Francesco Chiabrera has been awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC): €1.5 million over five years to develop his own research programme, TOPOIONICS, at IREC. ERC Starting Grants are among Europe’s most prestigious and competitive awards for early-career researchers.
Living systems are remarkably energy-efficient because they keep reorganising themselves in response to their environment. TOPOIONICS asks whether part of this behaviour can be reproduced directly in solid materials. Instead of making computers imitate the brain, the idea is to make the materials themselves adapt – a property Francesco calls “structural plasticity” – so that they become an active part of computation.
The project aims to lay the foundations for a new generation of energy-efficient, adaptive computing materials. It builds on years of work in our group on ion-controlled devices for neuromorphic (brain-inspired) computing, including the MSCA project MagnOxy.
Congratulations, Francesco!
