this relates to their other cellular functions – an important precondition for decoding the role of these processes in human pathologies.
Specifically, Jae will investigate the functional remodeling of the cell in the wake of mitochondrial stress and how this shapes cell fate decisions. To this end, he will examine the crosstalk with a secondary mitochondrial stress response and how this can be tuned to bolster cell viability. In addition, he will create new paradigms for studying non-autonomous mitochondrial stress signaling and responses via genomics. “Our goal is to decipher mitochondrial stress responses to inspire tomorrow’s biomedical solutions for longer, healthier lives across the population,” says Jae.
Errant memory
Professor Arthur Liesz is leader of the Stroke Immunology research group at the Institute for Stroke and Dementia Research at LMU University Hospital. He is also a member of the SyNergy Cluster of Excellence. His research is chiefly focused on the interplay between the brain and immune system after a stroke.
Heart attacks and strokes often leave behind traces that extend far beyond the affected organ – and the immune system plays a surprisingly active role here. Still a young concept in immunology, trained immunity describes how the innate immune system develops a memory and can thus drive sustained inflammation processes after an injury. If this memory is dysregulated, it can fuel chronic systemic inflammation that affects distant organs. Although trained immunity was originally discovered in connection with infections, there is increasing evidence that sterile injuries like heart attacks and ischemic strokes can also trigger such prolonged changes to the immune system.
In his research, Arthur Liesz has already demonstrated that these injuries trigger epigenetic reprogramming in the stem and progenitor cells of the bone marrow. As a result, the immune system remains in a mode of persistent activation, which can worsen dysfunctions in other organs. With his expertise in the fields of immunology, neuroscience, cardiology, and clinical medicine and in the use of state-of-the-art technologies, Liesz now plans to systematically decipher the underlying mechanisms in his ERC project TRAINED (The Role of Trained Immunity in Brain-Body Communication and Secondary Organ Dysfunction).
Central to this undertaking are the following questions: How exactly does sterile tissue damage change the bone marrow niche? Which disease-specific patterns emerge in the process? And to what extent is dysregulated trained immunity actually responsible for secondary organ injury. At the same time, the project will assess what significance these processes have for human health. “With TRAINED, we aim to establish trained immunity as a central disease mechanism for sterile injuries and identify the molecular switches that drive multimorbidity,” says Liesz. “Ultimately, this will pave the way for novel therapies that prevent harmful immunological signals from an injured organ reaching and damaging other organs.”