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innovative demonstrator for hybridelectric regional application
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climate change poses an unprecedented challenge on todays society numerous studies highlight the urgent need to decarbonize global industry and to drastically reduce pollutant emissions across all sectors including aviation although the global environmental impact of aviation is mostly driven by smallmedium range market aircraft due to the large volume of operations the development of disruptive technologies for the power demands such applications require cannot be put in place until progressive maturation of novel enabling technologies has been achieved at lower scale or sizes the transformation of regional aviation ie aircraft serving distances of 500 to 1000 km at a capacity of up to 100 seats will thus lead the way towards sustainability and will be of particular importance both battery and liquid hydrogen powered fuel cell technology will not be sufficiently matured to allow the realization of a fully electric regional aircraft within the next decade instead an intermediate step will be required to significantly reduce ghg emissions already by 2035 the development of a hybridelectric propulsion system for regional aircraft with at least 50 hybridization represents this very challenging yet achievable intermediate step and can allow for a mission fuel burn reduction by at least 50 compared to 2020 stateoftheart regional aircraft a thermal engine that allows for usage of 100 sustainable aviation fuel will allow to reduce lifecycle ghg emissions by 90 and thus close to zero the proposed project amber innovative demonstrator for hybridelectric regional application addresses this aspect and pursues the maturation of hybridelectric key components and the validation of a productrepresentative parallel hybridelectric propulsion system architecture fuel cell based for nextgeneration regional aircraft with eis by 2035 to meet the ambitious environmental goals set out in sria and the clean aviation topic call
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enabling and leveraging climate action towards netzero emissions
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to implement the paris agreements goals greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced to netzero around 2050 however current policies are still insufficient to reach this target and netzero promises by countries are generally lacking concrete roadmaps how to reach them elevate aims to create a robust scientific understanding required to strengthen ndcs and current climate policies towards reaching netzero emissions for this elevate brings together a unique multidisciplinary consortium of leading international and national modelling teams climate policy experts and social scientists the consortium aims to interact directly with policymakers to define information gaps and attractive policies thus enhancing usability of the knowledge base and stimulating mutual learning based on this the consortium will systematically assess ndcs and policies at the global and national levels to identify current progress and good practice policies subsequently elevate will look into a range of critical enabling factors related to sectoral action international climate policy and the relationship with justice and sustainable development that can be leveraged to strengthen action this allows a new generation of global and national mitigation scenarios exploring the possibility of strengthening climate policies in countries worldwide and support netzero goals we assess the impact of different ways to formulate netzero goals and the impact of climate uncertainty outcomes include detailed pathways and milestones on how policies can be strengthened to achieving netzero goals elevate goes significantly beyond the stateoftheart by 1 the inclusion of social sciences in all aspects of the analysis providing significantly improved insights into issues related to implementation and feasibility 2 the detailed focus on sectoral action 3 the stakeholder interaction and 4 the direct collaboration between the global and national teams on netzero emission scenarios
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quadruplehelixbased knowledge valorisation best practices to transition to an open science innovation management model
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kaleidos brings together research and innovation managers and advisors from a group of 4 european universities and one sme with strong competence on knowledge valorisation kv and open science os that will in partnership with a lowintensive kv university collaborate for competence exchange and development crosslearning and skill sharing and network building and consolidation and quadruplehelix qh interactionbased knowledge valorisation best practices kvbp they will share their kvbp and enhance them by embedding actions with qh stakeholders of their local ecosystems throughout all research stages from challenge definition to establishment of multidisciplinary research and innovation teams generation of innovations to respond to existing needs design of project concepts and funding applications and actual project implementation and advancement of results to the market ultimately this process will develop a comprehensive set of social innovation and os approaches and practices to be piloted and assessed within universities and with their ecosystems through a new set of indicators for measuring os and social innovation impact kaleidos will also define with qh actors the os professional profiles for both researchers and managers and the associated capacitybuilding training programmes for universities and research centres generated resources action plans guidelines and peersharing professional network will be made available for any university or research centre to replicate the exercise adapted to their specific context and needs policy recommendations will be developed at national and european level to contribute to the european advancement of the os policy framework ultimately kaleidos aims to consolidate a methodology and associated tools and guidelines to help universities and research centres in their transition towards an os and social innovation management approach at all stages of research
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towards a theory of endings in innovation studies
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because innovations are important to achieve sustainable development substantial investments have been made in innovation research yet innovations often prove insufficient for replacing established production and consumption practices in endings i argue that we need to overcome this innovation bias by studying how existing sociotechnical systems and their respective knowledge bases end or not in fact evidence suggests that it is more likely for existing systems to endure than to disappear still we have a rather limited understanding of how decline and deinstitutionalization unfold this is an important research gap in several disciplines that needs to be addressed to tackle the transformations needed to achieve a more sustainable society combining theoretical insights from innovation and organization studies in a novel way i will study the epistemic motors of industries by developing an analytical framework that 1 introduces a knowledgebased conceptualization of sociotechnical systems 2 differentiates between different kinds of knowledge and their prevalence in certain industries 3 specifies the ways in which knowledge is maintained and reproduced 4 identifies the mechanisms that lead to the erosion and extinction of knowledge 5 substantiates endings as a precondition for innovation and systemic change to apply this framework i will reformulate the method of innovation biographies by adding the phases of erosion and extinction to the knowledge life cycle and pioneer its application in comparative crosscase analyses of three industries energy ict craft in three geographical contexts germany uk sweden based on the findings i will formulate an original interdisciplinary theory of endings that understands innovation as only one part of the knowledge life cycle such a novel perspective will open new research avenues for empirical analysis that will significantly advance research on innovation and sustainability transitions
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the second life of modern period architecture resilient and adaptive renovation towards netzero carbon heritage buildings
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today 19th and 20th c modern period buildings are the trademark of numerous european cities forming a great part of eu built heritage reflecting and shaping the identity of our local national and multinational societies considering that historic buildings are ineffective in terms of energy consumption for heating and cooling among the biggest restoration and renovation challenges is to enhance the energy performance of historic buildings sincere aims to elucidate the values of built heritage and provide the tools for optimizing the carbon footprint and energy performance of historic buildings towards the requirements of netzerocarbonbuildings by utilizing innovative sustainable and costeffective restoration materials and practices energy harvesting technologies ict tools and socially innovative approaches sincere adapts a multiscale concept from material to building to neighbourhood to cityscale applied on the three main parts of buildings structure external envelope opaque and transparent parts implemented at different timeframes in order to provide decision making tools to the stakeholders involved in the process considering the fullservice life of the buildings including restoration operation monitoring and maintenance phases energy performance in terms of retrofitting materials and solutions will be optimized according to the buildings unique structural architectural functional and materials characteristics their environmental setup as well as local future climate change scenarios sincere will provide a palette portfolio of sustainable restoration options that will be evaluated by hbimhdt tools in order to enable the selection of optimum solutions and the planning of necessary adaptation actions sincere will also focus on raising awareness and empowering europeans to promote the concept of preservation ch buildings by disseminating the obtained results through national and international scale activities
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the neural language of song brain mechanisms for sensorimotor syntax control
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our motor sequences obey syntax rules from tying shoes to giving a speech choosing the next action requires our brain to remember past actions bridge across many seconds and apply rules that create hierarchical syntax whereas past studies revealed how primary motor cortex drives actions we poorly understand the transition mechanisms by which the brain strings actions into hierarchical variable sequences the key obstacle is identifying deep hierarchical syntax rules in behavior and in neural sequences this obstacle is met by studying birdsong that naturally segments to sequences of syllables in the zebra finch juveniles learn once from a tutor and fix a single sequence driven by a robust songlocked activity here to study hierarchical syntax rules i will use canaries virtuosos that learn and adapt such rules along and across seasons canaries produce a huge repertoire of songs that enable separate analysis of neural states and syllable acoustics when studying their rich and dynamic syntax rules my previous work in canaries identified hidden neural states that keep a memory of sung syllables over several seconds and predict upcoming transitions here i leverage this model to dissect transition mechanisms and elucidate 1 neural activity in the premotor nucleus hvc that underlies flexible transitions between syllables 2 integration of auditory and thalamic inputs for applying hierarchical syntax rules to select the next syllable 3 neural state dynamics when adapting syntax rules for new songs and 4 seasonal remodeling of hvc via neurogenesis we use imaging electrophysiology and neural network simulations that integrate data across behavior neural activity and circuit levels of analysis our work will map the process by which basal ganglia and thalamocortical circuits generate and adapt hierarchical syntax rules over time sensory and social contexts and might offer insights to dysfunction of motor sequence control in maladaptive conditions
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a physicsbased study of ice stream dynamics
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ice streams are riverlike corridors of fast flowing ice that account for the vast majority of ice discharge to the ocean in continental ice sheets their most outstanding feature is that they can appear spontaneously within a slowly moving ice sheet selforganize in evenly spaced patterns and switch on and off over time yet a full explanation of ice stream formation and evolution is one of the longest standing open problems in glaciology this knowledge gap has precluded fundamental investigations on the role of ice streams in driving ice sheet change and also casts doubt on the ability of stateoftheart ice sheet simulation codes to project future sea levels recent work by the pi identified an entirely novel class of feedbacks related to the onset of basal sliding which could be the missing ingredient needed to fully explain observed ice stream dynamic behaviors drawing on a unique combination of novel glaciological observations firstprinciple theoretical work and icesheetwide numerical simulations phast builds on this insight to 1 develop a complete and coherent theory of ice stream spatial and temporal dynamics that clarifies under what environmental conditions these dynamics are to be expected2 test the hypothesis that sliding onset physics play a central role in ice stream dynamics through a targeted field experiment3 build a new ice sheet simulation code that resolves sliding onset and ice stream margin physics at low computational cost thanks to emerging domain partitioning methods4 assess for the first time the sensitivity of antarctic and greenland mass loss to ice stream dynamics by developing new modeling tools and generating processlevel understanding across scales ranging from few tens of meters to thousands of kilometers phast will lead the way towards unraveling the complex interplay between internal ice sheet dynamics and climate over timescales ranging from decades to millennia
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filling the behavioral gap in disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation
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do only foolish people drown and only compulsive gamblers suffer flood losses conventional wisdom is based on flawed underlying assumptions and the eu vision of a disaster and climateresilient society cannot be achieved by relying on behaviourblind assessments and policy whilst the behaviour of individuals businesses and public services before during and after a crisis has a significant impact on damages recovery and resilience current assessments fail to include such critical factors because they are hardly understood floods and weather hazards are affecting 2bn people and exposure is expected to grow due to climate change despite trillions of public funds invested current flood reduction and planning policies are failing to reduce risks and losses of lives this is due to a mismatch between the rising application of risk vulnerability and resilience assessments and the understanding of their empirical validity the overreaching goal of this proposal is to move from behaviourblind to behaviouraware assessments indicators and policies to save lives and public money lifting the current barriers to predicting and simulating risk perception and behaviour will create forefront knowledge and open new horizons social and technological changes have widened the gaps in our knowledge making new empirical research essential to refine or replace existing theories this project will provide four demonstrators representative of the european and mediterranean context graded in size wealth and exposure to reach general considerations paris barcelona bucharest and algiers it is aiming at crossvalidation on floods and transferability to other emergencies technological disasters epidemics terrorism etc it will launch a new line of research by providing behaviouraware participatory assessments and indicators spatiallyexplicit interactive short and longterm simulation tools enabling decisionmakers to refine their strategies and policies
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transition to sustainable future through training and education
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transit aims to provide sustainable training and reskilling programmes for current and future generations on a multidisciplinary approach in renewable energy and fuel technologies identifying global and local challenges to realise the large deployment ambitions covering european level and all different stakeholders levels specifically through support measures and activities transit will dedicate its resources and educational materials to target groups of policymakers regulators innovators industry trade associations universities and local communities covering the various sectorial strategies under the european green deal therefore the transit framework establishes i success stories and practices that are catalogued retained and promoted in terms of circularity and sustainable aspects ii develop a handson training approach to revamp industryacademic curricula and iii establish a webenabled platform for the innovative and interactive multidisciplinary programme from educational campaigns to handson courses validation of transit resources tools and materials including challenges competitions and awards will pass through rigorous quality assurance that ensures that each material also takes into consideration gender balance societal impact and employment competencies transit developed framework will ensure postproject life is addressed through scalability and replicability including the deployment of the programme in partners countries through appropriate stakeholders and open access practices
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socialist symbolic geography and global belonging yugoslav travel writings in the third world
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european socialist travel writers in the previous century turned their course to africa and asia reflecting the fact that the second and third worlds formed a close political economic and cultural alliance which was built on a popular and widely accepted vision of mutual interconnectedness and global belonging the socialist travelogue had an important role in promoting such symbolic geography and in negotiating proclaimed and practiced solidarities with various tensions interests and power inequalities today these travelogues and the partnership between the two worlds have been forgotten profoundly influencing how we understand the european and global past and future socglobe sets to examine the yugoslav socialist travelogue 19451990 as a rich place to explore socialist symbolic geography and consequently promote values narratives and memories of solidarity and global belonging in order to reinspire public debates on the european future in line with that socglobe has two strategic goals 1 to compose the first comprehensive corpus of yugoslav travel writing thus integrating the uncatalogued material in danger of historical disappearance and 2 to build a novel conceptual framework to explore socialist symbolic geography beyond the currently dominant postcolonial model created for analysing relations between western europe and its colonial others socglobe challenges the postcolonial approach by incorporating imagology and bourdieus concept of positiontaking into the research and proposes the notion of socialist symbolic geography as a site of multidimensional and multidirectional exchange and negotiation socglobe advances literary cultural and travel writing studies beyond their westernoriented focus and contributes to socialist studies historical research on second and third world relations and broader research on semiperipheries by proposing an alternative conceptual model for framing intercultural relations
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optimizing multifunctional forestbased value chains with single tree information and application of digital technologies
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european forests pivotal in the bioeconomy and provision of ecosystem services face growing challenges from climate threats impacting their multifunctional roles from carbon sequestration to biodiversity and recreation singletree seeks to transform forest management aligning with the eus bioeconomy strategy rural vision biodiversity strategy and the european green deal singletree leverages cuttingedge data capture and ai technologies to monitor individual tree attributes health and biodiversity ensuring a holistic approach to multifunctional forest management by developing solutions for forest health monitoring and wood quality control the project aims to enhance sustainable forest management considering the diverse european and regional forest varieties data acquisition across the value chain from forest operations to wood processing will be optimized aiding decisionmaking processes from harvesting timings to treatment options using a cocreation approach with living lab value chains the project quickly develops solutions addressing realworld challenges it focuses on boosting forest resilience preventing biodiversity loss due to climate change and maximizing the use of different wood grades singletree prioritizes the full utilization of forest biomass highlighting the carbon retention of premium wood furthermore singletree will assess the environmental and social impacts of its innovations focusing on biodiversity enhancement resource efficiency and the implications for stakeholders the project encourages regional and local entities particularly smes to adopt innovative business models emphasizing sustainability circularity and tiered biomass use this strategy enhances material utilization and highlights the balance of tradeoffs synergies and community involvement ensuring beneficial outcomes for the environment society and economy in regional and rural areas
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the role of areabased conservation measures in reducing impact from agriculture conserving biodiversity and supporting local communities livelihood
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pressures on natural landscapes due to soybean and cattle ranching have been increasing in brazil over the last decades this is largely driven by exports including to the european union making these commodities some of the most important threats to biodiversity and nontimber forest products some of these products can be used for medicinal and food security purposes by local communities and often are managed either by women or men differently areabased conservation measures are an important global conservation strategy and include the newly defined other effective areabased conservation measures oecms oecms can play a larger role in nature conservation in areas managed by local communities yet it remains unclear to what extent they are contributing to conservation this project will evaluate the impact of soybean and cattle expansion in brazil on biological and cultural diversity and gender and the contribution of oecms on their conservation specifically i will i identify species used by local communities and assess their conservation status as well as potential genderdifferences in their uses ii analyze the impact of soybean and cattle ranching expansion on biocultural diversity and the potential genderbiased consequences and iii evaluate the contribution of different oecmtypes to the conservation of cultural and biological diversity to do that this action will combine methods and techniques across disciplines literature review on the relationship between species and gender and geoprocessing and statistical analysis landuse change and matching analysis expected results include three scientific publications and outreach activities to amplify societal awareness about the impact of agriculture on culture and nature and provide evidence of how oecms can support both biodiversity and the livelihood of women and men being considered as a promising conservation tool in the next decade
