National Fund saves hearing research
The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) is compensating European funding for research into the auditory cortex, which has been canceled because Switzerland has been downgraded to the status of a third country following the adoption of the mass immigration initiative.
Tania Rinaldi Barkat, Assistant Professor of Neurophysiology at the Department of Biomedicine at the University of Basel since 2015, has received compensation from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for an ERC Starting Grant. The grant was approved as part of a sub-programme of the European Program for Research & Innovation (Horizon 2020) in 2014, but could not be transferred when Rinaldi Barkat moved from the University of Copenhagen to Basel, as Switzerland had the status of a third country at the relevant time.
In the interests of Switzerland as a center of research, the SNSF is now stepping in and will pay the approximately 1.5 million euros that were originally promised to the researcher by the ERC.
In her research project, the neurophysiologist wants to investigate how the brain goes about understanding different types of sounds. The focus is on the development of the auditory cortex, an area of the brain that is used to process acoustic stimuli. In particular, the aim of the project is to better understand which functions the individual neuronal circuits perform.
