ERC Advanced Grant from European Research Council for Physicist at Freie Universität Berlin
Prof. Dr. Roland Netz to receive funding for research on dynamics of complex systems
№ 071/2019 from Mar 28, 2019
The theoretical physicist Prof. Dr. Roland Netz has received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). His project on modeling time series will be funded over a five-year period with almost two million euros, as the ERC announced on Thursday in Brussels. With the ERC Advanced Grants, the European Research Council enables established researchers to conduct groundbreaking research. Professor Roland Netz’s research project is entitled “Non-Markovian Memory-Based Modelling of Near- and Far-From-Equilibrium Dynamical Systems” (NoMaMemo). The project will focus on time series, i.e., time-dependent data as used in physics, chemistry, medicine, and finance.
The researchers will explore a wide variety of time series such as the movement of protons in aqueous environments, the folding and unfolding of proteins, the migration of living cells, and the dynamics of currency exchange rates. The planned research covers very different time scales: protons move on the femtosecond scale (one femtosecond equals 0.000,000,000,000 001 seconds), while protein folding typically takes microseconds, cells move for hours, and exchange rates show characteristic fluctuations from days to many years.
The scientists involved in the NoNaMemo project are aiming for a uniform description of generic time series data in the form of nonlinear integrodifferential stochastic equations. These equations are based on memory functions extracted directly from data. Their goal is to provide a platform for analyzing, understanding, comparing, and classifying data to predict time series and optimize stochastic systems. Exemplary applications will be to study movement patterns of animals in search of prey and to classify cancer cells with the aim of selecting efficient anticancer drugs.
Contact
Prof. Dr. Roland Netz, Department of Physics, Freie Universität Berlin, Tel.: +49 30 838 55737; Email: rnetz@physik.fu-berlin.de, Netz Group: www.physik.fu-berlin.de/en/einrichtungen/ag/ag-netz/