EU’s research funding organisation awards Advanced Grants to seasoned researchers to pursue ambitious projects and future breakthroughs. Prof. Mikko Salo received a five-year grant worth around €2 million to push forward research work on notoriously challenging inverse problems.
The European Research Council (ERC), Europe’s premier funding organisation set up by the European Union in 2007 to advance the highest quality research, has granted prominent ERC Advanced Grant funding to Professor Mikko Salo, one of the FAME Flagship’s Principal Investigators.
This five-year grant, worth approximately €2 million, will support Prof. Salo’s research team at the University of Jyväskylä, where he serves as a Professor of Mathematics, in developing new methods for solving inverse problems. This marks the third time Prof. Salo has been granted prestigious funding by ERC, following the previously awarded ERC Starting Grant for 2012−2017 and Consolidator Grant for 2018−2023.
A foundation for new knowledge and future applications
Prof. Salo’s project will focus on the so-called Calderón problem, a foundational mathematical question in the field of inverse problems. Posed by the Argentinian mathematician Alberto Calderón in 1980, this problem functions as a mathematical model for observing the insides of an object by only measuring how electricity flows across its outside surface. In the field of inverse problems, the Calderón problem falls under the notorious category of severely ill-posed problems in which tiny errors or noise in external measurements make accurate solutions incredibly difficult to reconstruct.
Prof. Salo’s team seeks to solve new variations of the Calderón problem in settings where space and time are bent as well as in geometrically demanding environments. In addition, the research team investigates how precisely imaging problems can be solved by methods based on machine learning and neural networks. Their work will not only generate new fundamental knowledge in mathematics, but it also holds potential for long-term influence on practical applications.
Combining ambitious research goals and long-term funding
The European Research Council’s Advanced Grants give established researchers the opportunity to pursue ambitious projects and major scientific breakthroughs. The grants are part of the Horizon Europe, the European Union’s key research and innovation funding programme that aims to boost Europe’s scientific impact, economic growth, and industrial competitiveness while tackling major global challenges.
Photo: University of Jyväskylä / Mikko Salo
