ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Computer models based on known physical laws are our primary tool for predicting climate change. Yet the state-of-the-art models exhibit a disturbingly wide range of predictions of future climate change, especially when examined at the regional scale, which has not decreased as the models have become more comprehensive. The reasons for this are not understood. This represents a basic challenge to our fundamental understanding of climate. The divergence of model projections is presumably related to systematic model errors in the large-scale fluxes of heat, moisture and momentum that control regional aspects of climate. That these errors stubbornly persist in spite of increases in the spatial resolution of the models suggests that they are associated with errors in the representation of unresolved processes, whose effects must be parameterised. Most attention in climate science has hitherto focused on the thermodynamic aspects of climate. Dynamical aspects, which involve the atmospheric circulation, have received much less attention. However regional climate, including persistent climate regimes and extremes, is strongly controlled by atmospheric circulation patterns, which exhibit chaotic variability and whose representation in climate models depends sensitively on parameterised processes. Moreover the dynamical aspects of model projections are much less robust than the thermodynamic ones. There are good reasons to believe that model bias, the divergence of model projections, and chaotic variability are somehow related, although the relationships are not well understood. This calls for studying them together. My proposed research will focus on this problem, addressing these three aspects of the atmospheric circulation response to climate change in parallel: (i) diagnosing the sources of model error; (ii) elucidating the relationship between model error and the spread in model projections; (iii) understanding the physical mechanisms of atmospheric variability.

2 489 151 €

Start date: 2014-03-01, End date: 2020-02-29

"Understanding how organisms regulate size is one of the most fascinating open questions in biology. The aim of the AMAIZE project is to unravel how growth of maize leaves is controlled. Maize leaf development offers great opportunities to study the dynamics of growth regulatory networks, essentially because leaf development is a linear system with cell division at the leaf basis followed by cell expansion and maturation. Furthermore, the growth zone is relatively large allowing easy access of tissues at different positions. Four different perturbations of maize leaf size will be analyzed with cellular resolution: wild-type and plants having larger leaves (as a consequence of GA20OX1 overexpression), both grown under either well-watered or mild drought conditions. Firstly, a 3D cellular map of the growth zone of the fourth leaf will be made. RNA-SEQ of three different tissues (adaxial- and abaxial epidermis; mesophyll) obtained by laser dissection with an interval of 2.5 mm along the growth zone will allow for the analysis of the transcriptome with high resolution. Additionally, the composition of fifty selected growth regulatory protein complexes and DNA targets of transcription factors will be determined with an interval of 5 mm along the growth zone. Computational methods will be used to construct comprehensive integrative maps of the cellular and molecular processes occurring along the growth zone. Finally, selected regulatory nodes of the growth regulatory networks will be further functionally analyzed using a transactivation system in maize. AMAIZE opens up new perspectives for the identification of optimal growth regulatory networks that can be selected for by advanced breeding or for which more robust variants (e.g. reduced susceptibility to drought) can be obtained through genetic engineering. The ability to improve the growth of maize and in analogy other cereals could have a high impact in providing food security"

2 418 429 €

Start date: 2014-02-01, End date: 2019-01-31

This project investigates the cross-fertilisation of Anglo/American and German literature and film during the Allied Occupation of Germany. It will be the first study to survey the cultural landscape of the British and American zones of Occupied Germany in any detail. By doing so it will offer a new interpretative framework for postwar culture, in particular in three areas: the history of the Allied Occupation of Germany; the history of postwar Anglophone and Germanophone literature (arguing the two were more intertwined than has previously been suggested); and the history of the relationship between postwar and Cold War. Combining Anglo-American and German literature and film history with critical analysis, cultural history and life-writing, this is a necessarily ambitious, multidisciplinary study which will open up a major new field of research.

1 414 601 €

Start date: 2013-09-01, End date: 2019-02-28

"In our current ‘Information Age’ we suffer as never before, it is claimed, from the stresses of an overload of information, and the speed of global networks. The Victorians diagnosed similar problems in the nineteenth century. The medic James Crichton Browne spoke in 1860 of the ‘velocity of thought and action’ now required, and of the stresses imposed on the brain forced to process in a month more information ‘than was required of our grandfathers in the course of a lifetime’. This project will explore the phenomena of stress and overload, and other disorders associated in the nineteenth century with the problems of modernity, as expressed in the literature, science and medicine of the period, tracking the circulation of ideas across these diverse areas. Taking its framework from Diseases of Modern Life (1876) by the medical reformer, Benjamin Ward Richardson, it will explore ‘diseases from worry and mental strain’, as experienced in the professions, ‘lifestyle’ diseases such as the abuse of alcohol and narcotics, and also diseases from environmental pollution. This study will return to the holistic, integrative vision of the Victorians, as expressed in the science and in the great novels of the period, exploring the connections drawn between physiological, psychological and social health, or disease. Particular areas of focus will be: diseases of finance and speculation; diseases associated with particular professions; alcohol and drug addiction amidst the middle classes; travel for health; education and over-pressure in the classroom; the development of phobias and nervous disorders; and the imaginative construction of utopias and dystopias, in relation to health and disease. In its depth and range the project will take scholarship into radically new ground, breaking through the compartmentalization of psychiatric, environmental or literary history, and offering new ways of contextualising the problems of modernity facing us in the twenty-first century."

2 362 659 €

Start date: 2014-02-01, End date: 2019-01-31