Alice Gabriel wins ERC Starting Grant

Ten early-career researchers representing a wide range of disciplines have received Starting Grants from the European Research Council (ERC) with LMU as host institution. Each of these grants is worth approximately 1.5 million euros. Submissions are evaluated solely on the basis of the applicant’s previous scientific record and the quality of the proposed project. Moreover, LMU offers the option of appointment to a Tenure-Track Professorship to successful grantees, which can be converted into a permanent faculty position, subject to a positive assessment of performance.

Sep 03, 2019

Dr. Alice-Agnes Gabriel is a lecturer in the Seismology group of Professor Heiner Igel at the Institute of Geophysics. Her research is concerned with the physical processes that are responsible for earthquakes.

The bewildering complexity of faulting behavior has hindered the development of reliable earthquake forecasts. In her ERC project, entitled “Truly Extended Earthquake Rupture” (acronym: TEAR), Gabriel wants to answer the following questions: What impact do local deformations in fault zones have on earthquakes? What are the scales and physical processes governing how and when faults slip?

To do so, she will use a combination of methodologies drawn from applied mathematics, seismology and computer science, together with laboratory studies of the behavior of rock under stress and large-scale earthquake modelling on high-performance computers. Her goal is to construct a mechanistic model of fault slippage that can serve as the basis for more realistic and timely assessments of earthquake hazard in the future.

Alice Gabriel studied Physics at the Technical University in Dresden, and obtained her PhD in Geophysics at the ETH Zürich in 2013, shortly after moving to LMU in 2012.

Ten early-career researchers representing a wide range of disciplines have received Starting Grants from the European Research Council (ERC) with LMU as host institution. Each of these grants is worth approximately 1.5 million euros. Submissions are evaluated solely on the basis of the applicant’s previous scientific record and the quality of the proposed project. Moreover, LMU offers the option of appointment to a Tenure-Track Professorship to successful grantees, which can be converted into a permanent faculty position, subject to a positive assessment of performance.