Vítor Cardoso, a professor of Physics at Instituto Superior Técnico, will run a new Center of Excellence in Denmark, with associated funding of eight million euros. The Center of Gravity (CoG) will bring together cutting-edge research into black holes and quantum aspects of gravity, based on recent observations of gravitational waves.

“I am very proud and happy to be able to continue our research within gravitational physics with this grant”, says the professor and researcher at the Center for Astrophysics and Gravitation (CENTRA), for whom strong gravity is “a field with a tremendous discovery potential”. “This is a unique moment for our species and civilisation”, he argues, justifying that in the last decade it has been possible to “capture gravitational waves that allow us to ‘see’ the universe in a new way”, opening new doors in the investigation of gravity phenomena.

Although Vítor Cardoso will conduct research at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, he sees this Center of Excellence as a new opportunity to get closer to Técnico – ‘the funding could give rise to academic and scientific partnerships with the School, both in teaching, through partnerships between master’s programmes, and the hosting of Fellows’. ‘Técnico is the best engineering school in the country, it is located in an amazing city and has the best students in Europe, so I see enormous potential for [research into] gravity,’ he says.

A Center of Excellence is a center funded by the Danish National Research Foundation for a 6-year period with the possibility of a 4-year extension.

In 2022, Vítor Cardoso received a grant from the European Research Council (ERC) worth two million euros to study black holes, about a year after he obtained another grant from the Danish Villum Fondon Foundation, worth 5.3 million euros, to create and lead the research group he is currently part of at the Niels Bohr Institute. In the current year, he published an ‘instruction manual’ for entering black holes, which was presented at Técnico.