Coveted ERC grants for four LMU researchers

Four LMU researchers have each been awarded a Consolidator Grant. Their projects deal with the statistics of social inequality, the cuneiform culture of Mesopotamia, the detailed investigation of small molecules, and Christian-Muslim relations before the first crusades.

The award comes with funding of up to two million euros for a period of five years. Through Consolidator Grants, the European Research Council (ERC) helps outstanding scientists expand and consolidate their innovative research. Decisions are based on the scientific excellence of the applicants and of the submitted projects.

A close analysis of social inequality and its causes

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Professor Daniel Wilhelm is Chair of Statistics and Econometrics at LMU’s Department of Statistics. His research focuses on the analysis of existing statistical methods and the development of new ones for the study of economic questions. Back in 2019, the European Research Council (ERC) awarded him a Starting Grant for his project “MEImpact,” in which he investigated the effects of measurement errors on empirical results and political decisions.

Income inequality and related disparities are continuing to rise worldwide, with consequences that are cementing the wealth gap for generations. The dramatic imbalance has become an important political issue. Documenting inequality, understanding what determines it, and looking for possibilities to reduce it are important elements of empirical research in the field of economics. There is a range of common statistical methods available for quantifying the various factors that influence inequality and intergenerational mobility. Using these methods, experts have sometimes come up with results that have caused a furor and have been over- or misinterpreted in public debate. For example, they are often attributed a causal or economic significance that are justified only under strong and unrealistic assumptions.

In his ERC project SEMANI (Semistructural Econometric Methods for the Analysis of Inequality), Wilhelm wants to reveal where the pitfalls lie and explain how to perform more credible analyses. The first goal of his research project is to demonstrate by theoretical and empirical means that these common statistical methods yield results that permit a structural economic interpretation only under strong and unrealistic assumptions. When these assumptions do not hold, the structural interpretation can be misleading and the results may not show what they purport to indicate.

In a second step, Wilhelm plans to develop new robust statistical methods that reliably lead to structurally interpretable results while retaining the attractive features of common simpler approaches. In this way, the statistician wants to obtain new insights into the causes of inequality and effective policies for reducing it. Wilhelm hopes, furthermore, that his research will facilitate a reevaluation of the comprehensive empirical material upon which the current state of research is founded and which has shaped our understanding of inequality and influenced political decisions around the world.

Rewriting the history of Mesopotamia

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Professor Enrique Jiménez, Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Literatures at LMU’s Institute of Assyriology and Hittite Studies, explores the literature of extinct cultures by harnessing artificial intelligence and digitization. The Electronic Babylonian Library database, which he built up, makes a decisive contribution to restoring Near Eastern literature, much of which survives only in fragmentary form.

One of the world’s oldest writing systems emerged in Mesopotamia, in the region of modern-day Iraq and Syria. Over millennia, people inscribed characters on clay tablets using styluses, and preserved the knowledge of the time was preserved in libraries. This legacy was handed down through generations of scholars. With the collapse of the large Mesopotamian empires, the libraries were destroyed and the clay tablets shattered. Today, we have countless isolated fragments of these tablets.

In his ERC Consolidator Grant project RECC (Rewriting the End of Cuneiform Culture), Jiménez aims to provide new perspectives on the decline of advanced Mesopotamian civilizations and the eventual disappearance of cuneiform writing. Thousands of preserved texts from this late period remain undated and unanalyzed.

To address this, Jiménez will use artificial intelligence to develop the “CuneiDate” tool, enabling the historical contextualization of previously undated texts for the first time. This work promises fresh insights into why cuneiform writing persisted even after the fall of the Mesopotamian empires in the first millennium BCE. “One of the central questions of our project,” Jiménez explains, “is how the people of ancient Babylon coped with the diminishing importance of their millennia-old traditions. These answers resonate today with cultures facing existential threats in a globalized world.”

Spectroscopy: homing in on small molecules

Professor Anne Schütz is leader of the NMR Spectroscopy research group at LMU’s Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy. In her research, she studies the mechanisms of enzymatic reactions and the structure and dynamics of various biomolecules and their interactions.

Small molecules play a key role in all chemical processes of life. As substrates, cofactors, solvents, inhibitors, and activators, they affect how proteins and nucleic acids work. “For studies that seek to understand these processes in detail, it would be useful to be able to filter individual molecules out of large complexes and trace their paths during chemical and structural transformations – even when the molecules involved are of very different sizes,” explains Schütz.

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Few methods can achieve this under natural conditions. One of them is nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, which affords extremely detailed insights into the movements, interactions, and chemical changes of molecules at the atomic level. However, investigating small molecules in large complexes presents challenges. To examine the molecules in question at the spectrometer, researchers have to label them with special NMR-active atomic nuclei. Although this is already common practice in biomolecular NMR, it remains trickier when dealing with small molecules and requires an elaborate and often individually adapted synthesis. Optimized experiments have already contributed to expanding the boundaries of the spectral resolution and sensitivity of NMR for large biomolecules up to the megadalton range. Owing to the differences in chemical structure, however, these strategies are not so easily transferred to small molecules.

The ERC project ZoomNMR (Zooming in on small-molecule ligands by magnetic resonance) by chemist Anne Schütz is designed to close this gap. Schütz plans to develop new spectroscopic tools that enable small molecules in large complexes to be analyzed using NMR. “Our approach combines innovative isotopic labeling techniques, inspired by organic chemistry, with special relaxation phenomena in order to improve the sensitivity and resolution of measurements,” says Schütz. “We will test and develop these tools on a human enzyme and three different classes of small molecules.” The enzyme in question is particularly interesting as a drug target for potential therapies for treating cancer and degenerative illnesses. In this way, the team plans to demonstrate that the new method can answer a wide variety of questions – from researching fundamental enzymatic mechanisms to developing new drugs. “Our long-term goal is to make the analysis of small molecules in large complexes just as easy and efficient as is currently the case for protein NMR.”

A new narrative of Christian-Muslim relations

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Professor of Byzantine Studies at LMU, Zachary Chitwood was previously the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant for his project MAMEMS about the monastic republic of Mount Athos in medieval Greece.

The half-millennium between the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 and the First Crusade in 1096 was a crucial period shaping the beginning of Christian-Muslim relations. Until now, research has tended to overlook how the principal Eastern Christian legal regimes – including those of East Rome (Byzantium), the Islamicate world, and the space in between – grappled with the rise of Islam.

In his new project NOMOS (“The Challenge of Islam and the Transformation of Eastern Christian Normative Regimes, ca. 630-1100”), Zachary Chitwood plans to examine how the normative experts of that time interpreted, circumscribed, and defined the new religion. Moreover, he will investigate how the encounter with Islam itself shaped long-term developments within Eastern Christian legal regimes.

Despite differences in literary language (Greek, Syrian, Coptic, and Armenian), levels of statehood (ranging from the Byzantine Empire and the smaller Armenian principalities to the stateless Coptic and Syriac communities), and confessional affiliation (Orthodox, Monophysite, or “Nestorian” / Church of the East), the encounter with Islam constituted the most significant factor in the late antique development of each of these legal normative orders in this period. The researchers plan to investigate this rich corpus of “Saracen law” provisions and utilize cutting-edge, AI-supported technologies to create new editions of legal texts.

This innovative, legal-historical approach to the history of the early medieval Middle East will not only offer a new way of looking at Late Antiquity in the first centuries of Islam, but will also provide a crucial new narrative of Christian-Muslim relations in the Eastern Mediterranean world before the First Crusade – and thereby problematize the traditional “Western”-dominated paradigm for this history.