2006 EURYI winners announced

A total of 25 researchers have been selected as the winners of the 2006 European Young Investigator Awards (EURYI). Each winner will receive up to ¿1.25 million over a five year period - a prize comparable in size to the Nobel Prize - to help further their research The awar...

A total of 25 researchers have been selected as the winners of the 2006 European Young Investigator Awards (EURYI). Each winner will receive up to ¿1.25 million over a five year period - a prize comparable in size to the Nobel Prize - to help further their research The awards were created in 2003 by the European Heads of Research Councils (EUROHORCs) in collaboration with the European Science Foundation (ESF). The aim is to attract outstanding young researchers from any country in the world to Europe for the further development of European science. The awards also aim to retain and attract back Europe's best brains in order to build up the next generation of leading European researchers. Looking at this year's winners, it is apparent that the award is succeeding in these objectives. While nearly all European citizens, the winners have spent long periods abroad. Take Dr Nicolas Mano, 32, for example. Originally from France, he is currently a research associate at the department of chemical engineering in the University of Texas in the US, where he also began his postdoctoral fellowship in 2004. Dr Mano picked up the award for his work on the development of a miniature membrane-less biofuel cell, which can be implanted under the skin and used to monitor many different physiological conditions such as the glucose levels of diabetes sufferers. The device could also be used to monitor post-surgical temperatures and detect any infections that may develop following surgery. The cell is 180 times smaller than earlier biofuel cells operating under physiological conditions, while its power density exceeds eightfold that of its top predecessor. 'I'm delighted to have won the award, and I look forward to starting work on this exciting project. The biofuel cell is unique in Europe, and the scientific community will undoubtedly benefit from the success of this project. This research, together with that in the US and Japan, will break new ground,' said Dr Mano. Equally groundbreaking is the research by Hungarian Gábor Tamás, 37, who is currently an associate professor in the department of comparative physiology at the University of Szeged in Hungary. Professor Tamás' work involves developing and testing the inter-neuron connection between single nerve cells and neural networks, such as neurogliaform cells and axo-axonic cells. The project is based around a discovery made by the professor that neurogliaform cells are capable of eliciting slow inhibition through GABA(B) receptors, the first neuron type known to do so. Further development of this research is expected to have great implications on our understanding of memory and cognitive functions. While this year's awards certainly reflect Europe's scientific excellence, they also bring to the fore the ongoing problem of under-representation of women in science. Only five out of the 25 researchers who received the accolade are women. Among them is Dr Mirjam Ernestus, 37, a Dutch linguist from Radboud University in Nijmegen. Her project focuses on acoustic reduction, an important phenomenon of everyday speech, and one which had received very little attention in linguistic and psycholinguist literature. In spontaneous conversational speech, words are often pronounced much shorter than their citation forms suggest. Thus, English 'ordinary' may be pronounced as 'onry', Dutch 'eigenlijk' (actually) as 'eik'. Although easy to understand for humans, reduced words are highly problematic for automatic speech recognisers. The overall aim of this project is to develop computational psycholinguistic models of speech production and comprehension that account for pronunciation variation in spontaneous conversational speech.