´The essence of why we need research and innovation´
Catherine Anne Bradley and Erik Tellgren, a musicologist and a chemist, were earlier this year elected as Young CAS Fellows 2020/21. In their projects, they ask questions that can lead to ground breaking insight in their respective fields.
CAS looked forward to hosting the award ceremony on April 20, an event that naturally had to be cancelled due to the Corona pandemic.
But fortunately, there are good digital alternatives. CAS has made a short video to celebrate our two most recent Young CAS Fellows.
‘Catherine Anne and Erik pursue questions in a novel way. That is the essence of why we need research and innovation: to move the world forward by questioning established truths’, Henrik Asheim, the Minister of Research and Higher Education in Norway, says in the video.
The Young CAS Fellow programme is designed by CAS and the Young Academy of Norway to support excellent early-career researchers. As a Young CAS Fellow, you receive funding, advice and infrastructure that will enable you to build your own research network. A Young CAS Fellow get to gather a “dream team” for three workshops throughout one year.
‘One of our most important tasks’
Both the Scientific Director of CAS, Camilla Serck-Hanssen, and the leader of the Young Academy of Norway, Sofie Høgestøl, say that the Young CAS Fellow program is one of their most important tasks.
‘In the years to come one of the most important tasks for institutions like CAS will be to further talents such as Bradley and Tellgren’, Serck-Hanssen says as she congratulates the two University of Oslo affiliated researchers.
‘Our goal is to help today’s talents establish themselves as leading figures in their field’.
‘The program yields a unique opportunity to direct our attention to excellent, young researchers, and to share their research with a broader audience’, Høgestøl says, and shares her eagerness to be able to meet in real space again.
Ask fundamental questions in their fields
Catherine Anne Bradley studies 12 pages of a medieval music manuscript produced in Paris, which made its way to Sweden. What can this tell us about the musical practices at the time?
´A Young CAS fellowship offers an invaluable opportunity to forge new collaborations and new networks´, Bradley says.
Erik Tellgren works on fundamental issues in quantum chemistry, and seeks to find out more about the reliability of existing algorithms when simulating electrons in the most stable state. That is when electrons have given out all the excess energy, and fallen down to the lowest possible state, he explains.
´This, of course, happens automatically in nature, but in order to make it happen in computer simulation, you have to work fairly hard, and with the available algorisms there is no guarantee that you succeed reliably every time´, he says.