This means I will soon be starting my own lab in Europe. I am deeply grateful to the mentors, colleagues, and friends who brought me here, and to those I have not yet met who will help build what comes next.

More details about positions, host institution, and timelines coming soon.

Jim was one of the great scientists of our time, known for the rigor he poured into 217 publications.

His door was always open, literally and metaphorically, and he loved experimenting. He would perform complex surgeries or prepare physiological solutions if extra hands were needed. And his solutions were always the "primo shit," osmolality right on the first try.

He had a boundless curiosity. At lunch he could chat about the Bhagavad Gita, or Tokugawa's isolation policy, Hemingway, or Jimi Hendrix. He once brought termites to the lab just to show us the cyanobacteria in their guts: twenty adults crowded around a microscope, entranced as kids, and our lab has truly nothing to do with cyanobacteria. He was sharp, witty, and funny. His humor was biting, sarcastic, from the Greek sarkazein, "to bite," as he would have pointed out.

He was an exceptional writer and communicator. Here is a sentence from his last review that reveals his style, his character, and why he did science:

"Over unfathomable amounts of time, the stark choice between life and death has yielded the adaptations that delight children and astonish biologists, older individuals who have not altogether lost their sense of wonder."

Building on our previous work, we have now overcome a decades-old experimental barrier by developing a technique that lets us examine the ear's amplifier outside of the living body and watch it in action under the microscope.

With this breakthrough we were able to reveal that the ear works right at a physical "sweet spot" known as criticality, where it acquires the astonishing features that define hearing as we know it: we can detect pitches from 20 Hz all the way up to 20,000 Hz (for comparison, a standard screen refreshes at just 60 Hertz, or 60 frames per second), and we can pick up sounds as soft as a whisper or as loud as a thunderclap.

Strikingly, the same critical tuning appears in the ears of birds, reptiles, and even insects. Our discovery in mammals points to the existence of one universal biophysical principle that underpins hearing across the animal kingdom. Read the full paper (open access).

ERC Starting Grant, at a glance. Prestigious EU funding for early-career researchers, awarded solely on scientific excellence. Typical award up to €1.5 million over five years, with up to €1 million extra for major costs including start-up costs. Source: ERC Starting Grant.

How the evaluation works. One submission, two stages. You apply once via the EU Funding and Tenders Portal: you submit Part A online plus two PDFs, Part B1, a 5-page extended synopsis and CV with track record, and Part B2, a 12-page detailed research plan. See the portal guide: Funding and Tenders guidance.

Step 1. The panel reviews Part B1 only. An expert panel screens the ideas and the PI's profile. Proposals rated sufficiently high are invited forward to Step 2.

Step 2. Full scientific review and interview. External referees review the full proposal, the panel interviews the PI, then ranks proposals for funding according to quality and available budget.

About ActivEAR. The goal of this project proposal is to identify the cellular mechanisms that drive the cochlea's "active process," the mechanism that makes hearing as we know it possible. A clear answer would close a long-standing gap in auditory biophysics.

I am grateful for thoughtful advice, sharp criticism, and steady encouragement from colleagues and friends. Onward to the interview; more soon.

When this process falters, hearing loss begins, affecting the lives of billions worldwide, but despite decades of research, no one fully understands how it works.

A big clue comes from frogs and other non-mammalian animals, where individual ear cells can be observed teetering on the edge of spontaneous activity, a special state that physicists call a Hopf bifurcation. Here, cells become incredibly sensitive, like a tightrope walker perfectly balanced, ready to sway at the lightest breeze. But whether mammalian ears use the same trick has remained a mystery, largely because of one stubborn technical challenge: once removed from the body, the mammalian ear quickly loses its magic.

I started working on this problem with my colleagues at Rockefeller University in 2021, by designing a custom bio-chamber that would preserve the active process viable ex vivo and by creating a new dissection protocol. The subsequent process of optimization led to the construction of 19 versions (!), before we could finally reach success in what I baptized the LIVE chamber: Lifelike In Vitro Environment. This work required mastering acoustics, electrical engineering, mechanical crafting, fluid dynamics, and microfluidics. This tiny ecosystem preserves the active process outside the body, giving scientists an unprecedented window into how hearing works. Read the full paper (open access).

The problem to solve was that the techniques available to study hair cells, either a piezo-driven glass probe or a fluid jet, are hindered by viscous drag and hence too slow to investigate the physiological timescales of mammalian hearing. The idea was to use photonic pressure to circumvent this issue.

As we press a letter on a keyboard, the ripple of pressure that spreads through the air peaks at about 20 µPa, a tenth of a billionth of atmospheric pressure, and yet, we hear it. It is not surprising then that the photonic pressure generated by a laser beam could be enough to move the sensitive hair bundles of the ear. I collaborated with an optical engineer to develop, test and validate this technique and designed a protocol to deliver the stimulus precisely onto mammalian hair bundles. Read the paper.