We are all stardust, as William Fowler put it when receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 for his work aimed at explaining that most of the atomic nuclei in the Universe, including those that make up our bodies and the world around us, were created inside stars. Investigations of the origin of the elements have just received a boost in Europe thanks to a grant from the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), Europe's longest-running intergovernmental framework for cooperation in science and technology. The new European COST Action ChETEC, which stands for “Chemical Elements as Tracers of the Evolution of the Cosmos” (www.chetec.eu, www.cost.eu/COST_Actions/ca/CA16117) started in April 2017 with the participation of 30 European and associated countries. The aim of the Action is to coordinate research efforts in astronomy, astrophysics, and nuclear physics and to tackle the big open questions related to how chemical elements are produced by nuclear interactions inside stars.

The management of the European ChETEC Action is based on a committee of roughly 40 members representing the 30 countries. Of these, approximately half are women, an outstanding achievement in a science panorama typically male dominated. Not only, of the roughly 20 managing women, almost one-third are grantees of the European Research Council (ERC), the prestigious pan-european funding agency, one of the most relevant worldwide today. These 6 women are worth together more than 10 million euros of research funding. Here is who they are and what they do.

Alceste Bonanos (Greece)

http://members.noa.gr/bonanos

Alceste Bonanos from the National Observatory of Athens, Greece, wants to unveil the mysteries related to mass loss in massive stars. Massive stars are extremely luminous and even if they have short lives, their energy output dominates their surroundings. Together with their explosive deaths as supernovae they impact the dynamical evolution of their environments and they enrich the Cosmos with many of the major chemical elements, such as oxygen and silicon. During their lives they may suffer violent episodes driving mass away from the star. However, we do not understand this process enough to firmly acknowledge its existence throughout the Universe, from the early times to today. To resolve this problem, Alceste will observe many massive stars in different galaxies and interpret the data using advanced machine-learning algorithms. Before coming back to Greece in 2009, Alceste spent a decade in the United States, including receiving her PhD from Harvard University. The joy of discovery is one of the main drivers for Alceste, together with the resilience and persistence that are essential to push through the difficult times. Apart from science, Alceste enjoys cooking a variety of Greek and non-Greek dishes. She is currently on maternity leave, with her ERC project ASSESS starting in September.

Anu Kankainen (Finland)

https://www.jyu.fi/science/en/physics/staff/personnel/kankainen-anu

Radioactive nuclei and their reactions play a key role in the chemical evolution of the Cosmos as well as in many astrophysical events, such as novae and supernovae. Anu Kankainen from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, studies properties of exotic radioactive nuclei to provide data for more reliable modeling of astrophysical processes and events. With her ERC project MAIDEN she will perform precision mass measurements of nuclear binding energies crucial for astrophysics, also for long-living states of nuclei known as “isomers”, which can contribute to nuclear processes in stars but have been poorly taken into account in many astrophysical calculations. During her PhD at the University of Jyväskylä and postdoc time at the University of Edinburgh, she gained experience from nuclear physics experiments at several international accelerator laboratories worldwide, such as CERN, NSCL, ANL, and TAMU. In 2015, Anu returned to Finland with her family and started to work as an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the JYFL Accelerator Laboratory in Jyväskylä. She is a passionate cross-country skier and sports fan. It is something to balance everyday scientific duties and family life. Skiing or running in the woods lets your mind roam free, an essential benefit for a scientist!

Maria Lugaro (Hungary)

http://www.konkoly.hu/staff/lugaro/

Also Maria Lugaro is not afraid of radioactivity. Radioactive nuclei emit radiation that is harmful for biological matter, however, this same radiation produces the heat essential to keep our Earth internally warm and help making it an habitable planet. From analysis of meteorites we know that radioactivity also produced huge amounts of heat at the time when the planets were created in our Solar System, impacting on the amount of ice and water locked into rocks. Radioactive nuclei are made in stars and supernovae and Maria's ERC project RADIOSTAR is aimed at discovering what is the origin of the large amount of radioactivity that shaped the early evolution of our Solar System, and if other planetary systems are also born in radioactive cradles, like ours. Maria left her home country, Italy, more than 20 years ago to pursue a PhD at Monash University in Melbourne. She then moved to the UK, the Netherlands, back to Australia, and is currently working in Hungary. Mindfulness, cooking, and ballet are her favourite activities. Budapest and Losanche (a tiny village in the Italian Alps) her favourite places to be. Her career was strongly supported by her husband, who has been the main carer of their four boys, aged 8 to 15 years old.