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a quantum system on chip for equal access to secure communications a pilotready photonic integrated circuit with embedded quantum key distribution functions for highperformance transceivers
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quantum computing forecasted to happen within 10 years will bring unprecedented computing power rendering obsolete current data security protocols based on public keys affecting our open society our business and basic individual rights quantum key distribution qkd technology can solve this strategic data security problem by providing informationtheoretic security making systems unbreakable even with unlimited computing power however until now technology development for qkd has been focused on government and defence applications with solutions made of discrete components in big boxes only a few can afford with equal access to secure communications at stake what is missing is a solution fit for massmarket industrialization to embed qkd technology in the fixed and mobile networks we rely on every day photonip offers such a solution a quantum ready highperformance dual polarization 100g miniaturized engine on a single chip quantum system on chip qsoc compatible with the smallest form factors for pluggable transceivers deployed in access networks and using the same wavelength channel for classic and quantum operations the project aims to develop a technology demonstrator of a qsoc that is ready for pilot production and offers breakthrough performance at low cost and full compatibility with current and future optical communications infrastructure this proposal builds on the uniqorn fet project on quantum technologies ga820474 where photonips founders developed a differential phase shift transmitter on a photonic integrated circuit fit for secure quantum key distribution and leverage photonip proprietary and patented hip technology a highperformance integration platform that allows a unique hybridization of the photonics integrated circuit pic which integrates bestinclass best in class inp based materials for all active functionality with bestinclass silicon on insulator for the optical passive functionality onchip
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engineering biological timers and their applications
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living cells are endowed with encoded programs that allow them to execute vital tasks and respond to relevant stimuli the use of analogous synthetic programs has an enormous potential yet we are highly limited in our ability to program cellular actions over time we rely on preciselytimed human intervention or on molecular oscillators that control repetitive processes but we are still unable to program cells to autonomously execute custom actions at desired timesi now intend to make a big leap toward this goal by producing control systems molecular timers and associated readytouse applications for the precise and selfsufficient control of cellular actions over time specifically i will engineer timer gene circuits into e coli that compute time and perform desired actions at specified moments timers will be highly programmable reusable and scalable and i will exploit their potential by using them for different applications including bioproduction and biosensingin sum i will develop the highlyneeded groundbreaking ability to measure and program time in cells my results will unleash a myriad of new possibilities both fundamental and applied
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selfinterpretability of human cognition how reportable knowledge emerges in learning
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current artificial intelligence ai surpasses humanlevel performance in a vast range of tasks however its decisional processes are opaque referred to as the ai interpretability problem humans on the other hand can verbally describe their decisional processes and strategies the accuracy of these reports varies especially in complex environments yet people often come up with reasonably accurate explanations for their decisions thereby allowing knowledge transfer in society however the mechanisms of accurate verbal report generation remain unclear therefore the main research objective of the reportit project is to study how humans generate adequate reportable knowledge during learning through experience inspired by the recent findings from research on metacognition ie insight into ones own cognition and cognitionemotion interaction i will test the novel hypothesis that metacognition and learningrelated affect support the emergence of reportable knowledge in two experiments modeling complex learning environments implicit category learning and probabilistic reward learning tasks i will track the development of metacognition affect and reportable knowledge over time this will allow me to evaluate the temporal relationships between these components and predict the emergence of reportable knowledge in the final step of the project i will study the behavior of deep neural networks dnns in the exact same tasks and test whether dnns can generate temporal patterns of metacognition and affect as observed in humans thereby the reportit project combines my expertise in implicit learning and affective science with expertise in neuroscience of consciousness and dnns at the host institute university of amsterdam this way reportit will contribute to understanding how people generate reportable knowledge and at the same time provide new approaches for explainable ai
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towards a systemsbased holistic environmental risk assessment of chemicals syberac
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towards a system based holistic environmental risk assessment of chemicals syberacbiodiversity is key to modern society sustaining natural resources and providing essential ecosystem services according to the un sustainable development goals the european green deal the eu biodiversity strategy and other european and national level directives and strategic regulations pollution is one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss the risks resulting from the use release and effects of chemical on the environment is addressed in a plethora of eulevel directives and regulatory strategies each with specific chemical targets and protection aims there is however concern that such a fragmented approach does alleviate the threats of chemicals to biodiversity and ecosystem services to protect genetic and functional biodiversity from pollution impacts a paradigm shift is needed this transformation should move beyond the current fragmented environmental risk assessment era performed in specific regulatory silos eg plant protection products pppsregulation for pesticides reach for industrial chemicals and biocides framework for biocidal chemicals towards a harmonised and systemsbased era applicable to all chemicals species and land use functions to make this advance syberac will provide ways forward to rationalise the current silobased protection goals into highlevel systembased protection goals and to operationalise their use within systemsbased era robust and broadly applicable era structures six case studies overarching different silos of current era will provide proofofconcepts of the developed approaches based on targeted stakeholder engagement in close cooperation with other relevant projects on the topic results and outcomes will be disseminated towards a wide audience including national and eu level regulatory institutions industrial partners but also land managers farmers and conservation bodies
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structural exploration of gd3 gangliosidecovid spike protein interaction and siglec7 role in inhibition of viral infection
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the present project focuses on deeply comprehending the molecular basis of glycan recognition events by key protein receptors at atomic level directly connected to processes related to immune response infection and cancer we will elucidate using nuclear magnetic resonance nmr and other biophysical techniques the binding preferences of the recognition event between gd3 ganglioside and the spike proteins of oc43 and hku1 human coronavirus hcov variants along with siglec7 the role of siglec7 in inhibiting the hcov viral infection will also be addressed this research will make a significant and direct contribution by unveiling the roles of glycosylation patterns and cell receptors in hcov infection mechanismsdr bermejo the applicant defended her phd thesis almost five years ago and was awarded a mscaif fellowship for the past three years during this time she has grown into an excellent researcher in chemical biology possessing practical experience in organic and peptide synthesis drug design lipid nanoparticles formulation cell culture and binding assays through the awarding of this fellowship she will join the lab of prof jesus jimnezbarbero the scientific director of the host institution cic biogune and leader of the chemical glycobiology lab he is one of the bestknown scientists in glycan research at the national and international levelsthanks to this action dr bermejo will consolidate her multidisciplinary scientific proficiency acquiring new competences in enzymatic synthesis and protein expression and purification and trend setting nmr concepts and techniques she will contribute to the host with her expertise in glycan and glycoconjugates synthesis and will bring her expertise in liposomal formulation setting up a microfluidics device within the group
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symmetry and similarity
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the goal of this project is to develop an algorithmic theory of similarity between graphs graphs are versatile models for representing complex data ranging from chemical molecules to social interactions dealing with graphical data and enabling modern data analysis techniques a fundamental task is to compare graphs and to measure their similarity preferably in a semantically meaningful and algorithmically efficient way however it is not clear at all how to achieve this in many application areas for example computer vision database systems and formal verification researchers have proposed often adhoc solutions to this problem tailored for the specific application but a general theory is missing we will develop such a theory in this projectsimilarity of graphs has many different facets we will identify the common core of different approaches to similarity but also exhibit their differences we will design methods for comparing different similarity measures and for obtaining a semantic understanding of similarity we will develop criteria for the suitability of various similarity measures for different types of applicationsa particular focus of our research will be on efficient algorithms for computing similarity there is little use in having a perfect similarity measure if we have no efficient way of determining how similar two graphs area classic algorithmic problem in this context is the graph isomorphism problem of deciding whether two graphs are structurally identical determining the precise computational complexity of this problem or of the equivalent problem of computing all symmetries of a graph is regarded to be one of the most important open questions in theoretical computer science building on recent progress we will design new algorithms breaking barriers towards a polynomialtime algorithm for the isomorphism problem
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intangible and invisible interests concealed constituents and excluded electorates understanding the politics of absence
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political representation is about presence and absence yet does advocating for the poor mean not advocating for the rich representing rural interests not representing urban ones and speaking for young people neglecting the concerns of the elderly political scientists have solid theories and empirics on who is made present in the political process but lack an understanding of the politics of absence who is made absent by whom how when and why amid an urgent crisis of representation in modern democracies this research uncovers crucial power dynamics who whom identifies inequalities how when why and addresses policy gaps what to do building on the pis record of leading research on political representation inconex fundamentally pushes the boundaries of the field it is the first to develop a comprehensive conceptualization of representative absence it identifies two agents of absence representatives and citizens and two types of absence intentional and unintentional representatives can intentionally exclude groups from the electorate eg migrants but also unintentionally overlook them because their interests are intangible eg future generations constituents may deliberately conceal themselves eg the rich or their interests remain invisible because they are unaware of their group belonging eg those in need methodologically inconex develops and applies qualitative and computational social science techniques to map presence and absence in national and eulevel parliamentary debate over time to understand the mechanisms that shape different representative absences inconex uses indepth interviews with members of national parliaments mps and the european parliament meps and focus groups with their constituencies based on this extensive data collection the project builds a comprehensive theory of representative absence and the politics behind it its manifestations causes and implications
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dissect cargo selectivity in autophagy
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macroautophagy is an evolutionarily conserved catabolic process induced to preserve cellular homeostasis under conditions of stress such as nutrient starvation upon autophagy activation cellular components are engulfed by autophagic vesicles which then fuse with lysosomes for substrate degradation despite the unquestionable physiological and medical relevance of nutrient and pharmacologicalinduction of autophagy in human health the precise identity of autophagy substrates and the rules governing their selection in vivo are largely unknown autoselects goal is to provide a framework to identify physiologically relevant autophagy substrates in different organs and to determine the signaling events that govern their selection this proposal relies on 1 newly generated mouse models to genetically manipulate autophagy and key autophagy regulators 2 tools to quantitatively measure autophagy substrate delivery to lysosomes and subsequent degradation in vivo and 3 omic technologies and bioinformatic tools to dissect the molecular events that govern substrate selection in response to diverse stimulations in a tissuespecific manner in addition autoselect will develop new strategies to modulate selective autophagy and test their therapeutic relevance in connective tissue disorders characterized by the intracellular accumulation of misfolded procollagen molecules autoselect has the potential to discover new rules governing cargo selectivity during autophagy and hence to provide new links between energy metabolism and cellular quality control that might be exploited for autophagy modulation to treat human diseases
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environmentally friendly copperengineered nanoparticles innovative fungicide to reduce copper accumulation
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in modern agriculture the extensive use of traditional pesticides requires a reevaluation to address the dual challenge of increasing food demand and sustainability historically copperbased fungicides have been crucial in pest management aiding farmers in the control of fungal or bacterial diseases across a wide range of crops additionally evolving eu regulations are imposing stricter limits on copperbased pesticides use driven by health and environmental concerns linked to cu accumulation and in line with the european green deal aim of reducing pesticide usage by 50 by 2030 this presents a significant challenge to farmers who must simultaneously manage pests and respect restrictions especially in vulnerable regions and crops currently few viable alternatives for reformulating cubased pesticides are availableecofun proposes a new material based on bioinspired and biocompatible nanoparticles engineered to incorporate copper with the aim to deliver a more efficient and sustainable fungicide moreover ecofun will comprehensively address the efficacy efficiency and toxicity of the material through in vitro and in vivo experiments including field tests the overarching goal is to reduce copper concentration by a minimum of 50 compared to commercial counterparts the objectives include the synthesis of the new material and its comprehensive characterization encompassing the study of cu release in water soil and foliar adherence fungicidal activity will be assessed in vitro against three different fungi commonly treated with copperbased fungicides alongside with cytotoxicity evaluations on target cells subsequently in vivo experiments in field and under controlled conditions will be performed to validate product efficiency and will involve measuring residue levels in fruits and soil and impacts on harvest this proposal enables the development of a novel pesticide class using the same technology owing to the broadspectrum action of copper
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longtrec the longreads transcriptomics european consortium the next generation transcriptome biology revealed by single molecule sequencing technologies
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thridgeneration singlemolecule longread sequencing technologies such as nanopore and pacbio are revolutionizing transcriptome research and are expected to outcompete shortreads sequencing for gene expression studies however technical and bioinformatics challenges exist to the realization of this full potential in this project we will train a team of excellent doctoral candidates to become the european and world leaders in the field of long reads transcriptome sequencing lrrnaseq the team will address three fundamental aspects of current barriers to the progress that these technologies face a obtaining highquality sequencing and preprocessed data from improved library preparation protocols and bioinformatics preprocessing methods b establishment of benchmarked analysis pipelines for the application of these approaches to genome annotation and isoform usage analysis both in bulk and singlecell samples and c extension of long reads to multiomics applications for the study of regulatory biology additionally dc will follow an intensive and comprehensive training program composed of scientific and soft skills training including activities related to pressing societal challenges such as climate change diversity and inclusion and the ethics of science students will complement their education through secondments in top european laboratories and companies as well as through exposure to a network of worldwide experts in the field of rna research
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a novel immunooncolytic virusbased dendritic cell therapeutic cancer vaccine
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following decades of development therapeutic cancer vaccines are beginning to gain momentum in demonstrating therapeutic effects and they represent a particularly promising approach the aim of therapeutic cancer vaccines is to stimulate immunity against tumor antigens usually through the use of whole cells peptides or nucleic acids ie mrnas dendritic cell dc based vaccines represent particularly interesting candidates for therapeutic cancer vaccine products due to their ability to crosspresent antigens to t cells thereby driving adaptive immune responses through induction of antigenspecific cytotoxic t lymphocytes despite the potential of dcbased cancer vaccines several major limitations have hindered their success in clinical studies these limitations include insufficient ex vivo maturation of dcs and challenges in selecting optimal tumor antigens to target the aim of dcanvax is to develop a novel oncolytic virusbased dendritic cell vaccine approach for systemic therapy of solid cancers we propose that the use of a highly immunooncolytic virus as a mechanism to lyse tumor cells exvivo will lead to the release of the entire tumor antigen library as well as a cocktail of danger signals in response to the virus infection by applying this highly immunogenic lysate to autologous dcs an optimized and personalized dc vaccine can be generated this method overcomes the major challenges that have been encountered by dc vaccine approaches in the clinic by providing a potent mechanism of dc maturation and activation while simultaneously exposing the dcs to the complete repertoire of tumor antigens that are specific to the patient leading to potent and broad tumorspecific immune responses against the cancer this approach can be developed for multiple solid cancer indications and combined with other immunotherapy approaches for potentially synergistic therapeutic effects
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performing arts in a new era ai and xr tools for better understanding preservation enjoyment and accessibility
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premiere seeks to modernize the performing arts focusing on dance and theater by using advanced digital technologies to support the whole lifecycle of performances from their production and curation by both amateurs and professionals to their delivery and understanding from the audience as well as their analysis and interpretation by art scholars in doing so premiere will contribute to the following general goals1 broaden accessibility to audiences that cannot attend live performances due to physical distance international audience health reasons eg elderly reduced mobility immunocompromised or economic reasons low income 2 enhance the understanding of present and past performances by audiences with diverse cultural social historical and educational backgrounds 3 enrich the creative process by adding new elements dimensions and capabilities offered by advanced digital technologies while enabling international and therefore intercultural collaboration 4 increase the visibility of performances by supporting both spectators in searching for relevant content and producerscurators in communicating their work to the most relevant audiencesaccordingly the overall objective of premiere is to develop and validate a comprehensive ecosystem of digital applications powered by leading edge ai xr and 3d technologies designed to fulfill the needs of diverse enduser communities involved in the main stages of the lifecycle of performing arts productions including amateur and professional performers performance art producers and curators performance art spectators and scholars
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capturing the evolution of a transformative cognitive capacity the case of vocal learning in dogs
