With the ERC Starting Grant, the ERC supports researchers of all nationalities with two to seven years of experience since completing their doctorate. Applicants must have a promising scientific track record and submit an outstanding project proposal on behalf of their host institution. The PI does not need to be employed by the host institution at the time of proposal submission, but a mutual agreement and commitment are necessary if the proposal is successful. Funding is usually provided for five years with a grant of up to €1.5 million. Further information is available at https://erc.europa.eu/apply-grant/starting-grant
ERC Starting Grants for the University of Bonn
Demographic change is leaving its mark on labor markets, with the workforce getting older and many experienced workers moving into retirement. Companies are urgently hunting for young talent to replace them, and yet the youth employment rate remains high in many countries. “We need a sound empirical understanding of entry-level labor markets to find effective answers to this phenomenon,” explains Assistant Professor Amelie Schiprowski. Theeconomist was appointed to the Cluster of Excellence “ECONtribute: Markets & Public Policy” of the Universities of Bonn and Cologne in 2019. In her project entitled “Entry-Level Hiring in Tightening Labor Markets: Frictions, Firm Heterogeneity and Public Policy” (ENTRYHIRE), which is being funded by the European Research Council (ERC), she studies how firms hire and train entry-level employees in the face of tightening labor markets.
“I will analyze how demographic change is altering the ‘matching process’ between young workers and firms,“ Schiprowski explains. What factors are complicating this process? What is the impact of labor market policy? By finding answers to these questions, Schiprowski is hoping to furnish an evidence base for public policy interventions that will improve the matching between young talent and companies. She is focusing primarily on the German training and apprenticeship market, which serves as an empirical “laboratory” for analyzing entry-level labor markets.
The ERC will be funding her project to the tune of some €1.5 million in funding over five years. Assistant Professor Schiprowski is extremely pleased with her funding: “The grant will give me the financial resources and the time I need to build a rich data base together with a team of postdocs and doctoral students, and thus answer novel research questions.”
Amelie Schiprowski studied economics at Sciences Po and École Polytechnique in Paris before going on to obtain her doctorate from the University of Potsdam in 2018. Since 2019, she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Bonn’s Department of Economics. Amelie Schiprowski is a member of the ECONtribute Cluster of Excellence at the Universities of Bonn and Cologne as well as the Individuals and Societies Transdisciplinary Research Area at the University of Bonn. She is also principal investigator in the “Economic Perspectives on Societal Challenges: Equality of Opportunity, Market Regulation, and Financial Stability” Collaborative Research Center, which is split between the Universities of Bonn and Mannheim. In 2020, she was awared the Joachim Herz Award in Economics (press release).
Media contact:
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Amelie Schiprowski
ECONtribute Cluster of Excellence
University of Bonn
Phone: +49 228 73-60330
Email: amelie.schiprowski@uni-bonn.de
Shimmering wings in green, blue, and turquoise like those of the peacock swallowtail from Indonesia; brown wings with spots that resemble eyes and scare off predators, like in the owl butterfly; or leaf-shaped wings in the delicate yellow-green of the brimstone butterfly: the wings of butterflies and moths display an enormous diversity of colors and patterns, the evolutionary origins of which are still not fully understood. ‘We know that many of these patterns have the purpose of signalling to con- and heterospecifics,’ explains Dr Moritz Lürig, who is currently a researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. ‘Many species of butterflies and moths use them to deter predators or attract mates, for example.’ New studies show that these complex patterns are often based on only a few genes and regulatory elements. ‘This raises a key question: How could such enormous diversity develop from such a limited genetic basis?'
With his ERC project, ‘The Evolution of Wing Coloration in Lepidoptera (EWINCOL)’, Lürig is investigating precisely this question. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), he will analyse millions of digitised images of preserved butterflies and moths from natural history museums around the world. "These museums are valuable research archives and publicly accessible repositories of knowledge. Their digitisation opens up new ways of making biological diversity visible and more accessible," says Lürig enthusiastically. His goal is to create a comprehensive database of the wing colour patterns, of all the major groups of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), the second largest insect order after beetles. "This digital 'wing atlas' will enable me to tackle three questions: first, how colours have changed during evolution and whether they are related to speciation, second, whether colour and shape evolved independently of each other, and third, how environmental factors such as light, habitat or temperature shape the global distribution of wing colour patterns.”
Combining computer science and biology, EWINCOL will develop open AI tools and contribute to a better understanding of biological diversity, with applications in biological research, museum curation, biodiversity monitoring, and science communication. This would not be possible without the ERC Starting Grant: “With this funding, I can build an interdisciplinary team to analyse millions of images and create new approaches at the interface of AI and evolutionary biology," says Moritz Lürig. “Without the funding, this would not be possible on this scale or time frame."
Moritz Lürig studied Environmental Sciences at the University of Oldenburg, earning a Bachelor's degree, and Marine Environmental Sciences, earning a Master's degree. In 2019, he received his doctorate from ETH Zurich. This was followed by postdoctoral positions at the Eawag water research institute in Switzerland and Lund University in Sweden. Since September 2023, he has been conducting research at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida.
Media contact:
Dr. Moritz Lürig
Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida
E-mail: moritz.luerig@gmail.com
Website: www.luerig.net
AI systems such as ChatGPT are increasingly taking on social roles – as advisors in everyday decision-making, as learning assistants, or as conversation partners in difficult moments. Yet precisely in situations where empathy, judgment, and social understanding matter most, these systems often fail. This is where the project LLMpathy, led by Prof. Dr. Lucie Flek from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bonn, comes in. Her goal: to make artificial intelligence (AI) more socially intelligent. “Today’s AI can imitate empathy, but it does not understand why,” says Prof. Flek, who also conducts research at the Lamarr Institute and the Bonn-Aachen International Center for IT (b-it). “At the same time, language models have recently learned to solve highly complex mathematical problems by breaking them down into smaller steps. In LLMpathy, we want to teach them to structure and justify human thoughts and emotions in the same way.”
To achieve this, Flek – who is also active in the University of Bonn’s Transdisciplinary Research Areas (TRA) “Modelling” and “Matter” and part of the upcoming Excellence Cluster “Our Dynamic Universe” (starting in January 2026) – will combine advanced machine learning methods with long-term psychological studies. The AI models will be given a personalized profile that links human traits, values, emotions, and actions. This enables the models to causally explain their answers and improve their reasoning through continuous human feedback. In addition, a simulation environment will be developed, where personalized AI agents interact with each other – for example, in conflicts or negotiations. This makes it possible, for the first time, to systematically measure and improve how well language models adopt different perspectives, pursue goals, or resist manipulation.
The new insights will also help uncover unethical forms of personalization, such as AI exerting emotional pressure in product advertising. In this way, LLMpathy ensures that future AI systems meet high standards of transparency, trustworthiness, and ethical behavior – in line with the forthcoming EU AI Act.
Professor Lucie Flek is the head of the Data Science and Language Technologies group at the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (b-it) at the University of Bonn, and a member of the Transdisciplinary Research Area (TRA) ‘Modelling’. As Area Chair for Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, she connects this work with her research on machine learning for natural language processing, including AI robustness and security. Prof. Flek has been active both in academia and industry, including with Amazon Alexa and Google Shopping Search in Europe. Her academic work at the University of Pennsylvania and University College London revolved around user modeling from text, and its applications in psychology and social sciences.
Media Contact:
Prof. Dr. Lucie Flek
Institute for Computer Science
University of Bonn
Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
Bonn-Aachen International Center for IT (b-it)
E-mail: flek@bit.uni-bonn.de
