NEWS Per Axelsson, Ellen Dorrepaal and Felipe Cava have been selected as Wallenberg Academy Fellows at Umeå University. They are awarded grants between SEK 5 and 7.5 million each for five years from the largest single private investment in supporting young researchers in Sweden.
Wallenberg Academy Fellows is a new career program that targets young and promising researchers in all disciplines. The programme provides long-term funding and enables the best researchers to focus on their research and it contributes to the internationalization of the Swedish research environment.
“I warmly congratulate these three distinguished researchers who have become Wallenberg Academy Fellows at Umeå University,” says Lena Gustafsson, vice-chancellor of Umeå Univeristy. “Thanks to this long-term investment they can concentrate on their research and thus perform the work as required to tackle the truly challenging issues.”
A total of 30 researchers in Sweden have been named Wallenberg Academy Fellows. After the first period, they will be able to seek support for an additional five years of funding.
“These three top researchers are working in medicine, science and the humanities,” says Marianne Sommarine, deputy vice-chancellor for research at Umeå University. “It demonstrates the broad range of Umeå University's excellence. It is also gratifying that we have an international contribution as Felipe Cava is currently working in Spain.
The researchers appointed as Wallenberg Academy Fellows at Umeå University:
Per Axelsson: Improving the health of indigenous people in the futureWhy do some indigenous peoples fare better under colonizers than others? Per Axelsson, a researcher at the Centre for Sami Research, proposes to find out, by looking at the forces that have shaped indigenous people’s health and well-being over the past 150 years in three different countries.
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As Earth’s climate changes, the frozen soils at the planet’s poles have started to thaw – threatening to release the massive amount of carbon stored inside this melting permafrost. Ellen Dorrepaal, researcher at Umeå University’s Climate Impacts Research Centre in Abisko, wants to pinpoint exactly how thawing permafrost ecosystems work, in order to forecast how they might affect the planet’s changing climate.Press imagePhoto: Christian Edelstam
For protection from the environment, bacteria have tough walls. Felipe Cava will map how different strains construct their walls. The knowledge can be used for future development of antibiotics. Today, Felipe Cava is a researcher at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain. As a Wallenberg Academy Fellow, Cava will have the opportunity to continue his research at the Faculty of Medicine at Umeå University.
Wallenberg Academy Fellows is a career programme that provides long-term funding for the most promising young researchers of all disciplines to develop their projects. The programme was initiated by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation in close collaboration with five royal academies and sixteen universities. The plan is to fund up to 125 young researchers for whom a potential total of SEK 1.2 billion will be available during 2012–16. They are to be awarded up to SEK 7.5 million each, spread over five years.
Lena Gustafsson, Vice-Chancellor of Umeå UniversityPhone: +46 (0)73-079 42 91
E-mail: lena.gustafsson@adm.umu.se
Marianne Sommarin, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research at Umeå UniversityPhone: +46 (0)70-662 3874
E-mail: marianne.sommarin@adm.umu.se
Per Axelsson, researcher at the Centre for Sami Research, Umeå University
E-mail: per.axelsson@cesam.umu.se
Per Axelsson is currently in Australia and can best be reaches via e-mail due to the time zone difference.
Ellen Dorrepaal, researcher at the Climate Impacts Research Centre in Abisko, Umeå UniversityPhone: +46 (0)980-400 09
E-mail: ellen.dorrepaal@emg.umu.se
Felipe Cava, researcher at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
E-mail: fcava@cbm.uam.es
Editor: David Meyers