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modifying the vocal repertoire using an external auditory model is a prerequisite for speech production but how fullfledged vocal learning evolved in humans uniquely among primates is still unclear integrating recent evidence from ethology and genetics i hypothesize that selection for tameness alloparental behavior and cooperativity in concert were the key driving processes for the emergence of human vocal learning and speech i propose that dogs constitute an ideal model to test this hypothesis as they underwent a strong selection for tameness and cooperativity with and often alloparented by humans at the same time their vocal behavior markedly changed compared to their closest relatives the wolves dogs have control over their vocalizations suggesting the presence of some primordial forms of vocal learning abilities combining bioacoustics ethology genetics and brain imaging k9voclearn thus sets out to reveal the mechanisms underlying the emergence of vocal learning capacities in dogs specifically i test how genetic similarity with wolves particular gene variations of breeds extreme domesticationsyndrome phenotype and individual cooperativity affect abilities and neural processes involved in vocal learning wp1 utilizes citizen science bioacoustics and machine learning approaches to develop a comprehensive catalogue of dogs vocal repertoire wp2 seeks evidence of vocal usage and vocal production learning including vocal imitative abilities in dogs while also testing neural and vocal control mechanisms involved wp3 tests dogs vocal coordination abilities in con and heterospecific interactions both on the behavioral and the neural level in early intervention experiments wp4 longitudinally examines vocal ontogeny and the role of the acoustic environment in vocal flexibility breaking ground on capturing the emergence of vocal learning in a cooperative domestic species k9voclearn will provide new insights into human language evolution
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pandemic literacy and viral zoonotic spillover risk at the frontline of disease emergence in southeast asia to improve pandemic preparedness
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the pandasia project addresses the call by providing a framework that will increase our understanding of the biology of viruses with emerging infectious disease potential and their interaction with humans animals and the environment and translating this understanding into proactive preventative actions such research is crucial for providing evidencebased knowledge and tools for better integrative public health measures for local and national actors we will develop models to identify and predict drivers of disease emergence which will be evaluated with real world data refined and used to develop health and pandemic literacy intervention strategies that reduce risk of future viral emergence thereby reducing the burden of zoonotic spillover to human health since pandemics arise at a local level it is important to engage with local communities and health environment and agriculture authorities to improve their health and pandemic literacy to ensure adequate preparedness and vigilance for future spillover events and human animal and environmental health threats understanding spillover dynamics and threats at local levels in emerging disease hotspot areas such as southeast asia is important for the european union to improve preparedness and the ability to respond quickly to health emergencies and crossborder threats the identified drivers are likely generalizable to other emerging infectious disease hotspots in the region and if successfully implemented in se asia could be adapted to other hotspot regions such as in south america and africa
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skill performance estimation from cardiac signals
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in any learning situation be it math education language learning or sport training different learners have different abilities motivations and capacities at any given time thus an optimal learning can only be achieved with personalized training solutions dynamically adapted to each learners cognitive andor physical states the scientific literature showed that such states could be estimated from cardiac signals cs in erc poc spears we thus propose to redefine consumer training apps by enabling them to propose personalized and adaptive training plans according to an estimation of their users cognitive andor physical states from their cs measured with consumer grade sensors eg smartwatches the outcome of erc project brainconquest should enable us to tackle this challenge indeed in brainconquest we explored such a personalized training approach for users of braincomputer interfaces bci in doing so we developed machine learning ml and signal processing sp algorithms to estimate users mental states and predict their upcoming performances from their brain and physiological signals including cs in spears we thus aim at adapting improving and assessing brainconquest ml sp algorithms initially designed for bci performance prediction from research grade brain and cs sensors in the lab to predict cognitive and physical performance from consumer grade cs sensors in the wild such algorithms could be used for adaptive training apps in education cognitive training for healthy aging or sport training we will then explore a commercial application of this technology for sport training in particular in collaboration with the startup flit sport which sells an app for providing personalized training exercises for endurance sport athletes based on their past performances and ml by integrating our csbased prediction into flit sport training app we should design optimally personalized training solutions for millions of runners worldwide
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advanced biopsychosocial simulation for harmful adolescent behaviour
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we the lifecourse team have been developing a theoretical framework that combines biological social and psychological data into unified concepts over the past five years we now have a combined biopsychosocial data framework that can be used to uncover and understand biosocial causal pathways to adolescent behaviour including selfharm suicide substanceuse and delinquancy to our knowledge we possess the only linkage of highquality biological environmental and social data across several developmental stages of life to matched longitudinal data n4000 in the proposed proof of concept we propose to build a computational infrastructure on this framework creating a fully digitized toolkit that can benefit from digital automation communication and artificial intelligence methods at the center of this strategy is a new detailed biopsychosocial computer simulation model this first stage of development a proof of concept will already bring our data beyond current capabilities we see this work as a necessary next step taking the lifecouse project beyond the stateoftheart once again with several fundamental implications and broad industrial societal and scientific impact
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advanced safer materials and high performing cells for the next generation of liion batteries suitable for mobility applications
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sageli aims to develop safer materials and cells that meet batteries europes 2030 targets for safety performance lifetime sustainability and cost including eucar level 3 sagelis new cathode active materials cam contain no co they are based on inherentlysafe mnrich oxides additional safety will be ensured by reducing cams active surface area and an innovative coating sagelis safer binders target better adhesion lower swelling and better processability to prevent safety issues from cracking and inhomogeneities sagelis flameretardant electrolytes target stability at high voltage sagelis flash thermal test will predict safety from just a few grams of novel materials eliminating the need for upscaling to determine safety sagelis state of safety early prediction tool will predict eucar level during battery operation and ageing sagelis pouch cells will be demonstrated at 25 mah and 5 ah scale and all sageli materials and cells are fully scalable and recyclable via existing processesthe consortium gathers i 5 top public research organisations whose previous results have been used in commercial batteries cea fzj cnrs cid cice ii 7 companies committed to bringing sageli to market in existing and future factories across the eu for sales to customers worldwide umicore for cam arkema for binder and electrolyte ccell for cells power4future for batteries fincantieri for electric ships and thales for electric aircraft equipment and ii eu electromobility association averesagelis raw material cost is 23 lower than nmc811 sagelis market penetration in 2030 is expected to generate 14 bn of revenues for sagelis eu partners by 2030 and 202bn in 2035 its materials are expected to be used in 40gwh of batteries produced in 2030 600gwh produced in 2035 and 700 gwh produced in 2040 providing a cumulative 19mt c02eq savings vs nmc811 preliminary lca also predicts reduced water use other emissions and landuse vs nmc811
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political economies of refugee camps
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the campeconomies project explores a crucial aspect of the campization of the refugee accomodation in europe that has not yet been addressed in literature the multiple and intertwined economic relations that develop in and around refugee camps the research will be conducted through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies drawing from an interdisciplinary approach my postgraduate studies on economic and urban development my phd on social and cultural geography and my long lasting research interest around migration and gender an in depth fieldwork research will be take place in two refugee camps in the balkan route the camp of shisto in greece and of obrenovac in serbia the aim is to analyze economic and social relations in multiple and interlocking socio spatial scales from a the funding of the camps by institutional actors to b the socioeconomic relations connecting the camp to surrounding areas and to c the grassroots economic practices of refugees apart from disseminating this original research within academic community publications conferences an educational toolkit the project aims to intervene in the level of policy making policy report open online event still following the principles of open science and as the discussion around refugee camps is also a public discussion the project will develop an innovative strategy to communicate both the research process research blog podcasts and the results interactive maps public discussions to wider audiences the supervisor prof dr manuela bojadijev is a professor in the institute of european ethnology and a founding member of the berlin institute for empirical integration and migration research bim both based in humboldt university in berlin where the project will be hosted prof bojadijev is an expert in migration studies and has a profound experience in supervising and managing research projects
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the acoustic dimension of human and terrestrial wildlife interactions
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sound plays a critical role in many species behaviour and their intra and inter specific interactions thus disruption of animal soundscapes due to anthropogenic noise has led to significant negative impacts on wildlife populations although in terrestrial environments anthropogenic noise is recognized as a major pollutant regulations are targeted towards human wellbeing and often not relevant to wild populations hence it is critical to better understand how noise influences and disrupts wildlife ecological niches this project will take an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the ecoacoustic dimension of human and terrestrial wildlife interactions focussing on mammals currently underrepresented in the bioacoustic literature specifically the project will evaluate how anthropogenic noise perturbates wildlife species ecological niches in alpine ecosystems and what are the mechanism and the consequences of such perturbation on animal behaviour and performance i will use a large array 200 of acoustic recorders to measure sound levels variation across anthropic gradients and identify sources of anthropogenic noise including outdoor sports first acoustic data will be integrated with a similar array of camera traps to investigate how noise levels affect the spatiotemporal occurrence of wildlife second i will use biologging data and hormonal stress levels from faecal samples to assess the behavioural and physiological consequences of anthropogenic noise exposure finally i will use a controlled experiment to disentangle the role of auditory and visual cues and their interaction in the elicitation of animal behavioural responses to anthropogenic disturbance i will complement my expertis in bioacoustics with training in camera trapping biologging and modelling the knowledge generated in this action will inform and support the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems un sdg 15 he cluster6 and nextgenerationeu
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developing highenergy telluriumselenium redoxamphoteric conversion cathode chemistry for aqueous aluminum batteries
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rechargeable aqueous aluminum battery aab system is potential candidate for sustainable energy storage systems at a gridscale owing to their high safety sustainability and low cost however the existing cathode chemistry intercalationdeintercalation mechanism exhibits poor kinetics caused by extremely high charge density of al3 ion due to the small ionic radius of al3 ion 039 versus 059 of li and trivalent nature leading to a restricted energy density and fast capacity fade those drawbacks hinder their extensive applications in this project we will aim to develop highperformance and innovative aqueous alte and alse batteries by creative redoxamphoteric conversion electrochemistry which means te or se will undergo positive and negative valance state during charging and discharging to realize this goal we will firstly screen the aqueous based electrolyte and create the appropriate electrolyte which can realize the redoxamphoteric conversion electrochemistry of te and se and further we will explore the underlying specific mechanism of the whole electrochemistry by combining insitu characterization technologies and molecular dynamics simulation moreover the performance will be optimized by adjusting host materials separator and anode finally the device on pouch cell level will be demonstrated to clear as practical application this project will enable the researcher to broaden her knowledge and have more comprehensive knowledge frame which is vital for her future career upon successful implementation of this project due to the dualion charge storage mechanism and multielectron transfer the welldesigned aab could exhibit stateoftheart performance among aabs and even approach the energy density of commercial lithium batteries meanwhile this novel redoxamphoteric conversion electrochemistry will be an important extension of battery knowledge and the proposed mechanism will be milestone in this direction
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co2free ondemand onsite production of lowcost green hydrogen produced with microwave plasma
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with a decentralised and scalable solution that produces carbonfree h2 on demand at a cost that is competitive with grey h2 sakowin is at the forefront of the energy transition sakowin produces equipment modules that using biomethane or ng as feedstock produces h2 and solid carbon both industrially valuable products a big step forward from current and emerging solutions our proprietary technology is distinguished by its competitive cost 15kg h2 2025 due to 5x less electrical consumption than water electrolysis and by its co2free process unlike steam reforming technology our technology brick will be installed where h2 is needed fits into existing gas infrastructures saving in storage or transport our focus is on equipment sales and licensing we foresee revenues of 75m in 2030 with 276 modules in total delivered by 2030 by that year we envision sakowin as a referent within the companies offering technologies to produce sustainable co2free h2
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nonlinear topological floquet phases in a fiber ring experiment
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the realm of topological photonics relies on extreme flexibility of optical media for sculpting hamiltonians with arbitrary properties in real and synthetic dimensions topological effects in the optical domain can provide robust waveguiding and stable lasing which is of extreme interest for integrated photonics a powerful tool to imprint topological properties is periodic floquet driving which maps the energy bands onto a periodic quasienergy spectrum even richer physics was predicted to emerge if interactions are added into the system however the experimental studies of interacting floquet matter remained scarce due to absence of suitable platforms this project relies on a system of coupled fiber rings to realize a synthetic lattice for the study of interacting topological floquet phases this platform provides a unique combination of intrinsic floquet nature due to periodicity of the light propagation in rings full control over complex couplings and tunable kerr nonlinearities in the fibers thus allowing to engineer manybody floquet hamiltonians and study topological physics inaccessible with other systems based on these unique features the action aims at demonstration of novel topological floquet phases and topological pumping in presence of interactions this project stays at the cornerstone between topological physics photonics and nonlinear fiber optics and perfectly fits the applicants experience for preparing him for a future career as an independent researcher
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the lockdown cohorteffect does the unequal impact of the covid19 pandemic on fertility lead to longterm consequences for health and public services provision
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the covid19 pandemic placed a heavy social and health burden on populations yet because of social inequalities in the pandemics impact on fertility behaviour babies conceived during the pandemic may be the most socially advantaged and healthiest birth cohort of the last decades research on this counterintuitive but realistic consequence of the pandemic the lockdown cohort locoeffect is critical for public policy and the understanding of pandemic consequencesas individuallevel register data for babies conceived and born in 2021 and later is only just becoming available we still know little about how the pandemic changed the composition of parents and to what extent this explains changes in birth outcomes for those born during the pandemic to address this knowledge gap i will use individuallevel register data 20102022 from finland scotland austria spain the united states and brazil and natural experimental methods to study the locoeffect comparatively this strengthens the generalisability of results across different welfare regimes and pandemic experiences first i will study the magnitude of compositional changes in parental characteristics due to the unequal impact of the pandemic on fertility second i will analyse the extent to which differences in prematurity and birth weight between the loco and earlier cohorts are caused by this change in parental characteristics third i will estimate how the pandemic has affected intersectional social inequalities in birthweight and preterm birththis project is innovative because it bridges disconnected debates in demography epidemiology and sociology to explain why against expectations pregnancy and birth outcomes have improved during the pandemic as parental characteristics and birth outcomes shape health developmental and socioeconomic outcomes throughout life the results of this project will influence social and public health research and policy for decades to come
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fortifying the automated smartphonebased cough audio classification for rapid triage testing for tuberculosis project
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tuberculosis tb is the single biggest infectious cause of death globally a situation worsened by covid19 revolutionary new tb triage tests are required including at facilities where people are accessible and efficiently referable to confirmatory testing the cough audio triage for tb cagetb study was edctp2funded to 1 collect cough sounds at peoples pointofentry into primary care facilities south africa and derive an audio classifier 2 validate diagnostic accuracy in independent cohorts south africa uganda and 3 deploy mixed methods research costing implementation science medical anthropology to inform design and implementation so that this classifier which will report people as likely tb or unlikely tb for confirmatory testing is embedded within a userfriendly mhealth app with ondevice offline computation per the original calls objective cagetbs goal was to deliver an accurate validated mhealth app usable in trials assessing clinical outcomes necessary for adoption uniquely this pure mhealth innovation mitigates barriers that jeopardise target product profile criteria eg reagents coldchain transport infrastructure after cagetb hired personnel covid19 prevented and slowed recruitment people had limited clinic access recruitment interrupted by successive covid19 waves throughout this cagetb paid personnel and trainees resulting in severe budget overruns without participant recruitment and limited trainee progress and site visits in 4cagetb we request essential support over two years to accomplish the original scopeofwork ensure trainees can finish degrees and due to the longer recruitment period accommodate critical additional site visits covid19 has only reinforced our premise it caused tb to increase for the first time in a decade damaged already weak facilitybased triage practices and accelerated cough classification technologies
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geology of texts genealogy of concepts intellectual ecosystems mapping the indic and tibetic buddhist text corpora
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a major legacy of the indic and tibetic great civilisations is the enormous corpora of preserved texts and the plethora of profound ideas transmitted therein intellexus focuses on three vast corpora of buddhist texts indic works in sanskrit indic works in tibetan translation and autochthonous tibetic works with claimed indic origin our hypothesis is that the indic and tibetic buddhist intellectual cultures and their elementsincluding texts ideas and intellectual ecosystems and their constituentsarose and developed in dependence bringing to light the details of this dependent arising is essential for understanding the rich philosophical religious and literary traditions of these cultures and the subtle processes of transfer from the indic to the tibetic cultural sphere these complex processes we claim involved interactions not only with other buddhist elements but also with nonbuddhist ones the unique synergy within a broad team of scholars of humanities and computer science makes it possible for the first time to develop methods and tools with which our hypothesis can be tested we will map the three corpora taking also indic and tibetic nonbuddhist material into consideration with a focus on three aspects a the geology composition history of texts and text corpora b the genealogy of selected concepts and c the intellectual ecosystems involved the project will also devise sophisticated visualisations of the nexuses of interactions between texts ideas and people which will uncover patterns of intertextuality and intersecting pathways of ideas and will enable the profiling of the intellectual ecosystems our groundbreaking methodology and tools will revolutionise the way we think about and investigate theseand with some adaptations also otherintellectual cultures and the processes leading to the development of their rich traditions we thus expect a major impact on our fields and beyond
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dryland agriculture and land use past present and future resilience agridry
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the interest in traditional agriculture is a worldwide trend as people reclaim their heritage they increasingly turn to lessons learned by their ancestors about how to sustainability interact with their environment the network dryland agriculture and land use
