Prestigious ERC Grants for two outstanding researchers at SDU

The University of Southern Denmark (SDU) has just received two research grants from the European Research Council (ERC) - the so-called Synergy Grants, which bring together groups of two to four researchers working together interdisciplinary to achieve ground-breaking research results.

The Synergy Grants 2024 go to Professor Lars Boje Mortensen, Department of Culture and Language, and Professor Bo Thamdrup, Department of Biology.

Together with international partners, the two SDU-researchers will investigate respectively 50,000 fragments of lost books from the Middle Ages and why large amounts of nitrogen disappear from oxygen-poor parts of the oceans.

- A huge congratulations to Lars Boje Mortensen and Bo Thamdrup on the ERC Synergy Grants. The grants are clear testimony to the excellent research that is carried out at SDU. I am proud that we at SDU - year after year - have researchers who receive such prestigious research grants. This underlines our position as a university of international class with strong roots in Southern Denmark, says Rector Jens Ringsmose.

More knowledge about medieval books

Professor Lars Boje Mortensen, Department of Culture and Language, and three Nordic partners receive an ERC Synergy Grant of DKK 97 million to investigate over 50,000 fragments of books from the Middle Ages.

Most of the medieval books from the Nordic countries were destroyed during or disappeared after the Reformation, but since parchment was expensive, the pages were often reused for other documents. In this way, fragments of thousands of Latin books have been preserved and these are the fragments that will be examined in the project.

The overall goal of the project is to elevate fragment studies to a new level and gain more knowledge about medieval books and how the Nordic countries became part of a common European book culture.
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Understanding the ocean's nitrogen cycle

Professor Bo Thamdrup from the Department of Biology is part of a new international research collaboration that has received approximately DKK 73 million DKK from the EU. This project aims to investigate how large quantities of nitrogen are lost from certain low-oxygen regions in the oceans.

The nitrogen content in the oceans directly influences how much CO₂ the oceans can absorb, a key reason why researchers want to better understand what goes on in these low-oxygen zones.

Microorganisms in seawater are responsible for this process, known as nitrogen loss, transforming nitrogen compounds that algae can use for growth into nitrogen gases that algae cannot utilize.

The research group aims to create a mathematical model of microbial activity that can predict how deoxygenation in the oceans impacts both the nitrogen and carbon cycles.
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