Two ERC Advanced Grants awarded to researchers at the University of Freiburg
Freiburg, 23/06/2026
Two female researchers from the University of Freiburg have each secured around 2.5 million euros in funding from the European Research Council for their projects. Prof. Dr Johanna Pink, a scholar of Islamic studies, is investigating how traditions of Qur’anic exegesis from West Africa to South-East Asia contributed to the emergence of Islamic modernism in the 19th century. Neuroscientist Prof. Dr Marlene Bartos is investigating the mechanisms that enable the brain to form and retrieve memories.
Prof. Dr Marlene Bartos (left) and Prof. Dr Johanna Pink (right) have each been awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. Photo: Private (left), Silvia Wolf / University of Freiburg (right)
Prof. Dr Johanna Pink, a scholar of Islamic studies, and Prof. Dr Marlene Bartos, a neuroscientist, both from the University of Freiburg, have each been awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). The European Union is funding projects by the two researchers: Pink is investigating the global emergence of Islamic modernism, whilst Bartos is exploring how the brain forms and retrieves memories. Each of the two research projects will receive around 2.5 million euros over a five-year period. Out of more than 3,300 applications submitted across Europe, 319 were selected for funding.
Project „TabA“ – The emergence of Islamic modernism
Pink’s project, ‘TabA – Tafsīr beyond Arabic’, examines how Muslims in the 19th century understood, explained and passed on the Qur’an in various languages. To this end, for the first time, Qur’anic commentaries from all regions of the Islamic world – from West Africa to South-East Asia – are being examined collectively and compared with one another using, amongst other methods, computer-assisted analysis.
“With its global approach, the TabA project can make a decisive contribution to our understanding of how Islamic modernism came about – at a time when religious texts were no longer transmitted solely by hand or orally, but were printed and widely disseminated.”
Prof. Dr Johanna Pink
Professor of Islamic Studies and the History of Islam at the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of Freiburg
“With its global approach, the TabA project can make a decisive contribution to our understanding of how Islamic modernism came about – at a time when religious texts were no longer transmitted solely by hand or orally, but were printed and widely disseminated,” says Pink. “The funding from the ERC enables me to put together a multilingual team with a diverse range of regional and methodological expertise, which is well equipped to tackle the challenges of this project comparing different languages and regions.”
Perceptions of the Qur’an in everyday life
This comprehensive research approach provides new insights into the traditions of Qur’anic exegesis between the 18th and early 20th centuries. These interpretations brought Muslims together across linguistic boundaries and great distances, but they also incorporate regional particularities rooted, for example, in denominational differences or the influence of specific scholarly traditions.
The project places particular emphasis on short forms of Qur’anic commentary, which have received little attention in scholarship to date but were used extensively in schools, sermons, at royal courts and within religious communities. These sources reveal how conceptions of the Qur’an were conveyed in everyday life and what role they played in education and religious piety.
The foundation of ethical and religious conduct
At the heart of this analysis lies the question of how, during the era of Islamic modernism at the turn of the 20th century, the Qur’an came to be a central source of faith and of ethical and religious practice for Muslims worldwide. A key factor in this development was the idea, which had by no means been taken for granted previously, that believers should not only recite the Qur’an in Arabic, but also delve deeply into its content. “TabA has the potential to trace the spread of this idea across all regions of what was then known as the ‘Islamic world’ and to do so even before the encounter with European thought, which is often regarded as the initial spark for Islamic modernism,” says Pink.
Project “ReMember-CA3” – The formation and retrieval of memories
Bartos’ project, ‘ReMember-CA3 – Circuit mechanisms underlying the discrimination and recall of memories along the hippocampal CA3 axis in behaving mice’ addresses a central question in systemic neuroscience: How can the brain form new memories without overwriting existing ones? And how can the brain retrieve these memories even after a long time, even though only fragments of the original information remain?
The ability to recall memories of events and experiences is a fundamental cognitive function. It enables us to adapt our behaviour and decisions flexibly to new life situations by drawing on our past experiences. A loss of this ability is characteristic of serious disorders of the nervous system that are associated with memory impairment, such as Alzheimer’s disease.
“The aim of our research is to unravel the fundamental mechanisms that enable the brain to process, store and retrieve information.”
Prof. Dr Marlene Bartos
Head of the Institute of Physiology, Department I, at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg
Investigating the hippocampal CA3 region
“Our ERC-funded project addresses a particularly challenging scientific question and is also highly demanding from a technical standpoint,” says Bartos. “The aim of our research is to unravel the fundamental mechanisms that enable the brain to process, store and retrieve information.”
To this end, Bartos and her team will be investigating the so-called hippocampal region CA3 of the brain. It is a region of the brain that has received very little investigative attention to date, but which plays a key role in the formation of episodic memories.
The fascinating process of memory
“The findings of this innovative multidisciplinary research project will provide new insights into the neural mechanisms underlying the experience-dependent formation, discrimination and retrieval of memories in the hippocampal CA3 region,” says Prof. Marlene Bartos. “Our findings may help us to better understand the fascinating process of learning and remembering.”
About Prof. Dr Marlene Bartos
Marlene Bartos heads the Institute of Physiology, Department I, at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg. She is the spokesperson for the Transregio Collaborative Research Centre ‘IN-CODE – Inhibitory Neurons: Shaping the Cortical Code’. She is also a member of the supraregional research group ‘Prefrontal Flexibility’, the ‘BrainLinks–BrainTools’ Centre, the Bernstein Centre Freiburg and the Spemann Graduate School of Biology and Medicine at the University of Freiburg. Her research has already been recognised with a Lichtenberg Professorship from the Volkswagen Foundation, a Reinhart Koselleck Project from the DFG and an ERC Advanced Grant in 2018. She is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
ERC Advanced Grant
ERC Advanced Grants are aimed at established, active researchers from all disciplines with an outstanding track record of scientific achievement. Funding may last for up to five years and amount to up to 2.5 million euros.
About Prof. Dr Johanna Pink
Johanna Pink has been Professor of Islamic Studies and the History of Islam at the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of Freiburg since 2012. She is one of the leading researchers in the field of Muslim Qur’anic exegesis and has led numerous projects on Islam in South-East Asia, the Arab world and Germany. Her project “GloQur – The Global Qur’an” [https://gloqur.de], which examines the transnational dimension of Muslim translations of the Qur’an in the 20th and 21st centuries, received funding from an ERC Consolidator Grant from 2020 to 2025.