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science technology and research for ethical engagement translated in society
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the present version of the project streets science technology and research for ethical engagement translated into society 20242025 marks a significant shift from the previous proposal the most evident change is the shift of our focus from the streets to the squares as the focal point for the initiatives this transition defined as streets to the square also represents an elevation to the next level of engagement and an enhancement of the results of the previous project the objectives remain consistent emphasizing in all the initiatives the promotion of scientific understanding opposing to misinformation engaging the public fostering public participation advocacy for ethical research and promoting innovation and social developmentthe project will continue to engage the entire campania region and southern lazio potentially encompassing approximately 10 of italys populationthe collaboration among all the prominent public universities of the campania region the network of more than 26 cnr institutes private companies and various new third parties is confirmed this result gives an idea of the positive impact of the first two years of implementationfurthermore the project addresses key themes on europes developmental agenda notably through the eu missions a specific attention is dedicated to the relationship with schools researchers will engage with teachers educators and pupils on challenges related for instance to climate change sustainable development health schools initiative will also promote gender balance diversity and inclusiveness in science in terms of planned activities and researchers involvedin this dynamic the transition to squares as a meeting point represents a dynamic response to the evolving needs of society ensuring that the project remains at the forefront of fostering a symbiotic relationship between science technology research and society for the common good
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frame fungal research in the age of museomic exploration revisiting historical lichen collections
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with current projections of fungal diversity estimated at 22 to 38 million species only 35 of those species are currently accepted within this group lichenforming fungi comprise c 17 of known fungal diversity playing fundamental roles in the world ecosystems however considering that lichens are poorly studied compared for example to angiosperms global lichen diversity is widely underestimated and this is further confounded by the fact that genetic material is sometimes the only way to uncover diversity hidden beneath their simple morphological structures as researchers race to uncover such cryptic diversity one resource ripe for exploitation is existing natural history museums where thousands of lichen specimens have been preserved ranging from recent to centuriesold collections frame seeks to use such existing resources to address this issue with the use of museomics a novel approach to generate informative genomic sequences from historical collections providing a costeffective efficient and laborsaving technique to integrate essential organisms into our global biodiversity inventory this project will not only determine the efficacy of using museomics on fungal collections but will also provide novel insights into the evolutionary history of a charismatic lineage of lobarioid lichens whose diversity has been continually reclassified in the past decade primarily due to standard genetic analyses while this project will involve an extensive and robust reclassification of lobarioid lichens as a whole it will also use new caledonia as a case study to determine both the efficacy of combining museomics with targeted fieldwork to provide biodiversity estimates while also elucidating the factors that have led to insular lichen diversification thus through frame a novel and cuttingedge integration of relevant museum collections with modern bioinformatic techniques will be generated providing an adaptable framework for use in other taxa
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prioritization incentives and resource use for sustainable dentistry
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oral diseases and conditions are the 3rd most expensive diseases to treat in the eu they affect about half of the eu population as highlighted in the 2021 who oral health resolution there are major challenges in the financing of oral health care in deviation from the un and who goal of universal health coverage many eu citizens do not have access to essential oral health care without financial hardship this causes detrimental impacts for the individual citizen while increasing costs and wasting resources on the macro level researchpolicy gaps and researchpractice gaps keep triggering inertia and inaction instead of addressing the persistent albeit largely preventable burden of oral diseases to this end the prudent prioritization incentives and resource use for sustainable dentistry project aims to develop and implement an innovative and contextadaptive framework for optimized financing of oral care prudent brings together top investigators from prestigious universities public authorities and policymakers civil society and patient organizations health insurers and health professionals to achieve a step change in collective problem solving given the comprehensiveness of the topic prudent uses a targeted approach that is entirely focused on four major rootcauses underlying the current limitations of oral care financing using a mixedmethods research approach prudent will i codevelop oral health system performance indicators and implement them in euwide monitoring framework ii conduct realworld and lab experiments to identify improved oral care financing mechanisms iii leverage regulatory learning needsadaptive resource planning and deliberative priority setting to enhance the improvement of oral care financing the knowledge gained will be merged into the prudent financing companion with policy briefs and decision aid tools for concretely actionable and contextadaptive improvement of oral care financing
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protein degraders for targeting galectin8
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in the protag8 project we aim to target galectin8 by protein degradation using proteolysis targeting chimeras or shortly protacs galectin8 is a galactosidebinding lectin that exists as a soluble intracellular and extracellular receptor with an extensive exchange between the membranebound and cytosolic forms its inhibitors are potential new anticancer drugs but the affinity of classical galectin8 inhibitors is in the low micromolar range hardly sufficient for their use as drug molecules the overarching aim of protag8 is to explore whether the protac method can be implemented for galectin8 and to answer the question of whether protacs offer advantages over classical selective galectin8 ligands since protacs need only bind their targets with high selectivity and with an affinity high enough to stabilize the ternary complex between the protein of interest and the e3 ligase the affinity in the micromolar range could be sufficient for their activity unlike conventional ligands the current stateoftheart in the development of protacs focuses only on intracellular proteins but galectin8 exists as both an intracellular and extracellular protein based on this fact we want to find out whether such a receptor which occurs both in the cytosol and in the extracellular matrix can be effectively targeted with protacs and its activity modulated this scientific question will be tackled by a highlyqualified phd nives hribernik with international experience in glycochemistry medicinal chemistry and chemical biology and is expected to be an excellent springboard to her independent scientific career the project proposal includes renowned principal investigators from two academic institutions prof dr marko anderluh from the university of ljubljana slovenia and prof dr ulf nilsson and prof derek logan from lund university sweden giving the protag8 international and interdisciplinary background
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smart 4d biodegradable metallic shapeshifting implants for dynamic tissue restoration
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reconstructive surgeries frequently require multiple often complex procedures at high social and economic costs a shapemorphing implant that can be implanted using less invasive procedures and that then undergoes predesigned shape changes leading to tissue expansion and allowing for complete degradation coupled with tissue regeneration is a radically new treatment concept biomet4d aims to create a new generation of shapeshifting and loadbearing implants for dynamic tissue restoration and to introduce a revolutionary paradigm in how actuators can be implemented in biomedicine sciencetowardstechnology breakthroughs will be demonstrated with new shapemorphing metamaterials 4d smart metallic actuators advanced multidomain optimization tools and finally proofofconcept for two potential clinical applications technologically this vision also goes beyond existing paradigms because of the stepbystep actuation mechanisms enabled through the additive manufacturing of multimaterial degradable metallic structures that are targeted for an order of magnitude improvement compared to the stateoftheart a futuristic longterm vision of this breakthrough technology is to dynamically regenerate entire tissues such as a nose or an ear and proofofconcept will be demonstrated for craniosynostosis treatment and skin expansion this longterm vision can only be achieved through an interdisciplinary approach and will likely have high social and economic impact as well as provide a new line of research for applications of smart metamaterials in medicine and engineering
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oglcnac modifications of rnabinding proteins
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oglcnacylation is a posttranslational dynamic modification of proteins that is becoming more widely recognized as a modification that can protect proteins from pathological aggregation in neurodegenerative diseases however it is unknown how this modification influences the rna binding properties of the protein and its function in the proposed project i will study the oglcnacylation of rnabinding proteins rbps associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis als and its effects on the rna binding properties and thereby on the regulation of rna processing i will find oglcnacylation sites of tdp43 fusedinsarcoma fus ewing sarcoma protein ews and tatabox binding protein associated factor 15 taf15 and i will assess the increased amounts of modification after stimulation of the cells with high glucose or with oglcnacase inhibitor i will study if their rna interaction profiles change with increasing amounts of oglcnac modifications in differentiated cortical neurons later i plan to implement in the company a mass spectrometry method adapted to analyse the alsliked rbps proteins which will help the glycoscience community this project will expand our understanding of the molecular mechanism of transcription regulation through protein oglcnacylation and can provide the necessary knowledge to understand alsrelated proteinopathies
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local accessible urban digital and sustainable factories new european bauhaus approach to open and decentralised urban manufacturing
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covid19 pandemic manifested the vulnerability of industries the unpredictability of external shocks and evidenced that traditional solutions do not suffice societal transformation and appropriate innovation models along with new technical solutions are seen as important pillars in solving environmental problems today seeds of this societal and industrial transformation exist digital communities gather around opensource innovative projects makers create collectives of professionals artists and tinkerers in tierplaces cocreate solutions smes looking for more sustainable new business models are inventing circular and sensemaking businesses in various territories usercentric agile cocreation is a very well known development practice that can be expanded to the whole manufacturing chain the transition to a low carbon resource efficient circular and sustainable bioeconomy with its technological potentials and proven applications and initiatives like the new european bauhaus offers solutions to the challenges society is facing today lauds factories is an innovative concept aiming to create small versatile factories in local and urban areas to cocreate and produce customised products in small series it seeks to incorporate innovative and active resiliency capabilities at production and supply chain levels to support a green circular and digital transformation it can enable artists creatives and entrepreneurs to test new ideas and products and reduce the carbon footprint by cutting transportation costs and time it also aims to create a more personalised experience for customers enhance their satisfaction loyalty and dynamize the job market the key exploitable results include a sustainable model for local manufacturing an updated digital product passport for transparency and innovation services for makerspaces smes and creatives
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the humantech nexus building a safe haven to cope with climate extremes
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the hut will employ innovative disaster risk reduction solutions accounting for the potential variations induced by climate change this will involve integrating and leveraging best practices and successful multidisciplinary experiences that have been recently developed within various territorial contexts by leading european research groups institutions and stakeholders to deal with extreme climate events the projects main ambition beyond the state of the art is to promote the best set of transdisciplinary risk management tools and approaches that could be adopted and used extensively across europe in as many situations as possible the activities of the project will be developed considering the following main critical dimensions transdisciplinarity systemic risk coproduction crossfertilization transferability and longterm legacya set of ten demonstrators will constitute a multihazard arena wherein possible disastrous events associated with climate extremes will be dealt with jointly by representatives of the scientific and technical communities practitioners policymakers and local communities the events associated to climate extremes that will be considered in this project are forest fires including wildland urban interface fires meteorologicalhydrologicalagricultural droughts including associated water shortage heatwaves weatherinduced landslides including debris flows fluvial and pluvial floods storms including heavy rain hail thunderstorms and storm surges the hut will mainly focus on the prevention and preparedness phases of the disaster risk management cycle explicitly considering climate change scenarios and integrating the proposed set of solutions for the various events considered over short from days to several months and longterm from years to decades time horizons
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plant adaption to elevated temperatures mitigating crop losses caused by climate change
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agricultural ecosystems are severely pressed by global warming elevated temperature consequence of climate change is causing dramatic crop and economic losses while threaten the healthy and sustainable living standards of most european citizens predictions on increased ambient temperatures between 154c pose on danger food security globally for the coming years in the context of european research council erc consolidator grant idrica683163 our lab found that vascular brassinosteroid receptors can confer resistance to several abiotic stresses without penalizing plant growth disclosing a yet unexplored innovation potential eu patent application p6100130ep 2021 these findings were initially obtained in the model arabidopsis and the emerging hypothesis has been now tested in brassinosteroid mutants of cereal sorghum we found that hypocotyl and mesocotyl growth on selected mutants is compromised upon elevated temperatures in both arabidopsis and sorghum respectively supporting conserved mechanisms across species these findings enable a novel highthroughput htp screening capacity for compoundsbiologicals to overcome the most damaging impacts of warming in crops upon initial htp screening this proposal aims to enter into a valorization path towards lead generation through a computationallyassisted screening cascade to identify costeffective lead compounds that can improve crop yield at elevated temperatures overall planet takes the opportunity for transferring proprietary knowhow into value to marketcreating innovation in the agricultural industry
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a multiisotope assessment of the past arctic nutrient cycle
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the ongoing radical decline in seaice cover and the greenland ice sheet gis melt is causing the oceans in the arctic to freshen in the western north atlantic decreasing salinity again results in changes in ocean stratification and a shift in the nutrient distribution between atlantic and pacificsourced waters stratification and nutrient flux strongly impact surface productivity and phytoplankton community structures but the collective influence of these mechanisms is not yet known and might regionally vary the aim of pnut is to study the effects of seaice loss gis melting and watermass redistribution of nutrients during previous warming phases of the deglacial and holocene to achieve this i will investigate the effects of past climate change on nutrient distribution and utilization by phytoplankton off greenland for a high spatial and regional evaluation the study is based on five available sediment cores one from the east greenland shelf and five cores along a northsouth transect from baffin bay to the west greenland shelf in a novel approach i will differentiate between silicic acid utilization based on silicon isotope compositions of sea ice and springsummer bloom diatoms silicic acid concentrations will be evaluated based on silicon isotope compositions of sponge spicules the net productivity nitrate utilisation and stratification will be investigated based on bulk sedimentary nitrogen isotope analyses the new results will be combined with records of sea surface temperature diatom abundance primary productivity watermass mixture stratification and seaice extent to synthesise a synoptic understanding of the influence of further future warming on the arctic marine nutrient cycle and the biological pump
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heterogeneous integration for connectivity and sustainability
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the challenges and major hiconnects objectives are to transform the centralized cloud platform to decentralized platforms which include edge cloud computing in a sustainable energyefficient way this will bring cloud services including artificial intelligence ai closer to the iot endusers which enables them to really use the cot and iot efficiently the technologies underpinning this revolutionary step include the development of highperformance computing storage infrastructure network interfaces and connecting media and the analysis of iot sensors and big data in realtime this major step forward will enable for example the mobile clients during the 5g deployment phase and 6g exploration to move among different places with minimum cost short response time and with stable connection between cloud nodes and mobile devicesthe main underlying technology to be developed by the hiconnects consortium comprising large industrial players universities and rtos and many smes can be summarized under the title heterogenous integration hi which is needed to meet the computing power bandwidth latency and sensing requirements for the next generation cloud and edge computing and applications the hi revolution brings the electronic components and systems ecs into a new domain which combines traditional silicon wafers integrated circuit ic inp based high speed electronics and si and inp photonics devices and interconnectthe hiconnects ambition is to demonstrate through hi development a leap in computing and networking reliability and performances across the full vertical and horizontal ecs value chain ie essential capabilities and key applications in a sustainable way in addition hiconnects will focus on the development of next generation design algorithms equipment hwsw systems and systems of systems sos
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unique noninvasive pacemapping system to identify subjects at risk of arrhythmic sudden death
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sudden sudden cardiac death scd is a common cause of adult mortality in western countries accounting in europe for about 350 000 cases annually most scds are caused by ventricular arrhythmias generated from an arrhythmogenic substrate present within the heart paradoxically despite the existence of efficient preventive therapies the sole available predictor of scd is a measure of cardiac contractility an indirect metric which applies only to a subset of patients at present most patients at risk cannot be identified preemptively to prevent sudden death my aim is to develop a novel noninvasive bodysurface mapping and pacing system which will allow detection of cardiac signals related directly to the substrate responsible for lethal arrhythmias for efficient scd prediction the unique approach proposed to achieve this objective will consist in 1 combining electrocardiographic mapping and ultrasonic pacing technologies during cardiac signal acquisition from a highdensity array of body surface electrodes 2 characterizing microscale temporal spectral and spatial features of substrate signals at baseline and during pacing to unmask hidden signals 3 establishing critical signal features specific of arrhythmogenic substrates using multiparametric signal analysis on the body surface based on unique electrophysiological data from explanted human hearts and from scd survivors 4 developing risk prediction scores from wellphenotyped groups of patients monitored by implanted devices this project will constitute a new paradigm in clinical cardiac investigations and allow a major breakthrough in the prevention of premature arrhythmic deaths in the world the capability of detecting and influencing cardiac electrical signals will also dramatically impact the management of populations suffering from other cardiac pathologies enabling earlier diagnosis of heart disease and better guidance to drug interventional or preventive therapies
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ending covid 19 variants of concern through cohort studies endvoc
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the endvoc consortium will support the european and global response to the covid19 pandemic and variants of concern voc through well characterised cohorts and linked with existing european and international initiatives endvoc consists of 19 partners in europe uk spain italy germany netherlands norway italy south america brazil and peru africa mozambique south africa nigeria and 13 anticov african countries middle east palestine and asia india pakistan philippines with a focus on countries affected by vocs and vois we will elucidate the global circulation of the current and emerging sarscov2 vocs and their characteristics including transmissibility pathogenicity and propensity to cause reinfection to support best control strategies and the development of diagnostics evaluate the impact of vocs on the effectiveness of different vaccines and vaccination strategies and assess the implications of vocs on the choice of optimal treatment options endvoc will also investigate how vocs alter longterm postinfection sequelae and where new vocs emerge within hosts using our clinical cohorts we will inform future preparedness and response working closely with international and national public health organisations and existing cohort consortia specific beyond stateoftheart components of endvoc include the use of novel phylogenetic prediction tools and mathematical modelling generation of powerful cohorts through sentinel surveillance in low and middle income settings and cohorts of travellers to increase our global reach use of novel predictive modelling of clinical outcomes by voc and comorbiditytreatment and evaluation of differences in natural and vaccine immunity by voc antiviral screening models within cohorts and an artificial intelligence driven tool for the prediction of long covid
