LPG researcher awarded ERC Starting Grant 2024

On Thursday September 5, the European Research Council (ERC) announced the winners of its Starting Grants, which this year will fund 494 researchers who are established and recognized in their field, both nationally and internationally. Anna Grau Galofré, a CNRS researcher at the Laboratory of Planetology and Geosciences (LPG) has been awarded one of these grants to work on the formation of mega-canyons on Mars. Objective: understand how this planet went from a habitable climate to cold, desert and inhospitable conditions. Congratulations!

Anna Grau Galofré

Anna Grau Galofré studied physics and geophysics at the University of Barcelona (Spain) before undertaking a PhD at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (Canada) under the supervision of Mark Jellinek (2013-2018). Her thesis focused on the origin of Martian valley networks and her work showed that some of these systems may have formed beneath ancient ice sheets. She joined the Laboratory of Planetology and Geosciences (LPG) in 2021 thanks to a grant from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions of the Horizon Europe program, where she was recruited by the CNRS as a research fellow in 2022. Her work focuses on the footprints of past ice ages on Earth and Mars.

Her project

Anna Grau Galofré, winner of a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC), is developing a research project entitled ICEFLOODS (Glacial sculpture in Mars ancient megachannels), the aim of which is to investigate the hypothesis that Kasei Valles, one of Mars' mega-canyons, was formed by a rapid glacial flow channelled through an ice cap, based on new fluid dynamics simulations, analyses of analogous terrestrial terrains, geological mapping and climate modelling.