Selma de Mink (The Netherlands)

http://www.selmademink.com/

One star is not enough for Selma de Mink, theoretical astrophysicist in Amsterdam. She is fascinated by so-called “binary stars”, systems of two stars “dancing” around each other because of their mutual gravity. Together with her colleagues she showed that such close pairs are very common. With her ERC project BinCosmos she studies how massive binary stars interact, how these two stars change each others lives and what this means for their final fate. The analogy with dancing is no coincidence, when not obsessing with astrophysics you can probably find her dancing salsa.  She lived four years in the United States: she was a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Space Telescope Institute, where she got involved in observations with the Hubble Space Telescope and later at the California Institute of technology, where she became interested in gravitational waves.  She is now back in her home country, The Netherlands. Besides her passion for science and dancing, she is also passionately running an online network that tries to help young aspiring female astrophysicists to find their way in computational and theoretical astrophysics, which are still heavily male dominated fields.

Ann-Cecilie Larsen (Norway)

http://www.mn.uio.no/fysikk/english/people/aca/anncecil/index.html

Nuclear astrophysics is all about connecting the teeny-tiny quantum world with huge astronomical objects like stars and galaxies. Ann-Cecilie Larsen’s ERC project gRESONANT addresses one such connection: how do gamma-decay resonances in atomic nuclei impact the reaction rates responsible for the formation of heavy elements in extreme astrophysical environments? One of her best days at work was the 16th of October 2017, when the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors announced a direct detection of two neutron stars colliding. Follow-up measurements finally confirmed that neutron-star collisions are indeed producing the heaviest elements such as gold and uranium! Now it is time to significantly improve the nuclear reaction rates involved in the process. Ann-Cecilie and collaborators will happily take Anu Kankainen’s improved mass measurements from her ERC MAIDEN project to calculate new reaction rates, and add some extra ingredients as well: by measuring the available quantum levels and their gamma-decay properties in exotic, neutron-rich nuclei, the reaction rates can be experimentally constrained. Ann-Cecilie obtained her PhD degree from the University of Oslo, and has been a guest researcher at Université Libre de Bruxelles, UC Berkeley, and Michigan State University. She was awarded the Young, Excellent Researcher prize from the Research Council of Norway in 2016. Currently she is a research fellow at the Department of Physics, University of Oslo. She is a passionate science-fiction fan, and she loves running, classic and sci-fi literature, and Finnish folk-metal rock. (Photo credit: Ola G. Saether)

Paola Marigo (Italy)

http://www.astro.unipd.it/marigo/index.html

Paola Marigo is a Professor of stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis at the University of Padova. Her ERC project STARKEY focuses on stars of low mass like our Sun. Many complex physical processes happen toward the end of the lives of these stars. In their deep layers they produce various chemical elements, which are then mixed to the stellar surface. There, pulsation and production of molecules and dust lead to strong winds. One of the final effects is the enrichment of the Cosmos with carbon. The full understanding of the contribution from these stars to the chemistry of the Universe critically depends on the details of their physical evolution. A comprehensive approach is critical because all the processes involved - nucleosynthesis, mixing, dust growth, pulsations, and mass loss - are interconnected and their reciprocal feedback must be probed. Such global calibration method is performed by STARKEY via the reproduction of many observables at the same time and via the exploitation of the recent observational data for these stars in galaxies and stellar clusters. Like the stars she investigates, Paola’s daily life is also very active, as it flows among numerous academic and research commitments, together with the care of her two beloved children and two wonderful cats.  

Understanding the origin of the elements is a research field that requires researchers covering a wide diversity in expertise and knowledge. One common trait of success is the ability and the courage required to challenge yourself into taking the risk of broadening your views, and inspire others to do the same. Prof Raphael Hirschi (Keele University, UK), chair of the ChETEC COST Action, commented: “Our Action is dedicated to breaking gender biases. While historical female figures like Marie Skłodowska Curie, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, and Lise Meitner remain key role models in Physics, they may seem remote and part of history rather than the present or the future in the mind of children. It is a great pleasure for me to know and work with the current generation of female physics role models tackling the most challenging questions of our times. They are great scientists and women, their achievements must be shared with the public also to make sure that girls and young women know that they are the future generation of physicists.”

Raphael Hirschi, chair of the ChETEC COST Action with some of the women scientists involved in the Action during a meeting at the University of Keele in October 2017.