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stem and equality diversity and inclusion an open dialogue for research enhancement in portugal
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the step project aims to enhance the scientific capacity and innovation of the consortium partners with a principal focus on the instituto politcnico de bragana ipb portugal and to raise its research profile in the field of science technology engineering and maths stem throughout the crossfertilisation with the social sciences and humanities in particular by introducing in the stem domain the equality diversity and inclusion edi principles that have considerable potential in terms of solving the global challenges for wellbeing and the quality of life the 4 internationally researchintensive leading partners in the project will accompany and guide ipb resources and competencies will be shared and advanced across strategic plans for improving and empowering the ipbs capacitybuilding focus areasthe activities targeting the researchers and administrative and managerial staff will strengthen the scientific excellence innovation capacity nonacademiaacademia collaboration and skills for research communication and societal acceptance social sciences and humanities ssh involvement in the stem areaactivities for researchers will include mobility rounds master classes training industry and ssh mentoring attendance at conferences and workshops this project will lead to an increased number of highimpact articles research grants eu projects service contracts to the international and nonacademic sectors respectful of the edi principles new research topics and widescale impactthe twinning programme will gradually shift focus from research to innovationdriven implementation of the promising research outcomesaltogether the eufunded step project will help the ipb become a regional actor for edistem innovation studies
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snetp strengthening to consolidate collaboration within and beyond the nuclear sector
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snetp is an european technology platform founded in 2007 as a stakeholder forum recognised by the european commission to act as a key actor in driving innovation knowledge transfer and european competitiveness its main role is develop research and innovation agendas and roadmaps for action at eu and national level to be supported by both private and public funding it mobilises various stakeholders to deliver on agreed priorities and share information across the eu snetps is focused on nuclear fission technologies but it also fosters networking opportunities and international cooperation in order to address crosssectorial challengessnetp has a mature structure reflecting these three strategic themes in its three pillars nugenia esnii and nc2i which have wellestablished programs and governance thanks to dedicated ec funded projects for succeeding in their missionsthe aim of snetpforward project is to help the association consolidating its structure strengthening its position in the setplan and among the european etips enhancing its ability to interact with the european and international associations and organisation and last but not least to be engaged in the innovation world by boosting the innovation capacities of its members
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intelligent system for improved efficiency and effectiveness intelligent system for improved efficiency and effectiveness of the customs control of passenger baggage from international flight arrivals
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the bagintel project will provide robust ai based information utilization and decision support tools within the context of advanced detection systems to support customs for increased effectiveness and efficiency of the customs control of air traveller baggage in inland border airports while minimizing the human customs resources needed this aim addresses the challenge of maintaining effective and efficient customs control of passenger baggage in the situation of the substantial growth of the volume of air travellers arriving in inland border airports with the limited human customs resources available for this aim the project will develop an integrated system solution comprising 1 new ai powered functionality for enhanced detection of contraband in xray scanning of luggage 2 ai camera based endtoend reidentification of luggage 3 digital twin for system visualisation and performance optimization for the operational context of an airport 4 use case for test demonstration and evaluation in 3 european airports a small a medium sized and a big airport and 5 wide dissemination and elaboration of easytouse training material for end users for the customs bagintel solution aims to increase the successful detection of contraband in luggage by at least 20 demonstrate the possibility and utility in automatically to derive risk indicators from external data such as the advanced passenger information demonstrate the effectivity of ai camera based reidentification of luggage when the traveller carries it into the customs space at the exit of the carousel area increase the fluidity of passenger flow and control by at least 20 decrease the customs personal resources mobilisation by at least 20 derive data useful in flights risk assessment derive data useful in flights risk assessment demonstrate the autolearning capacity of this smart risk engine
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sustainable solid state sodium batteries
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the liion battery developed in the last 30 years is a very successful technology however it now faces the challenge of powering the emobility revolution requiring a large increase of raw resources availability at this point in history given the roadmap of the european green deal and the need to reduce co2 emissions such a scale up should be seen as a unique opportunity to eliminate unsustainable elements from the batteries yet the liion battery relies on a series of elements that are critical most importantly li co and natural graphite moreover the safety of liion batteries is often in question and their energy content still needs to increase to satisfy the demand for extended driving ranges in this context 4sbatt aims to develop a solidstate battery based on na rather than li representing the best solution in terms of four key parameters sustainability energy density specific and volumetric readiness of adoption ie compatibility with existing liion production lines and safety to achieve such a challenging goal 4sbatt will operate at the crosssection between inorganic chemistry materials science and engineering my team and i will develop a combined computational and experimental approach based on density functional theory and in situ xray diffraction during synthesis that will allow us to explore large amounts of temperaturedependent multicomponent phase diagrams for various classes of materials thereby we will design and prepare novel nabased inorganic compounds for positive electrodes solid electrolytes and negative electrodes then the physical properties of materials and composite electrodes will be characterized to understand improve and engineer their performances finally we will assemble solidstate batteries based on na and sustainable elements such as fe mn and si intrinsically safe due to the nonflammable solid electrolyte and targeting record energy densities of 300 whkg and 750 whl at the cell level
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reuse of excavated soil in 3d printing of sustainable earthbased mixtures for low energy buildings
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modern construction materials are energyintensive and therefore the construction industry can reduce emissions by developing alternate building materials and adopting innovative construction technologies there is an upsurge of interest in earth building technologies but there are associated limitations such as labour cost and construction time on the other hand the construction and demolition of infrastructure produce a surplus of excavated soils that ends up at landfills in this scenario processing these soil wastes locally and integrating them in buildings as earthbased construction materials using 3d printing technology is an ideal solution therefore the project assesses the technical feasibility of reusing the excavated soil for producing earthbased composites with sustainable additive combinations for enabling 3d printing an industrial byproduct such as ground granulated blastfurnace slag ggbs is proposed as an additive with other inorganic admixtures in trace quantities for treating the soil the rheological parameters the timedependent green strength development characteristics and the longterm compressive strength characteristics of the soil treated with additives will be studied the microstructure of the hardened earth mixes will be used for explaining their mechanical performance the project will deliver promising earth mix combinations that are environmentally friendly printable and made from byproducts resources and excavation soil wastes the outcomes of the project will be instrumental in delivering the decarbonization goals of the construction industry this project is supported by the excellent research environment provided by the host dr perrot at ubs and prof habert at eth zürich with stateoftheart facilities for research development testing and training this project offers unique scientific opportunities that enable the candidate to return to mainstream research and excel in future career perspectives
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neuronal basis of group cooperation and social ties in monkeys and humans
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the negative impact on societys mental health by social distancing during the current covid19 pandemic highlights the importance of social interactions in maintaining a healthy life reputation cooperation and an individuals social ties play a crucial role in social interactions my proposal will examine the interdependence and neural correlates of these psychological processes i hypothesize that a social ties strength influences cooperative behavior similarly cooperative behavior fosters social ties further i hypothesize that the interplay of neuronal activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex dmpfc and insular cortex underpins these processes my recent studies of human and nonhuman primate dmpfc showed its involvement in encoding social processes yet its role in cooperation and social tie formation is unclear to test these hypotheses we will first characterize the neuronal representations underlying group cooperation second we will identify the neuronal mechanisms underlying fundamental behavioral processes in forming and maintaining social ties during naturalistic interactions in monkeys third we will compare in a new world monkey and humans the association between group cooperation and social ties formation and maintenance this new line of investigation will shed light on how elementary social computations during group interactions such as social dilemmas are computed at the singleneuronal and population levels within the primate brain overall this proposal will allow us to study social interactions in a way that has never been done before and will lay the foundation of future work in my independent laboratory by using an innovative approach this project aims to identify the brains mechanisms underlying the formation of nonkin and nonreproductive alliances the information gleaned from this work will lay the groundwork for a comprehensive behavioral and neuronal mechanistic understanding of social ties
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promoting robust systems biology on patients and experimental models with obesitydriven liver cancer
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in obesity pathological expansion of adipocytes leads to increased adipose tissue macrophage atm amounts and adipocyte death adipocyte death in turn is linked to ectopic lipid spillover and metabolically triggered inflammation which is a risk factor for diseases such as cancer particularly hepatocellular carcinoma hcc that is linked to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis nash hepatic fat accumulation leads to chronic hepatocyte metabolic and oxidative stress resulting in cell damage and death although oxidative damage microbiome dysbiosis mitochondrial dysfunction sterile inflammation are important in promoting nash and fibrosis and cirrhosis are crucial for hcc development the exact triggers remain unknown in hcc tumor cells take up nutrients including lipids to support their proliferation and solid tumors in hcc are characterized by enhanced hypoxia and acidosis resulting from a locally modified metabolism beyond malignant cells the tumormicroenvironment tme contains immune cells including tumorassociated macrophages tams and dendritic cells tams are pro tumorigenic sabotaging antitumor immunity through various mechanisms notably tams tumoursuppressive phenotype is directly linked to their lipid loading and disrupting lipid formation in tams attenuates tumor growth further in the tme dendritic cells are triglyceride laden which contributes to immunosuppression by impairing their ability to present antigen despite advancements a systems approach to understand the exact metabolites and lipid species in obesity driven hcc remains a challenge moreover which metabolites are adipocytederived or locally produced within the liver remains unclear here using systems biology coupled to nash and nash driven hcc animal models as well as patient cohorts spanning the nafld nash and hcc spectrum we aim to identify which factors produced by adipose and the liver regulate obesity driven hcc and contribute to immunosuppression
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towards democratic landscape observation through geoinformatics and public participation
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landscape is a key element of individual and social wellbeing although its protection management and planning is acknowledged by the european landscape convention of the council of europe since 2000 not much has been done for this treatys comprehensive implementation topio aims to give people an active role in decisionmaking on landscape by means of citizen science geoinformatics earth observation and gis artificial intelligence and public participation to promote the areas sustainable development topio will position the landscape as a key concept in addressing broader challenges such as the faro convention plan aarhus convention un sustainable development goals the eu green deal etc it will provide innovative international interdisciplinary and intersectoral training for the researchers of topio partners based on training activities and mobility actions in a range of different disciplines achieve advanced innovation and capacity building through developing a research and training network that will focus its activities on developing effectively integrating and increasing utilization of existing and emerging landscape monitoring techniques reinforce the sociocultural and environmental dimensions of the landscape and its role in defining operative and integrative frameworks supporting sustainable development at local and regional levels through the application of landscape character assessment methodologies in seven european countries exchange information on landscape policies and peoples experience concerning protection management and planning public participation and implementation at different scales and levelstopio will integrate and synthesize project findings suitable for awareness raising readily communicable to a wide audience and relevant for policy negotiations furthermore the project will maintain a dialogue with relevant stakeholders and will provide recommendations for policy makers
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intelligent twinning of wireless networks for 6g
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new emerging applications demand performance requirements that exceed the capabilities of 5g networks requiring a rapid evolution towards 6g networks 6g is expected to offer data rates of the order of tbps time responses of the order of submilliseconds and localization accuracies of the order of subcentimeter while meeting united nations sustainable development goals this calls for the deployment of paradigm shifting technologies and design methods and the use of new frequency bands including the deployment of reconfigurable metamaterial transceivers the integration of communication and sensing functionalities and the migration towards the subterahertz spectrum this will make 6g an extremely complex system to model and optimize digital twins dts and machine learning ml are two vital technologies to tackle the modeling and optimization complexity of 6g a dt is a virtual replica of the 6g physical network dts are essential to model complex systems in real time providing valuable insights into their behavior and performance as well as for generating enormous amounts of training data ml provides advanced analytics and decisionmaking capabilities enabling 6g communication systems to selfoptimize selfconfigure and selfheal the integration of dts and ml offers a powerful approach for modeling simulating and optimizing 6g communication networks it is expected to lead to the creation of a highly intelligent and dynamic network environment where physical and virtual objects interact seamlessly and where decisions are made and executed in real time twin6g is the firstofitskind staff exchange research and transferofknowledge program whose aim is to build the worlds first openaccess and opensource digital twin emulator to design 6g networks integrating accurate physical models for emerging technologies and physicsbased ml designs for dynamic and realtime network optimization
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validation of novel immunotherapeutic targets against fibrosis in inflammatory bowel diseases
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fibrostenosis is the driving reason for the persistent need in bowel resections in inflammatory bowel diseases ibd current ibd therapies are limited to solely targeting inflammation while these therapies in some but not all cases lead to symptomatic disease remission recurrent flares interspaced with periods of remission will still result in cumulative gut wall remodeling and fibrosis indeed despite these therapeutic strategies to control inflammation fibrostenosis incidence and bowel surgical resection is not declining in ibd patients as no antifibrotic drugs are currently available the aim of this project is to validate fibroblast therapeutic targets for preventing andor treating fibrosis in ibdpatientsamples with an emphasis on c3 andor tyk2stat3 andor nlrp3 in the evolution of intestinal fibrosis the antifibrotic efficacy and mode of action of these novel immunotherapies will be studied preclinically in ibdpatient derived samples and validated in animal models of chronic colitis in parallel we aim to develop and validate a clinical diagnostic and prognostic pathway for fibrosis in ibd patients based on the use of noninvasive crosssectional imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance enterography with elastography and optoacoustic these results together will allow to design a firstinhuman proof of concept randomized trial of immunotherapeutic drugs targeting complement c3 andor tyk2stat3 andor nlrp3 pathways in intestinal fibrostenosis our aim is to obtain patients and regulatory approval for implementation of these novel noninvasive imaging modalities as diagnostic and prognostic tools for fibrotic ibd to allow vital future therapeutic development for intestinal fibrosis by providing better molecular and clinical stratification of ibd patients at risk for fibrosis and by identifying and validating novel targets for antifibrotic therapy we aim to pave the way in preventing and treating this invalidating ibd comorbidity
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molecular mechanisms through which oocytes evade ageing
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female germ cells oocytes have the remarkable ability to survive for long periods of time up to 50 years in humans while retaining the ability to give rise to a new organism we know surprisingly little about the molecular mechanisms through which oocytes alleviate cellular ageing and why such mechanisms eventually fail with advanced age the goal of this research proposal is to reveal both the mechanisms dormant oocytes employ to maintain cellular fitness and how ageing affects these mechanisms combining biochemical perturbations with imaging and stateoftheart omics techniques we have recently discovered that oocyte dormancy involves two mechanisms not reported in any animal cell type before the suppression of mitochondrial complex i and the constitutive activation of mitochondrial unfolded protein response these discoveries point to a set of poorly understood strategies that oocytes use to minimise damage to their cellular components during their long lifespan in this project we focus on three new interlinked directions to reveal mechanisms that dormant oocytes employ to keep a youthful cytoplasm 1 characterise the metabolic adaptations that enable life without mitochondrial complex i 2 study extremely longlived oocyte proteins and their regulation 3 identify and characterise the quality control mechanisms that eventually fail in dormant oocytes to impact fertility we will use oocytes from frogs mice and humans which are complementary in their ease of handling and relevance to human physiology one of the biggest problems developed nations face is latemotherhood and associated fertility problems due to ageing oocytes 25 of female fertility problems are unexplained pointing to a huge gap in our understanding of female reproduction this proposal will help fill this gap by studying longevity mechanisms in dormant oocytes it will further provide insights into the metabolic adaptations of longlived cells female fertility and ageing
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dynamic regulation of photosynthesis in lightacclimated organisms
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cultivation of plants consumes huge resources of water for irrigation and energy for lighting introducing disruptive technologies is key to improve plants and enable their parsimonious cultivationdream overtakes these challenges by gathering an interdisciplinary consortium sharing a same radical vision to measure and exploit the dynamics of photosynthesis regulation under naturallike light conditions for selective sensing monitoring the plant state and enhancing lighting efficiency in controlled environments we develop groundbreaking instruments and acquisition protocols unraveling unprecedented kinetic data from microalgae and plants including tomato as a crop species by using novel periodically modulated or randomly fluctuating illuminations chlorophyll fluorescence and original luminescent nanosensors these data are processed with comprehensive theoretical tools system identification dynamical systems system control machine learning to build a powerful dynamical model which delivers categorizing fingerprints for highly selective sensing and tailored modulated illuminations for enhancing lighting efficiency finally we implement a server with incremental learning from an open source community to extend sensing to organisms and environmental conditions much beyond the ones used in our dream projectdream will expand knowledge on photosynthesis regulation and lead to major achievements categorizing plant states sensing stresses selecting improved plants improving controlled ecosystems equipping lighting with sensing and decreasing its cost and instrument design targeting scientists and many more endusers dream will further improve innovation in key european industries active in the fields of scientific instruments phenotyping and plant production while increasing resource use efficiency so as to improve environmental quality and offer better and safer products to consumers
