Gemma Busquet, IEEC researcher at ICCUB, awarded 2022 Leonardo Grant in Physics
2022-05-10 18:00:00
Gemma Busquet, researcher from the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya — IEEC) at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the Universitat de Barcelona (ICCUB), has been awarded one of the 5 2022 Leonardo Grant in Physics given by the BBVA Foundation. This is a special call this year, within the BBVA Foundation's support programme for Researchers and Cultural Creators.
The aim of the Leonardo Grant is to foster talent and originality and to promote cutting-edge scientific research by supporting the personal projects of researchers at intermediate stages of their careers. Each grant consists of a financial support of €40,000 that will help the awarded scientist to carry out his/her project and, thus, allow him/her to consolidate his/her professional career.
The grant awarded to Dr Busquet, academic staff at ICCUB, will enable her project ‘Towards a new paradigm of radio emission in young stellar objects' to be carried out. "We know that during the early stages of stars there are very powerful phenomena in which matter is ejected at a very high velocity," explains Busquet. "What will determine the massiveness of the star will depend on how much material it has managed to accumulate or lose," she adds.
The aim of the Leonardo Grant is to foster talent and originality and to promote cutting-edge scientific research by supporting the personal projects of researchers at intermediate stages of their careers. Each grant consists of a financial support of €40,000 that will help the awarded scientist to carry out his/her project and, thus, allow him/her to consolidate his/her professional career.
The grant awarded to Dr Busquet, academic staff at ICCUB, will enable her project ‘Towards a new paradigm of radio emission in young stellar objects' to be carried out. "We know that during the early stages of stars there are very powerful phenomena in which matter is ejected at a very high velocity," explains Busquet. "What will determine the massiveness of the star will depend on how much material it has managed to accumulate or lose," she adds.
The aim of Dr Busquet's project is to understand star formation and how the rates of mass loss (ejected from the star) and mass accretion (falling into the star from the stellar disc) determine the final properties of stars. On this basis, the project that the researcher will develop with the Leonardo Grant aims to study these phenomena of accretion and ejection of material in a very large and representative sample of the Milky Way. With the grant, she will be able to develop tools for the analysis of large quantities of sources with methods based on machine learning, artificial intelligence and Big Data, all of them crucial resources in modern astronomy nowadays.