University of Warwick announces five ERC Advanced Grant Winners for 2025

Professor Austin’s project will be looking at the interplay between two core fields of mathematics – graphs and groups - through a new lens.

A graph gives an abstract summary of the relationships between the objects in some collection. A group is an abstract collection of possible symmetries for other mathematical structures such as physical shapes. In both graph theory and group theory, rich veins of current research explore the asymptotic behaviours of sequences of these objects as they grow in 'size'.

Professor Austin’s work has recently uncovered a new analogy between these two fields. It depends on notions of 'entropy' that can be associated to such sequences. This ERC grant will support research into the resulting interplay between these two fields of mathematics. It will develop properties and applications of these notions and explore the ways in which results from one field can shed new light on the other as a result.

Rather than focusing on judicial rulings (the mainstay of academic study), Off-Bench undertakes the first systematic study of what judges do outside of their courtrooms as part of their official duties and public engagements.

Professor Lynch’s project will investigate what off-bench activities reveal about how judges understand their role in a democratic society and the impact of these activities on judicial rulings, public support for the courts, and judicial independence and the democratic space. Off-Bench focuses on contemporary Africa as a most likely case for off-bench significance and to build theory from the Global South.

Professor Nakariakovm’s £2.1M project aims to transformatively advance our understanding of the long-standing mystery of why the Sun’s outer atmosphere — the corona — is heated to millions of degrees.

Ground-breaking in both scope and ambition, the research introduces fresh hypotheses and methodologies that could revolutionise our understanding of energy release and transfer in solar and stellar coronae. At the heart of the project is the hypothesis that coronal heating results from the combined action of numerous small-scale flares and magnetohydrodynamic waves.

In addition, the programme will develop an innovative diagnostic technique for constraining and evaluating the coronal heating function, based on the recently established effect of coronal thermal misbalance, and will investigate the mechanisms by which energy is transferred from the lower solar atmosphere into the corona.

The research will leverage high-precision data from novel observational instruments, including ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission, and integrate these with advanced theoretical modelling. This is the second time Professor Nakariakov has received an ERC Advanced Grant, underlining his sustained leadership in the field of solar plasma physics.

Professor Sadan’s £2.3m project will deliver ground breaking research on conflict and gender.

Her five-year historical study of the mountainous Indo-Burma borderlands (encompassing present-day northern Myanmar, northeast India, and eastern Bangladesh) adopts a gendered and transnational lens to investigate the deep-rooted causes and enduring nature of conflict and resistance. The project aims to reshape regional historiography and global understandings of conflict in marginalised and often-overlooked border zones and will explore how the legacies of British imperial expansion intersect with the ongoing challenges of national integration and identity.

Special emphasis will be placed on the roles of women, kinship networks, and community memory - areas often neglected in both historical and contemporary analysis. Professor Sadan will work closely with local research institutions to conduct community-based fieldwork in multiple languages across the region; she will also draw on extensive archival research.

The GENREG research program will be working to address an existing problem through a novel framework centred on generic regularity.

Picture a soap film spanning a loop of wire - it is in equilibrium since everywhere the surface tension forces are in complete balance. In mathematical terms this is known as a minimal surface and one can find ones that are in equilibrium but are not stable. There are arbitrary small perturbations that make them unbalanced rendering them close to impossible to witness as soap films. In higher dimensions, area minimising surfaces can exhibit singularities and it has been long been theorised that these singularities are what inherently make the configuration unstable, that is if they can be made to disappear by a suitable small perturbation.

Recent collaborations including Professor Schulze have already produced major advances, particularly in the context of area-minimizing hypersurfaces and mean curvature flows, demonstrating the profound potential of generic regularity to resolve long-standing open problems in geometric analysis.