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modelling of threephase flows with catalytic particles
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this proposal is on modelling of 3 phase gassolidliquid multicomponent flows with catalyst particles which are frequently encountered in industrial applications but have not been tackled fundamentally before due to their complexitydense multiphase flows have been intensively researched because of their scientifically interesting transport phenomena and industrial applications considerable progress has been made for gassolid and gasliquid twophase flows however catalytic multicomponent threephase flows have received relatively little attention despite their importance for the production of clean synthetic fuels base chemicals and many other products multiphase transport phenomena in such systems are poorly understood due to their complexity therefore the design of processes is cumbersome in addition the process operation is often far from optimal in terms of energy and feedstock utilization therefore significant improvements are required to boost the efficiency of threephase systems which demands for a better understanding of the transport fundamentals and complex interplay with chemical reactions and availability of predictive toolsthe main underlying problem is the wide range of length scales suspended catalyst particles have a size of 100200 m whereas the diameter of industrial reactors is 510 meters to tackle this problem a multiscale modeling strategy is required at the finest scale detailed models take into account the interaction between the phases these interactions are condensed in closure laws for mass momentum and heat exchange that feed socalled eulerlagrange models which can then be used to compute the flow structures on a much larger industrial scale the key innovative aspect of this proposal is the integrated approach including incorporation of multicomponent chemical transformations and the validation on basis of onetoone comparison of the of the computational results with experiments
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aligning and mutualizing nonprofit open access publishing services internationally almasi
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the objective of almasi is to provide the research community with an aligned nonprofit highquality and sustainable scholarly communication ecosystem across three world regions africa europe and latin america this will enable scholarly communities to take full responsibility for innovative valid reliable and accessible publishing services and solutions that do not charge fees to readers or authors commonly known as diamond open access this aligned nonprofit publishing ecosystem will take into account specific needs across the diversity of disciplines global regions and languages the project will achieve this goal by concentrating on measures that will harmonise and strengthen existing nonprofit publishing services and solutions almasi will establish a framework for knowledge transfer coordination and alignment of nontechnological publishing skills services and solutions the project will focus on 1 mapping nonprofit publishing services and solutions across the 3 regions 2 aligned quality support instruments for publishing services 3 shared training materials and curricula for publishing services journal editors and publishing staff and 4 longterm financial sustainability and os policies for scholarly publishing the project will be carried out in the context of the nascent global diamond federation which is supported by unesco
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cacheaided folding for reducing vod loads in networks
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communicating videoondemand vod over various networks is very costly vod drives up the costs for purchasing bandwidth and overprovisioning infrastructures as well as the costs to content providers netflix amazon etc that must pay large fees to network operators to deliver content to their clients to reduce the massive vod fees networks employ caches our findings in our erc project duality reveal a new method of exploiting caches that boosts the performance of various networks we wish to explore the practical ramifications of these findings in practical networks this project will explore the algorithmic and testing work needed to render these ideas practical
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empowering personalized therapeutics advancing 3dnano dld arrays and raman microbiochips for precision isolation segmentation and molecular profiling of exosomal trop2 biomarkers in tnbc
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the exodiagai project is at the forefront of addressing a critical challenge in modern healthcareearly diagnosis and effective management of breast cancer particularly the aggressive and elusive triplenegative breast cancer tnbc subtype tnbc lacks welldefined molecular targets hindering treatment options exosomes a subset of extracellular vesicles with unique functions hold great promise as diagnostic and prognostic markers for various diseases including cancer these tiny vesicles are abundant in biological fluids but have been underutilized due to the absence of a costeffective isolation protocol our primary goal is to develop a microfluidic device integrating nanolateral displacement arrays with a raman biochip to identify exosome biomarkers specific to tnbc and translate this knowledge into clinical practice this projects main objectives encompass creating the microfluidic device assessing its surfaceenhanced raman spectroscopy sers capabilities conducting raman fingerprinting of exosomes from in vitro cell cultures and patient samples and employing chemometric analysis to discriminate biomarkers the distinctive raman fingerprinting associated with exosomes serves as a promising prognostic and diagnostic marker by introducing 3d printing sers technology we aim to enable realtime monitoring shedding light on exosome structural integrity this interdisciplinary project combines organic inorganic nano computational spectroscopic and molecular biology techniques culminating in innovative device fabrication ultimately the exodiagai project holds the potential to revolutionize early breast cancer diagnosis through exosomal biomarkers aligning with the eus sustainable development strategy for advanced diagnostic platforms and fostering the career of a promising researcher this endeavor marks a pivotal step towards enhancing the detection and management of tnbc addressing a pressing healthcare need
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piezomagnetic ferrites for selfbiased nonreciprocal millimeter wave devices
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the relentless demand to increase data rates traffic and connected devices in our mobile communications has prompted a paradigm shift in wireless technology 5g and the forthcoming 6g will use mmwaves and miniaturized antenna systems that need to be lowcost and energetically efficient an unresolved challenge of this transition is the miniaturization of nonreciprocal devices above 100 ghz pi4norm envisions an onchip integration of miniaturized selfbiased nonreciprocal magnetic components for the forecasted 6g evolution those passive devices are significant components fulfilling three critical functions within rf systems decoupling amplifiers protecting the systems against mismatched impedances or electromagnetic aggression and enabling the fullduplex operation of antennas pi4norm aims to fill the gap between materials science and mmwave engineering to develop subthz ultracompact selfbiased nonreciprocal elements the success of pi4norm could open an expansive innovation roadmap toward more capable rf systems and radar for this reason a strategic transfer strategy is also implemented in pi4norm
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regulating rnapii levels gaining insight into the translation assembly and transport of rnapii subunits
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cellular diversity in eukaryotic organisms is obtained through differential regulation of transcription which is therefore a heavily studied step in gene expression proteincoding genes are transcribed by rna polymerase ii rnapii an enzyme consisting of twelve subunits recently work from my host lab the svejstrup lab has suggested that depleting the number of fully assembled rnapii molecules in the cell through degradation of its main catalytic subunit rpb1 is crucial for achieving transcription recovery after dna damage this finding underscores the importance of understanding how rnapii levels are regulated therefore in this proposal i aim to gain insight into the mechanisms influencing rnapii abundance by studying rpb1 mrna and protein levels rnapii assembly and rnapii transport in human cells specifically i will leverage my background in rna biology and bioinformatics analysis to identify rnabinding proteins interacting with the 3utr of rpb1 and study their role in regulating rpb1 mrna turnover and translation efficiency moreover using stateoftheart selective ribosomal profiling techniques i will determine whether rnapii is assembled cotranslationally as was recently proposed to be the mechanism of assembly for most multisubunit complexes in eukaryotes finally i will perform a crisprcas9 screen to identify novel factors that mediate rnapii nuclear import together this proposal will elucidate the biogenesis of rnapii which is crucial for a better understanding of transcription regulation the proposed experiments will enhance my postdoctoral training by broadening my conceptual and technical skills and will provide data and tools to start my own laboratory in the future ultimately these findings might also have therapeutic implications as rnapii is one of the targets being investigated for cancer treatments
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catholic inculturation of the uniate church basilian hagiography of the 17th and 18th centuries
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in early modern period the longlived rift between catholicism and orthodoxy was overbridged by the union of brest 1596 it established the uniate church in the region reaching from lithuania through poland and belarus to ukraine and it was the basis for the development of local monastic structures the basilians while the research on uniate and basilian literacy significantly underrepresented in an international discourse on posttridentine christianity and its culture is interested mostly in basilian book and printing history basincult pursues for the first time a detailed and qualitative analysis of the writings about the saints and candidates to sanctity hagiography who had a programmatic and symbolic meaning in a wide spectrum of literary forms created and circulated in the 17th and 18th centuries it is argued that the uniates and basilians used hagiographic sources not only to adapt uniate church to the framework of the catholic culture but especially to include their issues in the mainstream of catholic discourse focusing on the instructive examples of saint figures eg josaphat kuntsevych works eg menologium bazyliaskie and hagiographers who served also as orders officials ignacy kulczyski the project demonstrates the strategies of such a mutual adaption process regarded as inculturation which had a vast impact on shaping the confessional and cultural landscape of todays centraleastern europe the project will be affiliated at vilnius university in an exceptional environment of the specialists in uniate history and basilian monasticism
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towards constraining the pillars of our cosmological model using combined probes
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despite the observational successes of the lambda cold dark matter cdm cosmological model a number of its key ingredients remain unknown imminent surveys promise to yield unprecedented constraints on these components thus making precision tests of cdm a firsttime realityin pico my team and i will focus on two fundamental questions in modern physics that can only be answered through cosmological observations what mechanism gave rise to the primordial fluctuations seeding all the structures seen in the universe today what is the cause for the universes latetime accelerated expansion we will address these by developing novel analysis techniques built on the complementarity of cosmological probes and advanced statistical methods these are designed to harness the rich information contained in nongaussian smallscale features of cosmic fields while enabling precise constraints on cdm robust to systematic uncertainties dominating highprecision data focusing on two of the most powerful probes of the next decade galaxy clustering and galaxy clusters we will constrain the mechanisms driving the accelerated expansion through the first joint simulationbased inference analysis of galaxy clusters selected through the cosmic microwave background cmb and weak lensing in addition we will derive constraints on primordial fluctuations in a combined analysis of galaxy clustering and cmb lensing angular two and threepoint statistics capitalizing on my past work we will develop these methods using simulations and current data before applying them to galaxy data from the rubin observatory legacy survey of space and time and cmb data from the simons observatory two upcoming highprecision experiments i am deeply involved in pico will deliver tight constraints on the key ingredients of cdm and will thus contribute to understanding if this model provides a complete description of our universe or if it is time for a paradigm shift in cosmology
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development of biocatalytic strategies for the synthesis of chiral thiols and thioethers
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active pharmaceutical ingredients apis are crucial for public health however their synthesis is often challenging due to the high complexity of modern drug molecules in particular apis need to have welldefined chirality as opposite enantiomers can have dramatically different biological effects yet the synthesis of chiral centres is often challenging and toxic metals as well as harsh reaction conditions are often required enzymes on the other hand can often achieve unmatched enantioselectivities while also avoiding such environmentally unfavourable conditions while several biocatalytic strategies for the synthesis of chiral alcohols and amines have been developed few such strategies exist for the synthesis of chiral thiols and thioethers despite 20 of all apis containing sulfur in the project described herein i will be developing biocatalytic approaches for the synthesis of thiols and thioethers by exploring promiscuous activities of classes of enzymes widely used in industry this will expand the tools available for their synthesis and open up new routes and new chemical space for the synthesis of apis and improve the sustainability while working with dr caroline paul in the biocatalysis group at tu delft i will receive training in handling nicotinamide and flavindependent oxidoreductase enzymes as well as specialist computational tools for enzyme engineering while providing my experience in highthroughput screening and chemical synthesis i will have the opportunity to cosupervise bachelor master and phd students and attend several key conferences this will allow me to further develop the necessary scientific and teaching skills that are required for leading my own research group
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a general approach for the design of covalent protein proximity inducers
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chemical biology has made remarkable strides over recent decades producing potent and selective inhibitors for many proteins including essential drug targets despite these achievements however inhibition has been the primary mode of perturbation gpcrs notwithstanding whereas many biological processes are controlled through a rich spectrum of biochemical perturbations what if a small molecule could activate an enzyme install or remove a posttranslational modification ptm or control its oligomeric statethe overarching goal of this proposal is to dramatically increase the scope and breadth of perturbations and ptms one can induce in cells using small molecules accomplishing this will have tremendous impact on the ability to investigate numerous cellular processes and holds massive therapeutic potentialto achieve this goal we will build on our recently developed covalent liganddirected release coldr chemistry which allows totag proteins covalently while preserving their function our research will develop1 a general method to create coldrbased probes against a panel of targets that would enable us to harness their activity forselective perturbation of new nonendogenous substrates2 homodimeric coldr probes to induce selective dimerization of targets this will allow us to selectively activate targets such askinases in cells we will also design protein polymerizers by tethering obligatory homodimers3 chimeric proximity inducers that would selectively modify new targets in vitro and in cellsour groups experience in covalent chemical biology proteolysistargeting chimeras and the development of the coldr platformmakes us uniquely positioned to create the next generation of covalent proximity inducers
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support utilisation of sustainable and tailored innovative methods for hta
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with everincreasing complexity of novel health technologies health technology assessment hta methodologies have been evolving rapidly however there is now a lack of harmonization on the methodological needs of hta bodies against the varied methodologies and tools there is a need for a solution that allows for continuous dialogue between hta bodies and academia a solid unified base for implementation of fitforpurpose methodologies and longterm upskilling on hta expertise sustainhta aims to upskill the paneuropean hta body workforce and harmonise hta expertise via a robust education and training framework that ensures continuous uptake of novel needbased hta methodologies aligned to the methodological developments as part of the new eu hta regulation the project will set up a mechanism for dialogues and interaction between hta bodies and academia to regularly assess htabodies needs in parallel with a methods observatory that ensures uptodate knowledge of latest hta methods prioritized methods will be piloted within hta bodies and after endorsement implementation will be supported by a harmonized training and education framework that will be established to upskill the hta experts a longterm dissemination and communication structure among all stakeholders will be established to guarantee a feedback loop between hta needs methods assessment and associated training needs via the collaboration of 5 universities 7 hta bodies 2 smes and one nonprofit organization sustainhta brings together extensive experience in coordinating previous european funded htarelated projects including htx ehden comed and getreeal with this sustainhta has the background for establishing sustainable business models that ensures continuity of project outcomes and activities in years beyond the project sustainhta will support european leadership in the hta field reach hta bodies across at least 15 european countries with hundreds of people upskilled
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toward perovskitebased electrically pumped laser via facile facet engineering
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beyound traditional iiiv laser diodes solutionprocessable solidstate lasing spssl has been in spotlight due to promising versatility and simplified fabrication for integration into various platforms among the classes of optical gain media organic materials colloidal quantum dots cqds and perovskites have been extensively explored while organic materials have shown promise challenges remain in addressing triplet and polaron losses cqds on the other hand have demonstrated significant progress in suppressing undesirable loss mechanisms perovskites a rising material present distinct advantages including ease of formation through roomtemperature processes and remarkable optical properties low threshold of ase and continuous wave lasinghowever two primary challenges face perovskite implementation firstly there is a notable gap in fundamental studies specifically in understanding the correlation between auger recombination and optical properties secondly the softionic nature of perovskites poses a challenge for surface shell modification necessitating the development of suitable treatment methodsthe research aims to achieve electrically pumped amplified spontaneous emission through a comprehensive study of perovskites and the introduction of a novel modification strategy the project encompasses three objectives understanding the correlation between compositions and ase thresholds maximizing the optical properties of perovskite nanocrystals pncs through surface etching and facet reconstruction and implementing pncs into leds with a focus on modulating joule heating and introducing distributed bragg reflectorsoverall this research endeavors achieve worlds first electrically pumped ase using perovskite offering a promising avenue towards efficient costeffective and widely applicable laser diode technology
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fundamental study of co2 storage through microbially enhanced carbon mineralization co2forearm
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largescale implementation of geological carbon sequestration is considered as a key strategy to limit anthropogenic warming to 15 2 c as set out in the paris agreement i am interested in a viable alternative represented by injecting co2 into reactive rock formations eg basalts to facilitate rapid carbon mineralization and therefore increase storage security my particular interest lies in microbially enhanced carbon mineralization biological catalysts are utilized to alter reaction rates and further enhance carbon mineralizationthe overarching aim of this projects research is to provide the fundamental understanding and simulation technology required to assess the largescale deployment of co2 storage through microbially enhanced carbon mineralization and hence contribute to climate change mitigationthe project brings together engineers biologists and environmental scientists from spain and italy to undertake a comprehensive research programme comprising combined experimental computational and theoretical investigationsi will derive models both at the conceptual and the numerical level necessary to understand the dominant processes and develop a suitable simulation framework the computational studies will employ various numerical techniques combining multiscale modelling and conventional cfd to investigate the flow physics and co2rockbiomass interactions at subpore levelscomplementary experiments on flow and mineralbiomassfluid interactions will be conducted at polimi aiming at characterizing biofilm growth in porous microstructures using microfluidic devices that can capture spatial flow heterogeneities and chemical gradients at the porescalethe ultimate aim of the investigations is to use the new experimental and computational data to produce correlationsrelationships for use with large scale simulations as well as developing further fundamental understanding of phenomena of co2biomass reactive flow in porous media
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isotopically labelling of cell surface glycans to illuminate infectious processes at atomic resolution
