King's College London

The ERC awards recognise ERC-funded researchers who excel at engaging audiences beyond their academic fields, showcasing innovative approaches to research communication and encouraging more people to connect with and contribute to their research.

Working on the ERC COSMOS project, Professor Chew and her team brought together citizen science and data science to investigate the links between musical expression and cardiovascular health. The project supported public involvement through bespoke digital tools, including the HeartFM platform, which recorded and visualised music alongside physiological measures such as ECG signals, breathing patterns and heart rate variability, and CosmoNote, which enabled recordings to be annotated and analysed. A strong online presence across websites, blogs, YouTube and social media helped engage diverse contributors, including members of the public, professional musicians, physician-musicians and patients living with cardiovascular conditions, ensuring a wide range of perspectives informed the research.

More than 500 people contributed to COSMOS, generating over 70 datasets and 109 videos to document and share the project’s findings. Presented in more than 40 cities, the project engaged over 156,000 researchers and an estimated 47.6 million people worldwide, including 30,000 children, while also reaching more than 500 policymakers.

Working on the Laws of Social Reproduction (LSR) project, Professor Kotiswaran led a research team exploring women’s work across five sectors in India: sex work, erotic dancing, surrogacy, paid domestic work and unpaid domestic work. 

The project studied the political and economic forces shaping these forms of labour, as well as the legal frameworks that regulate them. The aim was to advance women’s rights, dignity, and economic justice while strengthening their bargaining power. The research focused on bringing greater visibility to work that is often overlooked, undervalued or obscured by legal systems, social stigma and societal expectations, helping to ensure these workers’ experiences are better understood in public and policy debates.

Through advocacy campaigns and two public interest lawsuits, the team worked to raise awareness among legislators and judges of the rights of surrogates, egg donors, and paid domestic workers. Researchers also partnered with policymakers and government officials in two Southern Indian states to generate evidence on unconditional cash transfer schemes designed to recognise women’s unpaid domestic and care work. To support wider social change, the project collaborated with filmmakers, museum curators, educators and legal designers to create a documentary, a virtual museum, educational resources for schoolchildren and accessible guides to complex laws on assisted reproductive technologies and surrogacy.