ERC meets MSCA: Giulio Monaco and Peihao Sun

Everything went as planned? You never plan for these grants to be awarded! 

Giulio Monaco is Full Professor of experimental matter physics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Padua, and he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant in 2021. Peihao Sun, with an MSCA Individual Fellowship, works as a post-doc in his lab.

They both work with X-rays to study peculiar properties of glasses. In particular, one of their goals is to observe a new out-of-equilibrium state of condensed matter which has never been observed before: these objects are called ideal glasses, and they might have very interesting technological applications, for example in quantum computers or digital memories. 

“I think we have some preliminary results that make us confident that it might be possible to get there, but we still have a long way to go” says Prof. Monaco, who moved to Padua in 2020 and was awarded the ERC Advanced Grant right afterwards. “Before coming to Padua I spent 14 years of my life in France, in Grenoble. For family-related reasons I decided to come back to Italy: my wife and my daughter are in Padua. I first moved to Trento, where I stayed for 8 years. I wrote the project in the last year of my stay in Trento and the first year here in Padua. I think it matched my change of University very well, but it was definitely not planned.” 

Peihao was a PhD student at Stanford University, in California. “During my PhD research I met Prof. Monaco, who helped me a lot, actually. He was on my defence committee and we exchanged a lot of scientific ideas. I decided to apply for a Marie Curie Fellowship to work with Prof. Monaco.” 

Winning the most competitive and prestigious European Research Grant is not something that happens every day. “I’m not sure there is a recipe I can give, or a secret way of doing this. I think you start with an idea that you think is reasonable or convincing and then you just work through the writing of the project with patience. In particular, during the second step of the application, I think the interactions with the Offices here in Padua have been really helpful.” 

Peihao has one year and a half left in Prof. Monaco’s lab. “The goal for me was to have an international experience and I have already learned a lot from Prof. Monaco’s group.” 

Whether it’s winning a big grant or observing something that has never been observed before, like ideal glasses, you have to go one step at a time, says Peihao. “For questions as big as this one you can never say for sure that things are exactly as they seem, but we are on our way. We do things step by step, in a very scientific way, to achieve our goal.” 

Watch the whole interview with Giulio and Peihao.