EUR 1.4 million arriving to Serbia for quark research

(Magdalena Djordjevic) An extraordinarily good piece of news for science in Serbia arrives from Brussels – Dr Magdalena Djordjevic of the Belgrade Institute of Physics has achieved historical success by winning the prestigious European grant in the amount of EUR 1,356,000 for researching quark-gluon plasma.

As reported by the Center for the Promotion of Science, this is the second grant given by the European Research Council (ERC) to a Serbian project. The ERC grants are available to Serbian researchers as Serbia is a member of the EU Framework Program for Research and Innovation “Horizon 2020”. They are the very core of Horizon 2020 and are awarded for excellence, especially for those ideas which have the potential to change the course of world science.

There are very few contests in the world as competitive as this one. The states are measured by how many grants they've received, and rare winners from small states such as Serbia are true heroes of modern researchers – it was stated.

Following the winning of the ECR starter grant by archaeologist Sofija Stefanovic two years ago, this is the first ERC grant in the consolidator category, meant for middle-aged researchers. This is the most significant support ever received by a Western Balkans researcher in the area of natural sciences from Europe for researching fundamental properties of the matter.

– Our project pertains to understanding the basic laws of nature, and is thereby not directly applicable in economy – says Dr Djordjevic.

– The economic benefit of the project is that a EU grant of EUR 1,356,000 has been brought to Serbia. A large part of these funds will be used to employ our scientists, especially our young colleagues, who would, in the absence of a project such as this, probably leave the country.

With her teams, Dr Djordjevic, is researching the new state of the matter – quark-gluon plasma, whose existence was proven only ten years ago, in experiments at the Brookhaven accelerator in the USA and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva.

Institut za fiziku Beograd

Magdalena Djordjević

quark gluon plasma research

European Research Council

ERC

quarks

gluons

ERC grants

Horizon 2020

Sofija Stefanovic

CERN