ERC Starting Grant for Brian Hare and Harish Vedantham

Two ASTRON-staff members who are closely linked to the Kapteyn Institute received an ERC Starting Grant for research projects using the LOFAR radio telescope. One project will use LOFAR to create detailed images of lightning on Earth, the other aims to detect space weather events and magnetic fields around exoplanets.

Dr Brian Hare
Brian Hare will lead the project LIFT (Lightning corona Imaging From a radio Telescope), which will make use of the LOFAR radio telescope to create unprecedented images of lightning that are precise and detailed enough to allow for direct comparison with state-of-the-art lightning models.

Dr Harish Vedantham
Harish Vedantham has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to detect space weather events and magnetic fields around exoplanets for the first time. Space weather is caused by a star ejecting huge masses of plasma and high-energy particles that can be detrimental to planetary atmospheres.

More about ERC
ERC supports talented young researchers in setting up a research team and starting an independent research project. An ERC grant enables these researchers to start bold, groundbreaking research and thus open up new avenues in their field of study.

Read the full press release by ASTRON