Max Gronke Awarded Prestigious ERC Starting Grant
The Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) is proud to announce that Dr. Max Gronke, leader of the Max Planck Research Group 'Multiphase Gas', has been awarded a highly competitive European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant. This prestigious grant will fund Dr. Gronke's innovative research project "Resolving the Multiscale, Multiphase Universe" (ReMMU) over the next five years.
About Max Gronke

Dr. Gronke established his Max Planck Research Group at MPA in 2021, following a distinguished early career that included a NASA Hubble fellowship at UC Santa Barbara and Johns Hopkins University. He completed his PhD at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics in Oslo, where his thesis on "Lyman-alpha observables of the high-redshift Universe" earned him the His Majesty the King's gold medal for the best PhD thesis at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the University of Oslo.
Research Focus and ERC Project
Dr. Gronke's research focuses on understanding the complex interactions of multiphase gas in various astrophysical contexts, from galactic winds to the circumgalactic medium. The ReMMU project aims to address a fundamental challenge in our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution: the physics regulating the galactic ecosystem.
"Current cosmological simulations fail to capture the multiphase structure of galactic halos and show a lack of convergence in even basic gas properties," explains Dr. Gronke. "This significantly limits our ability to interpret existing observations and make reliable predictions about the circumgalactic medium."
The ReMMU project will tackle this issue by developing and implementing innovative computational methods to better model multiphase gas in cosmological simulations. This approach will enable more accurate comparisons with observational data, advancing our understanding of galactic ecosystems across cosmic time.
"This work will shed light on the drivers of galactic growth and feedback mechanisms, which are key to understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies," Dr. Gronke adds.
Impact and Future Prospects
The ERC Starting Grant, valued at €1.5 million, comes on top of the approximately €2.3 million funding for Dr. Gronke's Max Planck Research Group. This substantial combined funding will enable Dr. Gronke to expand his research team and pursue this ambitious project.
"The timing of ReMMU is particularly exciting," says Dr. Gronke. "Recent advances in fundamental hydrodynamical theory have constrained the parameter space sufficiently to allow for subgrid models of unresolved gas. Simultaneously, we're seeing a rapidly growing body of observational surveys that are revolutionizing the available data on galactic ecosystems. ReMMU will combine these advances to establish firm predictions for comparison with observations across cosmic time."
We congratulate Dr. Gronke on this outstanding achievement and look forward to the groundbreaking research that will emerge from this project in the coming years. This grant is expected to significantly advance our understanding of the multiphase, multiscale nature of the universe.