Three Hebrew University researchers win prestigious ERC Advanced Grants for pioneering work

(Press-News.org) The Hebrew University of Jerusalem proudly congratulates three of its esteemed researchers – Prof. Dorit Aharonov, Prof. Israel Nelken, and Prof. Tamar Ziegler – on being awarded the highly competitive European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants.

This prestigious recognition, part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, supports senior researchers in pursuing ambitious, curiosity-driven projects with the potential to make significant scientific breakthroughs. The ERC Advanced Grant competition is one of the most selective funding schemes in Europe, designed to empower leading scholars at the forefront of their disciplines.

The awarded projects span diverse fields, underscoring Hebrew University’s ongoing commitment to research excellence and innovation.

Prof. Tamir Sheafer, Rector of Hebrew University, praised the recipients: “This remarkable achievement reflects the outstanding quality of research conducted at the Hebrew University. We are immensely proud of Professors Aharonov, Nelken, and Ziegler for pushing the boundaries of knowledge and earning international recognition at the highest level. Their success reaffirms our institution’s status as a global leader in academic research.”

Prof. Israel (Eli) Nelken, The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences and the Silberman Institute for Life Sciences, for studies of the cellular and network basis of continual learning: Decades of key advances in our understanding of synaptic plasticity resulted in a puzzle. On the one hand, memories can be highly stable and organisms are capable of adding new memories without destroying old ones. On the other hand, data and models support neither stability nor lifelong (‘continual’) learning. In project MEMORAT, I will study auditory continual learning in the behaving rat, measuring the stability of memory during that time and critically testing models of learning and memory. This project will address the deep puzzles of memory when memory load is high, a regime that has not been previously studied in animal models.

Prof. Tamar Ziegler holds the Henry and Manya Noskwith Chair in Mathematics at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics. She was awarded an Advanced ERC grant for research at the interface of dynamics, additive number theory, and algebraic geometry. Ziegler’s work has introduced methods from ergodic theory to resolve longstanding problems in combinatorics and number theory. A notable example is the use of dynamics on nilmanifolds in proving Hardy–Littlewood estimates for the number of prime solutions to systems of linear equations of finite complexity. Her research proposal explores frontier questions in dynamics, number theory, and additive combinatorics, and more recently, unveils new connections to stability phenomena in algebraic geometry.

Prof. Dorit Aharonov, from the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the Hebrew University, explores the development of new quantum algorithms and the computational power of noisy quantum computers. Aharonov is leading research that tackles the two most critical challenges in quantum computing. The first challenge lies in the field of computer science: despite extensive research efforts, only a limited number of quantum algorithms and efficient algorithmic techniques are currently known. What is the range of computational problems that quantum algorithms can significantly accelerate, and how can entirely new methods be devised to develop such algorithms? The second question concerns physics: quantum computers are closer than ever to physical realization, following recent demonstrations that error and noise correction can be effective in small-scale systems. However, we still lack a comprehensive theory explaining the impact of errors on the computational capabilities of quantum computers, and it remains unclear whether—and how—highly noisy quantum systems can be effectively used for computation. The research aims to attack both challenges together. A theory of quantum complexity in the presence of noise will be developed,  alongside quantum algorithmic methods that treat errors not as obstacles but as resources—leveraging them to advance quantum computation and facilitate the creation of new quantum algorithms.

This achievement not only highlights the groundbreaking work of Professors Aharonov, Nelken, and Ziegler, but also reaffirms the Hebrew University’s role as a driving force, in face of adversity, in advancing global scientific discovery across disciplines.
 

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