ICCUB-IEEC researcher Chervin Laporte, awarded an ERC Starting Grant

2021-11-02 16:15:00
ICCUB-IEEC researcher Chervin Laporte, awarded an ERC Starting Grant
Chervin Laporte, a researcher from the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC – Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya) at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). The grant, in its 2019 call, has been given for his project ‘Numerical Simulations of the Milky Way’s Accretion History’ which was officially starting on 1 November.

The ERC Starting Grants, which are part of the program Horizon 2020, are designed to help talented researchers who want to establish their research teams in Europe. The awarded candidates must have an excellent scientific track record showing an excellent research proposal for the next 5 years. These requisites are evaluated on the basis of excellence as the sole criterion by international peer reviewers.

The aim of Laporte’s project is to constrain the accretion history of our Galaxy and study how this influenced the formation and evolution of the Milky Way as well as its distribution of dark matter through a series of numerical simulation campaigns. The predictions from these runs will be central for the interpretation of data from future and upcoming large photometric/spectroscopic surveys on the ground. 

As part of his project, Laporte will also be joining the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) V collaboration, which will map and measure chemical abundances and radial velocities for ~5 million stars in the Milky Way in both hemispheres. He will also join the WEAVE survey at La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain). 

Currently, Laporte primarily works on the formation and evolution of the Milky Way through a combination of numerical simulations and interpretation of large dataset (e.g. SDSS, Gaia) and dark matter on astrophysical scales.

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