Three new Horizon Europe projects will be launched at ELTE
As part of the Horizon Europe research and innovation framework programme, Twinning aims to support the capacity building of research institutions and universities in the so-called widening countries with a moderate innovation performance through the establishment of long-term, strategic partnerships with internationally recognised research institutions. Joint projects focusing on new, promising research directions are implemented within the framework of the collaborations. The research excellence, international visibility, and competitiveness of the widening institutions are enhanced through expert exchange and extensive knowledge transfer programmes.
In September 2023, researchers at the ELTE Faculty of Science submitted five proposals to the EU call, of which three projects gained funding from the European Commission. This year, the judges received a total of 848 proposals, and the approximate odds of winning were 12 percent. ELTE won a total of 1,954,911 Euros to implement the three winning projects. The projects will start in September 2024 and their duration will be 3 years.
The QUEST project will be launched at the ELTE Department of Complex Systems Physics under the supervision of Viktor Ivády. The partner institutions of ELTE in this project will be Linköping University (Sweden), Loughborough University (UK), and Montpellier University (France), as well as JustInMind SL, a medium-sized enterprise working in the field of AI based in Spain, and Intelligentsia Consultants Sarl, a consulting firm in Luxembourg. These institutions will co-operate to develop a quantum system to be used in the field of the so-called Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC), a new direction of quantum informatics, for fast and energy-efficient processing of large datasets, for example, in machine learning tasks.
The TRILMAX consortium will be modelling and characterising magnetic van der Waals materials and testing their technological applicability. The consortium will bring together five outstanding European scientific institutions under the direction of László Oroszlány at the ELTE Institute of Physics. ELTE, specialising in theoretical investigations, as well as the Universidad de Oviedo (Spain) and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics look back on decades of collaboration regarding the research of magnetic systems. The Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (Germany) and the Universitat de València (Spain) are internationally acknowledged institutions in the synthesis and characterisation of magnetic thin films.
The IDP2Biomed programme is meant to enhance scientific excellence and innovation capacity at ELTE in the field of biochemistry. Headed by Zsuzsa Dosztányi (Institute of Biology), ELTE researchers will closely co-operate with three leading European research teams in the field of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). The research will be focusing on IDPs that are involved in pathological processes (e.g. neurodegenerative and rare diseases) that are relevant to public health. By comparing information on IDPs with biomedical data, researchers strive to understand the function of IDPs in normal and diseased states and explore new ways to alter their pathological behaviour.
The evaluators also regarded the other two proposals submitted by the ELTE Faculty of Science as “projects above the threshold”, but no resources have been left to support them at present.