ERC Starting 2024 : Romain Millan awarded for his IceDaM project

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the award of 494 Starting Grants to young scientists and scholars across Europe. The funding - totalling nearly €780 million - supports cutting-edge research in a wide range of fields, from life sciences and physics to social sciences and humanities. It will help researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas.

Supporting curiosity and passion

Iliana Ivanova, Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, said : “The European Commission is proud to support the curiosity and passion of our early-career talent under our Horizon Europe programme. The new ERC Starting Grants winners aim to deepen our understanding of the world. Their creativity is vital to finding solutions to some of the most pressing societal challenges. In this call, I am happy to see one of the highest shares of female grantees to date, a trend that I hope will continue. Congratulations to all !”

Romain Millan, CNRS Researcher, awarded for his IceDaM project

The IceDaM project aims to quantify and understand the past and recent evolution of fracturing in ice shelves, which play a crucial role as protective barriers for the Antarctic ice sheet. This project relies heavily on multi-sensor remote sensing methods, combined with glacial flow models, applied across the entire margins of the Antarctic ice sheet. The goal is to measure the spatio-temporal evolution of damage and to identify the processes behind these phenomena. Ultimately, IceDaM aims to establish a continuous monitoring platform for ice shelf integrity, which controls the dynamics of the ice sheet, responsible for the majority of its contribution to sea level rise.