Two early-career researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have been successful in the latest call for Starting Grants from the European Research Council (ERC): In the COOLWEAVE project, Dr. Jingyuan Xu is developing a climate-friendly cooling technology. In the DATAARK project, Dr. Maryia Rusak is investigating how a classification system for building information developed across Europe after the Second World War and influenced major architectural projects. The two five-year projects will each receive EUR 1.5 million in funding.
“The fact that two KIT researchers, Jingyuan Xu and Maryia Rusak, have received ERC Starting Grants in such different disciplines is an outstanding achievement,” says Professor Stefan Hinz, Vice Provost Early Career Researchers at KIT. “These grants recognise their courage in pursuing new research approaches and their scientific achievements to date. At the same time, they highlight the broad range of expertise and the potential of KIT’s early-career researchers.”
Woven Structures for High-performance Cooling Systems
Heating and cooling account for around half of global final energy consumption. Conventional cooling systems generally use gaseous refrigerants that can contribute to global warming if released. Elastocaloric cooling offers an alternative: Shape-memory alloys heat up when subjected to mechanical stress and cool down again when the stress is released.
In the project “Elastocaloric Cooling with Porous Woven Regenerator” (COOLWEAVE), thermal scientist Dr. Jingyuan Xu aims to significantly improve the performance of this technology. To achieve this, she will use porous woven structures made from nickel-titanium wires as regenerators–components that absorb and release heat. Inspired by textiles, these structures provide up to 30 times more surface area for heat exchange than simple tubular designs. This is intended to enable the development of compact, high-performance cooling devices. “With the woven structures, we aim to make elastocaloric cooling systems more powerful, compact, and scalable. At KIT, we can cover the entire development path–from fundamental research to demonstrating complete systems,” Xu says. With the Starting Grant funding, she and her team will first investigate the behaviour and service life of the woven structures. They will then develop and scale up prototypes. Finally, the novel air-conditioning system will be demonstrated under real-life conditions at the KIT Energy Lab.
Xu completed her doctorate at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2018. She subsequently conducted research in Cambridge and at Imperial College London. She has worked at KIT’s Institute of Microstructure Technology since 2021. Since 2023, she has led the CZS Nexus Research Group “Emission-free and Environmentally Friendly Heating and Cooling Technologies,” funded by the Carl Zeiss Foundation. For her research, Xu has already received numerous awards—most recently the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award in 2025.
Architecture as Information Infrastructure
In her project “Designing United Europe: Data-Driven Architectural Networks” (DATAARK), Dr. Maryia Rusak investigates intra-European efforts to standardise architectural information after the Second World War. At the centre of the project is the universal classification system developed by the International Council for Building Research and Documentation (CIB). It encoded building components and construction processes to enable information to be processed across languages and by computers. Drawing on international archival sources, Rusak traces the application of this system in major building projects in Europe and beyond. She examines how it influenced communication, design, and construction and where its universal ambitions encountered local building cultures. In this way, DATAARK reveals the informational foundations of post-war architecture and explores a prehistory of today’s Building Information Modeling (BIM).
Rusak is an architect and architectural historian whose research focuses on transnational architectural histories and the less visible foundations of architectural production. She completed her doctorate at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in 2022 and subsequently held an ETH Postdoctoral Fellowship at ETH Zurich until 2024. From 2024 to 2026, she was a Junior Research Fellow at KIT’s Institute of Design, Art and Theory. In September 2026, she will move to KU Leuven, where she will carry out her Starting Grant project.
ERC Starting Grants 2026
Starting Grants are intended for outstanding researchers from all disciplines who generally completed their doctorate between two and seven years ago. In the 2026 call, the ERC awarded a total of 421 Starting Grants, 89 of them to researchers with a host institution in Germany. The selected projects will each receive up to EUR 1.5 million in funding for a maximum of five years. A total of 4,807 proposals were submitted, resulting in a success rate of 8.8 percent.
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