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every human cell is covered by a dense coat of glycans sugars carbohydrates sugars are the first molecules that viruses encounter when they approach host cells many viruses encode lectins to adhere to the outer glycan layer and start infection in this scenario glycoscience holds a tremendous potential for combating infections elucidating the molecular basis of infection is essential but far from trivial the complexity of the chemistry of glycans including synthesis structure conformation and dynamics hampers the full knowledge of sugarmediated recognition events and the development of glycanbased drugssurfing the current information on glycanlectin interactions we stumble in contradictory outcomes pointing out the tremendous difficulty of translating in vitro results to the in vivo environment which limits the translation from the bench to clinicsi propose an unprecedented strategy to untangle the key glycans molecular interaction features breaking the limits in answering fundamental questions related to sugar structure presentation dynamics and eventually function i will chemically remodel the glycans directly on the cell surface using nmr active probes to decode their roles at atomic resolution while preserving their presentation in a neartoinvivo environmenti am in a favoured position to accomplish this project due to my experience in nmr synthesis and mammalian cells manipulation i will combine chemical biology tools novel chemical and enzymatic synthesis and nmrbased methods from chemistry to biology and beyondglyco13cell will gap down the observed differences between in vitro and in vivo results paving the way for develop novel glycanbased tools for predicting diagnosing and treating infectious diseases now its time the increasing understanding of infection biology with the atomic precision of modern chemical tools will make glycomics run in parallel with genomics proteoms towards personalized medicine
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a metagenomicbased precisionmedicine tool for personalized diagnosis prognosis and treatment of oral diseases
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about 20m dental implants are performed globally per year implant market valued at 36b in 2020 is growing at a cagr of 11 unfortunately microbiomebiofilmassociated diseases can affect dental implants compromising oral and systemic health more than 50 of implant patients develop mucositis an inflammation of the soft tissues which may lead to periimplantitis a severe infection affecting soft and hard tissues that can lead to implant loss currently there are no reliable tools to assess disease severity and risk of disease progression and the dentist can only prescribe empirical therapies without knowing the composition of the triggering periimplant plaque microbiome at prebiomics we developed a precisionmedicine test that characterises the microbial composition of the plaque biofilm collected in the area surrounding the implant in 10 years of research we have shown that specific bacterias presence is key to predicting the infections severity and progression prebiomicspmt will develop a test using metagenomics and an ai algorithm which will enable the implementation of monitoring and diagnosis and provide treatment recommendations for each patient based on the bacterial composition of their plaque microbiome based on the results of the erc pocs pb3p this eictransition project aims at automating the workflow using a robotic solution to reduce the costs of the service and speed up the results building an extensive database that will be used to create an antibiotic resistance panel and further develop our decision support system dss for dentists finally conducting a validation study to prove the predictive power of our dss alongside the technical development we will define the ipr management plan to protect the knowledge we continuously generate study indepth the dental implants market and the needs and expectations of our customers and investors and elaborate a robust business plan to allow proper exploitation of our product
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motion control systems of multiactuated ground vehicles
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moco is based on an intensive staff exchange to promote joint research and training between 14 universities and industrial companies from 8 european countries japan the republic of korea mexico and south africa the proposal innovates the methods of motion control and creates a comprehensive framework for the design identification and validation of systems for the domain of multiactuated vehicles with a focus on driving and functional safety energy efficiency driving performance and ride comfort moco is dedicated to improving the robust operation of automated and electric vehicles under various driving conditions including uncertain road surfaces severe conditions and terrains as well as scenarios characterised by limited information and communication infrastructures research and innovation activities will focus on the followingi development of sophisticated tools for estimating parameter variations and identifying system characteristics using hybrid modelbased and datadriven methodsii design of advanced vehicle motion control systems considering automated driving functions multi actuated configurations and different electric powertrain topologies using robust and predictive approachesiii validation and verification of realtime software and hardwarebased demonstrators using stateoftheart methodsiv facilitate practical recommendations based on the moco results for researchers oems and suppliers working on automotive and interdisciplinary applicationsv professional development of participating research and engineering staffvi knowledge transfer and promotion of the exchange of expertise between the partnersin addition to research and training the project will focus on relevant networking dissemination and exploitation initiatives to maximise its impact moco will cultivate the necessary competences and skills that are essential to foster successful innovation in the emerging mobility domains
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automata dynamics and actions
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this project lies at the nexus of complex and symbolic dynamics group theory decision problems and computation it aims to solve major problems in each of these fields by means of automatic actions and relationsfinite state automata pervasive in theoretical computer science will serve to define selfsimilar mathematical objects and produce efficient algorithms to manipulate them i will explore a novel notion of automatically acting group encompassing the previously unrelated notions of automatic groups automata groups and substitutive shiftsgeometric group theory propounds the vision of groups as geometric objects a basic notion is volume growth and milnors still open gap problem asks for its possible range in this proposal i will give candidates of groups with very slow superpolynomial growth defined by their automatic action on dynamical systems and a proof strategya celebrated open problem by gromov asks whether all groups are sofic this property has too many valuable consequences to always be true yet there is no known nonexample i will present a strategy of producing nonsofic groups closely associated to automatarational maps on the riemann sphere provide a rich supply of dynamical systems a fundamental goal is to give a combinatorial description of the dynamics across families of maps constructing models of parameter space i will encode the maps via automatic actions and study relations between automata to produce such models i aim to achieve a full topological description including the longopen connectedness problem of milnors slices of quadratic mapsthis project will tackle these fundamental questions from group theory and dynamics and develop presently unexplored interactions between them through a unified use of automata it will prove decidability of certain algorithmic problems such as dehns and tarskis and construct efficient tools to further our exploration of these mathematical universes
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center for digital text scholarship
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rapidly expanding developments in computational methods and capacity in recent decades have significantly and sustainably changed the opportunities that humanities disciplines have at their disposal to carry out effective investigations using textbased data this subfield of digital humanities research is particularly relevant for linguistics literary scholarship folkloristics and history and yet relevant modern methodologies for computational approaches to processing textual data for humanities research are often practiced and taught in a fragmented individualistic way the very recent arrival of generative ai and llms promises even more opportunities but these uncharted waters are still waiting for exploration and potential exploitation in the humanities especially concerning smaller lesssupported european languages this erachair project will permanently improve this landscape in europe by creating the center for digital text scholarship digits as an interdisciplinary pocket of excellence at the university of tartu in estonia for applying cuttingedge computational methods in textbased humanities research at the european periphery prof maciej eder a renowned expert in expert in computerassisted text analysis will lead digits and its international interdisciplinary team in carrying out worldclass humanities research using established and novel methods in neural networks and data analyses for exploring textual data in addition the team will teach the next generation of estonian and other european humanities scholars in these methods at ba ma and phd levels and also consult dh researchers at all levels simultaneously the center will promote the creation and application of llms for estonian as an exemplary smaller european language these activities combined with collaboration with humanities researchers in other institutes and consortia will ensure that utartu becomes synonymous with textbased digital humanities research
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protesting the global air transport industry social movements fighting for the preservation of local communities and the planet
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protestairt is a multiactor and interscalar research project aiming at understanding the growing global and european dissent against the air transport industry before the pandemic air transport was expected to growth at a rate of about 4 per year including both more frequent flyers in developed nations and new markets in the developing world this future demand was paired with new infrastructural projects namely new airports and airport expansions recently several social movements have been campaigning in europe to create awareness about the series of side effects associated to this global industry from aircraft noise to co2 and nonco2 emissions airports have become both the site and objects of diverse forms of dissent as sites of dissent airports have been the place where activists congregate and exert their democratic rights through claimmaking oftentimes engaging in radical and performative protest acts as object of dissent the narratives about airports and airlines as spacescompanies of interconnection and development have been challenged by these dissenting citizens proposing alternative readings of airports and airlines as spaces of destruction and overconsumption the protestairt project focuses on selected cases of european activism that target the global air transport industry including collectives such as schipholwatch in the netherlands am boden bleiben in germany extinction rebellion in united kingdom zeroport in spain and the umbrella organization stay grounded which connects action groups from all over the world protestairt will be based on media texts indepth interviews visual documentation of acts of dissent through participant observation analysis of social media data in specific of twitter as political platform and secondary literature produced by airports airlines and social movements alike the project will study the ongoing debate apropos potential solutions for the aviation industry and their limits
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crowdcontrol identifying the mechanism underlying intracellular density homeostasis
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the cytoplasm is filled with an extremely high concentration of macromolecules that is close to the maximal physical limit such a tight packing of macromolecules gives rise to a crowding effect that influences chemical reactions and protein dynamics changes in crowding levels are therefore predicted to have profound consequences on cell function it is therefore not surprising that the overall intracellular concentration of macromolecules is very constant within a cell type but it varies during important physiological transitions such as cell division differentiation and senescence how crowding is regulated is poorly understood but feedback coupling between intracellular density and cell growth has been observed in multiple systems the crowdcontrol project will combine two unbiased screening approaches with targeted genetic manipulations and quantitative live cell imaging to identify the molecular mechanism underlying intracellular density homeostasis specifically we will i identify proteins that can sense intracellular density changes by performing structure sensitive mass spectrometry in cells with different levels of macromolecular crowding ii perform a crisprknockout screen to identify mutations that affect density homeostasis and iii use quantitative live cell microscopy to investigate whether proteins identified in i and ii affect feedback coupling between intracellular density and cell growth a better understanding of intracellular density regulation will allow the development of precise tools to alter crowding and identification of crowding sensitive proteins will give insight into what processes may respond to density changes the results of this project will therefore be key to understanding how cells finely tune their intracellular density levels but in addition they will also lay the basis for understanding how density changes affect cell function during the cell cycle senescence and differentiation
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ecoevolutionary dynamics in plantsoil interactions during land use transition consequences for soil functioning and resilience to drought
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european grasslands have been shaped by millennia of lowintensity management and are unique cultural and biodiversity hotspots providing critical ecosystem services however the area of traditionallymanaged grassland has declined dramatically during the last century with landuse intensification on productive soil and abandonment of unfertile land both causing species loss and deterioration of ecosystem services recent evidence suggests that landuse change also leads to genetic and phenotypic changes in plant populations how populationlevel processes mediate the impact of land use on ecosystem functions and affect adaptive potential to future perturbations is entirely unknown filling this knowledge gap is urgent as grasslands face additional pressure from climate change particularly an increasing frequency of droughts i hypothesise that land use intensification and abandonment lead to evolutionary shifts in plant function away from resource conservation towards fast resource acquisition and low stress tolerance combined with the disruption of coevolved mutualistic plantmicrobial interactions this has cascading effects on essential ecosystem services provided by soils and their resilience to droughtinduced perturbation the hypothesis will be tested using laboratory tests of the mechanisms underlying ecoevolutionary dynamics in plantsoil interactions during landuse change and communitylevel experiments to uncover the consequences of adaptation for soil functioning and resilience to drought i will use the worlds longestrunning fertilization experiment and grassland networks in three european regions representing different histories and contrasting management regimes the project will provide a stepchange in our understanding of the selective pressures imposed on plantsoil systems by human land use and will inform future policies for sustainable land management and maintenance of adaptive potential in the face of climate change
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families and inequality in a flexible world of work
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families often lead timeintensive lives having to balance the demands arising from the workplace and the family with the recent shift towards flexible working enabling employees to decide partly where and when to work the spatial and temporal segregation of employment and family has been substantially reconfigured greater flexibility is one of the most important labour market transformations of our timeflin creates new knowledge on how contemporary families combine employment and family in the context of flexible working taking a crossnational couplelevel perspective flin will study the implications of flexible working for 1 family time 2 gender equality in unpaid work 3 childbearing and partnership dissolution it will also 4 monitor inequality in flexible working and 5 address the role of contextual factors the project design is longitudinal with a focus on the new normal of flexible working after the covid19 pandemic flin will generate a novel empirical and theoretical understanding of the workfamily interface and its consequences enabling policy developmentbecause flexible working is mainly a privilege of higher status employees its recent rise has the potential to exacerbate the socioeconomic divide if flexible working has predominantly positive consequences eg more childcare time higherstatus families could disproportionally reap the benefits of this new development theoretical frameworks and past research are inconclusive as to whether flexible working leads to a better workfamily balance or more difficulties in managing the workfamily border considering that flexible working is an emerging social challenge for equality clarification is urgently neededthe project combines a detailed country analysis austria france germany italy norway and poland with a comparison across the eu it is based on highquality representative data time use surveys register data and the eu labour force surveys
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deploying circular bioeconomies at regional level with a territorial approach
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europes regional authorities have a crucial role to play as agents of just inclusive and resilient economic development for their territories robin sets out to empower them to fulfil this role with support to coshape their governance structures and models in ways that accelerate the deployment of their circular bioeconomy targets while also promoting social innovation and accounting for different territorial contexts to this end we establish and demonstrate the potential of innovative circular bioeconomy governance structures and models in 5 european regions within ireland germany spain slovakia and greece our journey begins by settingup multiactor regional constellations engaging key quadruple helix stakeholders to cocreate and work alongside novel governance structures wellembedded within existing organisational structures of our regions and mandated to coordinate and execute circular bioeconomy strategies with and for the entire actor ecosystem and to coordinate effectively with the ccricso along the way we provide them with tailored support for enhanced and more inclusive stakeholder engagement as well as a practical toolbox to improve the design operation and monitoring of their governance models in parallel a monitoring and evaluation framework will gauge the performance and impact of our support actions and tools providing quantifiable evidence of their economic social and environmental impact we will use this evidence to engage over 10 additional european regional authorities to test our tools and make a concrete case for their transferability while also offering mutual learning and capacity building opportunities in the process we coordinate our actions with the ccricso and complementary european initiatives to facilitate the dissemination of our results ensuring their longterm sustainability as viable solutions for supporting eu regions in adopting governance models that facilitate the transition to a circular bioeconomy
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higher observational type theory
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recent advancements have enabled proof asistants to formally verify worldclass mathematics the liquid tensor experiment the four colour theorem and the odd order theorem were formalised computer checked arguments are important for mathematicians who want to be certain their reasoning is sound and for computer scientists to prevent bugs in safety critical software examples are formally verified parts of googles chrome web browser and verified implementations of the c and ml programming languagesat the core of these formalisations lies type theory upon which proof assistants are built type theory is both a functional programming language and a foundation of mathematics recently models of type theory built on higher dimensional spaces emerged where elements of a type are points in the space and elements of an equality type are paths in the space based one these type theory was extended to homotopy type theory hott featuring the principle that isomorphic types are equal this moves formalisation close to actual mathematical practice where isomorphic structures are being treated as the samewhile hott is successful among academics it hasnt been widely adopted this is because type theories implementing hott rely on an explicit syntax for higher dimensional geometry which is conceptually difficult and hard to use in practice this creates a substantial barrier for formalisation which is treated as a lowlevel bureaucractic processour project will develop a radically new type theory where homotopical content is emergent rather than builtin the idea is to define the equality type via computation this makes hott explainable and conceptually simple it also improves pragmatic aspects with more computation proofs become less tedious our theory will contribute to a new era in formalisation of mathematics and verification of software where developing proofs in abstract reusable ways becomes standard accelerating progress in both areas
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innovative modelling and assessment capabilities through maas for manufacturing ecosystem resiliency
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dmaast aims to enhance the manufacturing ecosystems resiliency and capability of selfadaptation in response to external events it is achieved through a smart manufacturing platform comprising 4 layers the data layer establishes a foundation for mapping manufacturing ecosystem information using ontologies and decentralized knowledge graphs ensuring a trusted crossorganization realtime data integration next a layer with a twolevel cognitive digital twin is created with the lowlevel dt modelling two use cases manufacturing services production line and the highlevel dt modelling the main stages of usecases sectors value chains the resulting dts will use human expertiseknowledge datadriven algorithms and physical modelling to provide a reliable and robust dt of the manufacturing ecosystem the next layer employs the data and modelling layers information to present a multiobjective distributed decision support system algorithm combining multiobjective techniques and the latest trends in federated deep learning this makes dts actionable models and provides the necessary information to make optimal production decisions the fourth layer focuses on presenting the information in a userfriendly manner with timely scoreboards additionally a dedicated module will assess the productions circularity and sustainability and considering products traceability through the eudpp therefore the sustainability and remanufacturing opportunities of the production process will be improved the project ensures scalability providing information for replicating and trying new manufacturing processes thanks to the manufacturing services digital warehouse while assessing risks and opportunities for improvement dmaast innovations enable the manufacturing ecosystem to adopt the manufacturing as a service concept by smoothly evolving all the technologies from a trl3 to a consolidated trl6 in 2 use cases in key sectors aerospace and electronics
