ViCAS announces inaugural cohort

16 June 2026 — ViCAS is proud to announce its inaugural fellows: 10 advanced and 9 mid-career fellows will join the University of Vienna for 9 months, from 1 October 2026 till 30 June 2027.

Advanced fellows

• Marie Charpentier (Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution de Montpellier CNRS, France) is an evolutionary behavioural ecologist who studies the only habituated wild population of mandrills in Gabon. Her research aims to understand how variation in early-life social environments, maternal effects, and kinship structure shape health trajectories, biological ageing, and intergenerational outcomes.
• Gili S Drori (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) is a sociologist. Her ViCAS project, Leading Academia Through the Storm: Institutional legacies and university leadership during precarious times, will speak to studies of academia and higher education, organisational sociology, and studies of knowledge and professions.
• Edhem Eldem (Boğaziçi University, Turkey, ret.) is a historian of the Ottoman Empire. His project challenges the traditional Western-centred history of archaeology and heritage in the former Ottoman lands during the nineteenth century.
• Klaus G Grunert (Aarhus University, Denmark) is a marketing scholar and a consumer behaviour researcher. His ViCAS research question asks: How do perceptions of sustainability before purchase and experience with the product during consumption interact over time to shape sustainable, sustained consumption patterns?
• Raymond Ison (The Open University, UK) is a cybernetician and systems scientist. Through his fellowship, he seeks to develop second-order cyber-systemic antidotes to a world living on lies, where it may soon become difficult to distinguish reliable from unreliable explanations.
• Kalpana Kannabiran (Independent Researcher, India) is a sociologist, legal researcher and feminist activist. In her ViCAS project, she will explore the performance of the constitution in postcolonial India by studying legal challenges brought by social movements and civil liberties groups in defence of fundamental freedoms, especially free speech and personal liberty, under the constitution.
• Alexander Mielke (Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, Germany) is a mathematician. His research is driven by the fundamental question of how the general principles of thermodynamics can be translated into modern mathematical concepts, thereby providing new tools for understanding nature.
• Juan Fernando Poyatos Adeva (National Museum of Natural Sciences, Spanish National Research Council, Spain) is an interdisciplinary scientist, interested in principles of organisation, control, and feedback in complex biological systems. His ViCAS project, The Unreasonable Precision of Our Defective Genome, aims to develop an understanding of biological precision by combining systems biology, evolution, artificial intelligence, and quantitative modelling.
• Shuhua Xu (Fudan University, China) is an evolutionary biologist and human population geneticist. His ViCAS Project, Ancient Admixture and Human Adaptive Evolution in Eurasia, investigates how ancient admixture and population-specific factors have shaped adaptive variation in modern humans, which is relevant for understanding population-specific health risks.
• Peng Zhang (University of Birmingham, UK) is a researcher in sustainable nanotechnology and nano-enabled agriculture. His project proposes a transformative nanotechnology-driven strategy to enhance biological nitrogen fixation and reduce reliance on synthetic fertilisers, thereby addressing challenges of nitrogen pollution, food security, and climate resilience.

Mid-career fellows

• Nicole Ackermans (University of Alabama, USA) is an evolutionary biologist. Her research focuses on how animals with extreme evolutionary adaptations might help solve medical problems of the human body, particularly neurodegeneration.
• Ivana Arsić (The Spanish National Research Council, Spain) is a classical philologist and cultural historian. Her research is motivated by broader questions concerning interreligious encounters, contested and hybrid identities, and the long-term socio-cultural consequences of coercion, displacement, and exclusion.
• Sanchari Deb (Newcastle University, UK) is an interdisciplinary researcher in AI-driven energy systems, electric vehicle infrastructure, and equitable energy transitions. She is currently exploring how the transition to electric vehicles can help create fairer, more sustainable cities.
• Senyo Dotsey (University of Milan, Italy) has a multidisciplinary academic background in African Studies, geography, sociology, international development, urban studies and regional science. His research foregrounds the voices and strategies of displaced people, highlighting how agency persists despite structural constraints.
• Edoardo Giusto (University of Naples Federico II, Italy), a computer and systems engineer, focuses his research on dependable quantum systems engineering. His ViCAS project, Engineering Dependable Quantum High-Performance Computing Infrastructures for Future Scientific and Societal Applications, aims to establish foundational principles for building trustworthy hybrid quantum–classical computing systems.
• Ngozika Anthonia Obi-Ani (University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria) specialises in African colonial history, gender studies, and educational development. Her research interrogates the consequences of mishandled historical memory, aiming for a nuanced understanding of the socio-political dynamics that have shaped contemporary Nigeria.
• Daniel Pecoraro Demarque (University of São Paulo, Brazil) is a pharmacist and researcher in natural products chemistry and pharmacognosy. His ViCAS project investigates the chemodiversity of parasitic plants to understand how parasitism shapes plant metabolism, host interaction, and evolutionary diversification.
• Elena Emma Sottilotta (University of Cambridge, UK) has a background in women’s and gender studies, comparative literature and intermedia studies. Her ViCAS project, A Cultural History of Women Warriors in the Italian Fairy-Tale Tradition, contributes to scholarship on heroism in folklore and literary studies, agency in women’s and gender studies, and the politics of adaptation in film and media studies.
• Robert Streit (The University of Melbourne, Australia) is an interdisciplinary marine ecologist who studies how ecological change, power dynamics, and societal values intersect in climate-impacted oceans. At ViCAS, he will explore how societies govern ocean-based climate action amid urgency, uncertainty, and accelerating environmental change. 

More information about the ViCAS fellows and their research.

The call for ViCAS Fellowships 2027-2028 is now open.

About ViCAS

ViCAS offers a space of resonance. Borrowed from the language of music and especially fitting in a city such as Vienna, the term refers to emergence and enrichment through interaction. The Centre provides a period of intellectual breathing space: time dedicated to thinking, conversation, and exploration beyond disciplinary and national boundaries.

During this time, fellows can revisit ongoing work, deepen their research, and develop new ideas through encounters and exchanges with one another and with members of the University of Vienna. This process opens new paths for discovery and collaboration, giving rise to ideas that will continue to resonate in future research.

Visit ViCAS at https://vicas.univie.ac.at/