SNSF grants 214 Postdoc.Mobility fellowships

A research stay abroad opens up new horizons for researchers at the start of their careers and often serves as a springboard for personal and professional development. The SNSF specifically supports up-and-coming researchers through its Postdoc.Mobility scheme.

Three of the selected projects

As part of the most recent call, the SNSF is providing 26.5 million Swiss francs to support 214 researchers with a stay abroad or a return to Switzerland (see the box below for details).

Postdoc.Mobility fellowships include a grant for living costs, a flat-rate amount for travel expenses, and a possible contribution to research and conference costs. After returning to Switzerland, fellowship holders can also apply for a return grant to finance their initial period of research.

The research projects that the SNSF is supporting include:

• Better understanding Alzheimer’s: Cecilia Boccalini is heading to McGill University in Canada to research the complex pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease. She is particularly interested in the various protective measures and risk factors that influence disease burden and cognitive progression differently in men and women. Protein deposits, neurodegeneration and inflammation will be measured in the brains of around 200 test subjects with the aid of positron emission tomography (PET). The project is intended to help better assess the effectiveness and side effects of therapies.

• International law and climate change: Sovereign equality is one of the fundamental principles of international law, but it is being undermined by climate change. This is because some countries (e.g. island nations) are much more heavily affected by the impacts of climate change (such as rising sea levels) than others – and contribute less to the problem in the first place in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Rodolfo Ribeiro Coutinho Marques from the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies is examining this discrepancy at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is drawing on legal analyses and assessing how countries discuss and approach this discrepancy in international meetings and agreements.

• Accelerating the adoption of photovoltaics: Ayca Duran from ETH Zurich is travelling to Stanford University (US) to study the high energy consumption of buildings, which accounts for around 28% of global CO2 emissions. She focuses on building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) to promote the decarbonisation of urban spaces. However, the rollout of BIPV facades is being held back by complex decision-making processes. To accelerate this process, Ayca Duran aims to develop an automated method to analyse and evaluate facades for BIPV retrofitting. She is testing the developed method on thousands of building facades in Zurich and San Francisco.