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safetyfans safety and sustainability by design a framework for advanced nanomaterials synthesis
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we synthesized a nanoform of novel functions but is it safe is it sustainablethe supervisors team in isteccnr host synthesizes in their laboratory facilities new nanoforms nf with enhanced functionality their lab is a globally reputable center that over the years have established infrastructure and knowledge in developing novel nanoformulations everchanging interactive nf have a fate hard to track and policy makers with precaution limited nf use however valuable functionalities led to european initiatives to adopt the safety and sustainability by design ssbd concept that ensures safety intervening at the design stage avoiding later use uncertainties but beyond concept roadmaps are yet to be drawn and practices to be triedthe questions above are now addressed to the researcher who during her phd predicted the toxicity of nf based on their physicochemical characteristics using machine learning ml the team will realize a central aspect of the ssbd concept the design development and validation of a framework that predicts safety sustainability and functionality at the synthesis stage of nf based on previous knowledge using ml this framework allows insilico testing impact on ssbd of changes in nf features without conducting the actual resourceconsuming experiments the endeavor is rooted on information digitization built on exploiting the hosts industry and academia network and using its laboratory infrastructure to deploy real cases the project unlocks nf applicability potential proposes a pragmatic methodology on ssbd implementation and increases public confidence towards nanotechnology and ml multidisciplinarity and the hosts extroversion will distinguish the researcher in the growing market of scientific integrators as employees and consultants the acquired experience is also valuable to policy institutions aligning with the eu green deal position on ssbd and the merging of disciplines in a dataconnected world
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novel lioperated potentiometric electrochemical gas sensors
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this action aims to deliver innovative lithium lioperated gas sensor devices the lowpower ie lowtemperature lowcost fastresponse miniaturized gas sensor will monitor gas pollutants based on fast ionconducting libased chemistries originally developed for nextgeneration energy storage systems it remains surprising that despite their high conductivity and stability ligarnet li7la3zr2o12 llzo solid electrolytes were mostly first integrated as largescale ceramics in solidstate batteries with their integration in sensors to replace classic oxygen conductors lagging behind the fast ionconduction characteristics of libased materials unlock the possibilities of costeffective lowpower multisensing arrays with a fast response new sensingelectrode chemistries and an expanded scope of gases the applicant will develop and implement a cheap and scalable ceramic processing concept of a fully libased sprayed sensing device operating at low temperature to assure a transition of research to society this project will contribute to the major driving force behind eus mission finding a lowcarbon energy solution to minimize pollution effect on global health and the environment by providing tools for toxic gas sensing which will a consume less energy and b enable distributed sensing where sensing and power supply start to synergize new opportunities for multifunctional devices based on similar chemistry eg ligarnet to store energy or detect gasses are emerging simply by the choice of electrodes and electrochemistry the synthesis chemical requirements processing and electrochemical characteristics upon gas sensing vital for future sensornose technology and hardware in mobile commercial applications remain unclear and are south to be pioneered through this action
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identifying fingerprints of fragility in complex ecosystems
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ecosystems are deteriorating at unprecedented rate climate change is threatening their functioning and the vital services they provide to human societies imposing an urgent need to understand how they are coping with and reacting to global change the complexity of ecosystems however makes predicting their fragility a difficult endeavor fragileprints identifying fingerprints of fragility in complex ecosystems focuses on a critical scenario in ecosystem degradation large and abrupt transitions following gradual environmental changes observed across ecosystems worldwide despite important progresses key knowledge gaps remain in our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning these transitions making them notoriously difficult to predict current research relates them to the presence of multiple stable states mss with small perturbations able to induce large shifts from healthy speciesrich communities towards deteriorated ecosystem states understanding of mss however is based on simple models that largely ignore the role of species diversity and interaction complexity highlighting an extremely relevant gap in our capacity to uncover potential abrupt transitions in speciesrich ecosystems to address this gap fragileprints will investigate the emergence of mss in complex ecosystems by combining a novel bottomup and topdown interdisciplinary approach increasing complexity in fewspecies mss models and adding structure to random highdimensional complex networks the combination of the two each applying mathematical models and numerical simulations confronted with experiments and wholeecosystem data will allow the identification of fingerprints of ecosystem fragility conditions common across ecosystems related to the presence of mss and potential abrupt transitions these results will be applied to generate a predictive tool with utility in prioritizing areas for conservation mapping ecosystem fragility or restoring degraded ecosystems
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multitumour based prediction and manipulation of immune response
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only few patients respond to tumor treatment as desired treatment heavily relies on host tumor interactions including exploiting the host immune response against the tumor the underlying mechanisms of host tumor interaction are largely unknown guidance on specific intervention is missing to improve outcome better understanding of tumorhost interaction is needed large numbers of molecular snapshots will provide increased phenotyping coverage and better represent tumorhost evolution over time in an innovative approach multir aims at investigating not a single tumor entity but at compiling data from melanoma lung and bladder cancer most drugs target specific molecular features irrespective of the tumor origin to identify with high power the critical elements in the tumorhost interaction responsible for therapy response in a multidisciplinary approach involving leading clinicians immunologists experts in omics digital technologies social sciences and patient representatives from 10 eu countries and beyond and an extensive outreach plan to ensure rapid transfer of multir output to society multir combines existing multilayer epidemiological genetic clinical pathologic imaging molecular data from major studies on these tumors using aibased approaches to unveil functional modules regulating tumorhost interactions followed by validation of findings in models and synthetic patients harmonization with major eu initiatives will maximize use of european resources impact on all scientific technological and societal levels is expected including increased understanding of tumorhost interactions generation of a unique resource of harmonized data on three major cancer types available to the community in compliance to the legal and ethics framework boost of drug discovery and an aibased predictor for treatment response multir outreach plan includes policymakers and regulators to support prompt assessment and uptake into the health systemsthis action is part of the cancer mission cluster of projects on understanding tumourhost interactions
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sustainable trade regimes with europe and africa through mapping innovation newtechnology and growthmindset
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with a burgeoning population across africa characterized by a significant youth demographic the challenge of youth unemployment persists exacerbated by limited opportunities in the formal sector the informal economy absorbs the majority of new entrants offering precarious and lowquality jobs in response the streaming project aims to develop strategies for fair healthy and environmentally sustainable food systems across the continent by fostering connections between basic research and practical implementation streaming seeks to promote innovation and entrepreneurship among various target groups including women researchers students and farmers through networking platforms innovation hubs startup scouting and training programs the project aims to bridge academiaindustry gaps and promote the adoption of sustainable practices and technologies in african food trade systems additionally with a focus on policy analysis and recommendation streaming aims to inform trade policies in africa and europe with an emphasis on removing nontariff barriers to trade and enhancing resilience against external challenges such as climate change by integrating stakeholder perspectives empirical research and innovative solutions streaming strives to contribute to the establishment of fair healthy and environmentally friendly food systems continentwide
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nonequilibrium thermodynamics of the origin of life
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it has long been suggested that the laws of thermodynamics may specify thresholds for the origin of life in terms of minimal free energy fluxes needed to perform basic lifelike functions such as selfmaintenance and selfreplication such thresholds have yet to be derived however in large part because conventional thermodynamics is restricted to systems that are in equilibrium macroscopic in scale and that do not exchange information with their environments on the other hand protobiological systems minimal systems that lay at the beginning of life were likely farfromequilibrium nanoscale and exchanged information eg via simple mechanisms of adaptive response such as chemotaxisrecent times however have witnessed a revolution in nonequilibrium thermodynamics which has produced farreaching results concerning systems that are farfromequilibrium nanoscale and may exchange information these results are currently finding various applications in the study of biophysics of modern organisms while the tools of nonequilibrium thermodynamics are wellsuited for analyzing protobiological systems they have yet to be applied in origin of life research instead most existing models of protobiological systems are highly abstracted and ignore underlying thermodynamics in addition existing research in the field has paid very little attention to the role of information exchanges in early lifethis project will address these gaps by using techniques from modern nonequilibrium thermodynamics to study the origin of life specifically it will investigate thermodynamic tradeoffs involved in three essential protobiological functions selfmaintenance selfreplication and darwinian evolution including in systems that exchange information with their environment this project will shed light on fundamental thermodynamic thresholds which will have important implications for our theoretical understanding of the origin of life
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development of circular optimised material solutions for wind turbine blades and support structures
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circwind will develop and validate innovative technologies for current and future wind turbines wt to enhance reliability and lifetime performance operability and maintainability as well as to find costefficient pathways towards complete circularity in a context where a growing number of wt are reaching their eol circwinds most relevant results are a prototype fibrereinforced polymer frp material for blades with improved damagetolerance and fatigue life using a new multiscale modelling tool and simulation framework a circular low carbon concrete material for offshore floating wt based on a new geopolymer binder and circular lightweight aggregates clwa new virtual replicabased constitutive models and simulation tools for the frp material and geopolymer concrete coupled with monitoring technologies allowing to simulate and predict failure and lifetime and enabling future digital twinning for blade and substructure components integrated sustainability analysis addressing social economic and environmental aspects as well as improved circularitycircwind will develop its technologies to trl5 building prototypes and validating them in relevant environmental conditions representative components of tlp floater and blade have been chosen made of geopolymer concrete and frp materials respectively these innovations will allow future wt to include circular and costefficient materials installed in critical wt components at operating windfarms ensuring feasibility sustainability acceptability and high replicability besides new simulation tools virtual replicas dt to improve om costscircwind consortium has a good balance of academic and industrial partners which allows the projects developments to be welloriented towards real market needs that in addition to the strong dissemination and exploitation plan proposed will maximise future impacts clustering with relevant offshore wind stakeholders
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exploring opportunities for developing a risk and resilience climate service based on big data and machine learning
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despite the urgent need for adopting multihazard risk approaches and for the implementation of resilienceenhancing measures inthe eu and at the global scale several challenges for effective implementation of risk assessment and adaptation responses remainin particular the assessment of climate hazards risk and resilience is often based on static models which lose the appreciation of thetemporal and spatial dynamics and complex feedback responses within the system as a consequence the information providedoften fails to inform decisionmakers and other endusers with the correct data to be actioned through timely responses to emergingrisks barriers to development and implementation of novel approaches and models include the availability cost and reliability ofinput datasets the computational times and costs the lack of consideration of the combined effect of multiple hazards the spatialand temporal changes in the exposure of assets and services and the complex adaptive responses of government society and theenvironment to emerging risks expedite aims at exploring new pathways to reduce and remove these barriers by exploring testingand deploying machine learning and data science techniques and by developing and testing a climate service prototype tailored toendusers these may include institutional clients such as regions the private sector or individual consumers the research projectwhich will last 24 months will be mainly conducted at cmcccafoscari in venice italy under the supervision of prof andreacritto with targeted secondments for advanced training in machine learning and data science at malga university of genoa andfor climate service design and prototyping at gecosistema srl a specialised rd consulting lab a targeted dissemination andcommunication plan will allow expedite to share the research activities outcomes and outputs with researchers policymakers theprivate sector and the general public
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molecular engineering of synthetic motile systems towards biological environments
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the goal of this erc is to develop synthetic motile systems with cilialike and flagellalike movement based on supramolecular assemblies of controlled shape size and morphology with this strategy we are addressing the great challenge of developing synthetic systems with the ability to move sense adapt at the cellular tissue and systemic level the systems developed will then allow us to study the effect of propulsive movement on cellular uptake targeted transport external guidance and sensing and thus define the active delivery potential of these systems assembly from building blocks with preprogrammed functionality able to transfer complexity to their structure and behaviour is the core principle guiding nature and a tool that we have harnessed in our research besides their ability to move directionally these complex bioinspired systems are programmed to sense changes in the environment and consequently to adapt to the changes by regulating their speed shape and behaviour since they are by design catalytically active they can also change the chemical composition of their environment as well as dynamically regulate the chemical signaling pathways in their interaction with other species the study of the primary biomimetic complex emergent functions such as motility adaptivity regulated and feedback output and interactioncommunication in biological environments will be the goals of this erc program and will concentrate on 3 work packages built from 5 interconnecting projects organic inorganic catalysts and biocatalysts based on multiple enzymes will be incorporated within asymmetric soft selfassembled structures to generate smart autonomous systems able to harvest different sources of energy from the surrounding environment and generate a feedback response the final output of the program will be to develop an understanding of the directional movement of engineered synthetic motile systems studied from cellular levels to complex environments
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nova institute for medical systems biology
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the rise of chronic diseases is shaping health policy priorities worldwide as the population ages these conditions affect increasing portions of society and are more difficult to manage causing suffering in patients and their families for many years such increasing prevalence is a threat to the sustainability of healthcare systems thus an increasing focus has been put on disease prevention and awareness as well as on precision medicine this project will create a new centre of excellence nova institute for medical systems biology nimsb which will use the most advanced cell analytics and experimental in vitro systems combined with computational approaches to understand and fight chronic diseases the core of the project will be the integration of multiomics data from single cells from patient biopsies and derived organoids bioinformatics and artificial intelligence cell and molecular biology and relevant animal model studies to develop quantitative models that can inform on mechanisms of disease progression researchers and clinicians will collaborate to use this knowledge to implement novel precision medicine solutions aiming to intercept diseases before symptoms develop and also by improving diagnosis disease course prediction and response to treatment nimsb will contribute to clinical practice improvement not only with technology but also by training the next generation of researchers and medical doctors in precision interceptive medicine and digitaltransformation technologies nova medical school of nova university is in a unique position to coordinate the project due to its current drive for restructuring established reputation as a top medical school in portugal and research focus on chronic diseases the max delbrck center for molecular medicine is the best possible advanced partner as it is a world leader in this research topic and has recently created the berlin institute for medical systems biology which is a model for nimsb
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uncovering the molecular mechanisms of oligodendrocyte plasticity in cognitive aging
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myelin an oligodendrocyte membrane spirally wrapped around axons has only recently been appreciated to be a plastic structure which constantly remodels in response to experience myelin plasticity is based on proliferation and maturation of oligodendrocyte precursor cells opcs to form new myelinating oligodendrocytes oligodendrogenesis in conjunction with remodelling of myelin that is already established the cellular and molecular mechanisms governing myelin plasticity and how it contributes to agingrelated cognitive decline remain mostly unknown whereas cognitive aging is often attributed to neuronal vulnerability here i propose that early oligodendrocyte dysfunction is a key driver of cognitive decline i recently found that oligodendrocytes in the aging brain react to rejuvenating cues arising from young cerebrospinal fluid csf with substantial effects on their cellular function and memory consolidation mechanistically i identified the transcription factor serum response factor srf to be necessary in oligodendrocytes for developmental myelination iram et al biorxiv and showed that srf is downregulated with age and induced by young csf iram et al nature strikingly oligodendrocytes remain susceptible to microenvironmental cues even at late stages of aging positioning them as promising targets for therapeutic interventionscombining genetic optogenetic and transcriptomic tools with cuttingedge whole proteome metabolic labelling i will pursue three complementary objectives 1 uncover the transcriptional regulation of oligodendrocyte plasticity and aging 2 elucidate the molecular basis of failed oligodendrogenesis in aged mice 3 define mechanisms underlying decline in myelin plasticity with age by nascent proteome tagging completion of this work will have a profound impact on our understanding of how oligodendrocytes age and provide novel targets for brain rejuvenation through improving myelin health and integrity
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proteinrna interaction stabilization using molecular glues
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proteinrna interactions play a key role in cell biology and there are limited tools for specific modulation in this project we will look for molecules that act as glues by stabilizing the interaction between an rnabinding protein and a specific rna sequence which we call priglues the aims are to explore key concepts of how to develop screening methods to identify such priglues and to determine what type of chemical matter is suitable for this approach these novel molecular glues will be evaluated for their rna selectivity and the mode of interaction stabilization the methods we will develop to identify priglues can be applied to any proteinrna interaction and we will use them to modulate the process of mrna splicing to prove the concept the glues will be applied to stabilize mutant splicing factor rna pairs to recover lost affinity and correct diseasecausing splicing outcomes priglues will be applicable as novel tools for rna biology studies but can eventually also lead to therapeutics with an unexplored mode of action
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