Five Branco Weiss Fellows receive ERC Starting Grants

Five Branco Weiss Fellows receive ERC Starting Grants

Five Branco Weiss Fellows have been awarded European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants in the 2026 funding round. Robert Baines, Julius Huijts, Vincent Fortuin, Donald Iain MacDonald and Fabian Voigt will use the grants to pursue research projects spanning robotics, biophysics, artificial intelligence and neuroscience.

The ERC Starting Grants support promising researchers at the beginning of their independent careers, enabling them to establish their own research groups and pursue high-risk, high-gain research. This year, the ERC awarded 421 Starting Grants to researchers across Europe, with a total funding volume of €705 million.

Robert Baines: Harnessing nonlinear structures for dynamic robots

Branco Weiss Fellow Robert Baines received the ERC Starting Grant for his project “TENSE – Tensegrity Engineering for Nonlinear Shape-shifting and Embodied Locomanipulation.” The grant will support the establishment of his independent research group at the University of Oxford, where he has just joined the Oxford Robotics Institute and the Department of Engineering Science.

Baines research focuses on developing shape-morphing robotic systems that can adapt to different environments and tasks. During his previous work at ETH Zürich, he explored how robots can become more resilient and adaptable by combining soft and rigid robotics, learning-based control, simulation, and design optimization.

At Oxford, Baines will build on this interdisciplinary approach to develop highly adaptable robots designed to operate effectively in the real world, with potential applications including ecological monitoring, space exploration, and industrial maintenance.

Julius Huijts: Filming proteins in motion

Branco Weiss Fellow Julius Huijts received an ERC Starting Grant for his project “Cool T-Rex.” Building on his postdoctoral research, Huijts will use ultracold electron beams to develop an instrument that can create “molecular movies” of proteins as they undergo structural changes.

Understanding how proteins change shape is crucial for understanding how they function and how diseases arise. But these “molecular machines” are very tiny and move incredibly fast, so the information we can get by looking at them using traditional instrumentation is limited. Huijts will combine ultracold electron beams with principles from X-ray crystallography. By laser-cooling and ionizing rubidium atoms, he will generate ultracold electron pulses that can produce diffraction patterns revealing protein structures and their changes over time.

The project could enable structural protein analysis on a compact, table-top instrument, making the study of protein dynamics more accessible and helping researchers better understand membrane-protein-related diseases.

Fabian Voigt: Observing the brain in action

Branco Weiss Fellow Fabian Voigt has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for his project “KALEIDOSCOPE – Metasurface-based brain observatories.” The grant will support his independent research group at the Max Planck Center for Physics and Medicine and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany.

KALEIDOSCOPE aims to develop new optical imaging tools that record brain activity in freely moving animals, overcoming limitations of conventional methods that restrict movement or require simplified environments. Combining machine vision, microscopy and optical metasurfaces, Voigt will create a tracking microscope capable of following animals in 3D while simultaneously imaging individual neurons.

The technology will initially be developed for fruit flies and zebrafish, before being extended to the transparent adult vertebrate Danionella cerebrum. The project could reveal how neural circuits drive natural behaviors such as navigation and social interaction.

Vincent Fortuin: Making AI work with small datasets

Branco Weiss Fellow Vincent Fortuin has received an ERC Starting Grant for his project “AutoBayes – Unlocking Reliable Small-data AI through Bayesian Deep Learning.” The five-year project will be based at the University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN), where Fortuin has been Professor of Probabilistic Machine Learning since January 2026. He also leads the ELPIS research group (Efficient Learning and Probabilistic Inference for Science) at Helmholtz AI in Munich.

Many deep learning systems depend on large amounts of training data. In scientific research, however, datasets are often small, while researchers also need to know how certain or uncertain a model is about its predictions. AutoBayes addresses both problems by applying Bayesian statistical methods to deep learning.

The project builds on Fortuin’s research at the intersection of deep learning and probabilistic modelling, with a particular focus on reliable and data-efficient AI. Fortuin and his team will develop methods that allow AI systems to learn from limited datasets while providing estimates of the uncertainty associated with their results.

The methods developed through AutoBayes could make machine learning more useful in areas of science where collecting large datasets is difficult or impossible, while helping researchers assess how much confidence they can place in the predictions produced by AI models.

Donald Iain MacDonald: Understanding how sensory neurons drive migraine pain

Branco Weiss Fellow Donald Iain MacDonald has received an ERC Starting Grant for his project “MigSense – How do sensory neurons drive migraine pain?” The grant was awarded for a project with University College London as the proposed host institution, where MacDonald also completed his PhD in neuroscience.

Migraine is associated with changes in sensory processing, but the mechanisms through which sensory neurons contribute to migraine pain remain incompletely understood. MigSense will investigate how these neurons detect and transmit signals that lead to pain, with the aim of identifying the neural mechanisms involved.

MacDonald’s research focuses on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of pain and on how pain is modulated by the nervous system. As a Branco Weiss Fellow, he has been investigating how the brain suppresses pain in situations of danger, using predatory threat in mice to identify neural circuits involved in pain inhibition. His work at the National Institutes of Health in the United States has also examined how neuropeptides released by sensory neurons contribute to pain and inflammation. MigSense gives MacDonald the opportunity to extend this research to migraine and investigate the role of sensory neurons in generating migraine pain. The project could provide a basis for identifying mechanisms that may eventually be targeted in the treatment of migraine.