ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

In todays advanced technological world, we can track the exact movement of individuals, analyse their genetic makeup and predict predisposition to certain diseases. However, we are unable to accurately assess an individual’s dietary intake. This is without a doubt one of the main stumbling blocks in assessing the link between diet and disease/health. The present proposal (A-DIET) will address this issue with the overarching objective to develop novel strategies for assessment of dietary intake. Using approaches to (1) identify biomarkers of specific foods (2) classify people into dietary patterns (nutritypes) and (3) develop a tool for integration of dietary and biomarker data, A-DIET has the potential to dramatically enhance our ability to accurately assess dietary intake. The ultimate output from A-DIET will be a dietary assessment tool which can be used to obtain an accurate assessment of dietary intake by combining dietary and biomarker data which in turn will allow investigations into relationships between diet, health and disease. New biomarkers of specific foods will be identified and validated using intervention studies and metabolomic analyses. Methods will be developed to classify individuals into dietary patterns based on biomarker/metabolomic profiles thus demonstrating the novel concept of nutritypes. Strategies for integration of dietary and biomarker data will be developed and translated into a tool that will be made available to the wider scientific community. Advances made in A-DIET will enable nutrition epidemiologist’s to properly examine the relationship between diet and disease and develop clear public health messages with regard to diet and health. Additionally results from A-DIET will allow researchers to accurately assess people’s diet and implement health promotion strategies and enable dieticians in a clinical environment to assess compliance to therapeutic diets such as adherence to a high fibre diet or a gluten free diet.

1 995 548 €

Start date: 2015-08-01, End date: 2020-07-31

The gas and dust in the interstellar medium (ISM) drive the chemical evolution of galaxies, the formation of stars and planets, and the synthesis of complex prebiotic molecules. The prime birth places for this interstellar material are the winds of evolved (super)giant stars. These winds are unique chemical laboratories, in which a large variety of gas and dust species radially expand away from the star. Recent progress on the observations of these winds has been impressive thanks to Herschel and ALMA. The next challenge is to unravel the wealth of chemical information contained in these data. This is an ambitious task since (1) a plethora of physical and chemical processes interact in a complex way, (2) laboratory data to interpret these interactions are lacking, and (3) theoretical tools to analyse the data do not meet current needs. To boost the knowledge of the physics and chemistry characterizing these winds, I propose a world-leading multi-disciplinary project combining (1) high-quality data, (2) novel theoretical wind models, and (3) targeted laboratory experiments. The aim is to pinpoint the dominant chemical pathways, unravel the transition from gas-phase to dust species, elucidate the role of clumps on the overall wind structure, and study the reciprocal effect between various dynamical and chemical phenomena. Now is the right time for this ambitious project thanks to the availability of (1) high-quality multi-wavelength data, including ALMA and Herschel data of the PI, (2) supercomputers enabling a homogeneous analysis of the data using sophisticated theoretical wind models, and (3) novel laboratory equipment to measure the gas-phase reaction rates of key species. This project will have far-reaching impact on (1) the field of evolved stars, (2) the understanding of the chemical lifecycle of the ISM, (3) chemical studies of dynamically more complex systems, such as exoplanets, protostars, supernovae etc., and (4) it will guide new instrument development.

2 605 897 €

Start date: 2016-01-01, End date: 2020-12-31

European incursions onto the narrow isthmian pass that divided and connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans made it a strategic node of the Spanish Empire and a crucial site for early modern globalization. On the front lines of the convergence of four continents, Old Panama offers an unusual opportunity for examining the diverse, often asymmetrical impacts of cultural and commercial contacts. The role of Italian, Portuguese, British, Dutch, and French interests in the area, as well as an influx of African slaves and Asian merchandise, have left a unique material legacy that requires an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to its varied sources. Bones, teeth and artifacts on this artery of Empire offer the possibility of new insights into the cultural and biological impact of early globalization. They also invite an interdisciplinary approach to different groups’ tactics for survival, including possible dietary changes, and the pursuit of profit. Such strategies may have led the diverse peoples inhabiting this junction, from indigenous allies to African and Asian bandits to European corsairs, to develop and to favor local production and Pacific trade networks at the expense of commerce with the metropolis. This project applies historical, archaeological and archaeometric methodologies to evidence of encounters between peoples and goods from Europe, America, Africa and Asia that took place on the Isthmus of Panama during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Forging an interdisciplinary approach to early globalization, it challenges both Euro-centric and Hispano-phobic interpretations of the impact of the conquest of America, traditionally seen as a demographic catastrophe that reached its nadir in the so-called seventeenth-century crisis. Rather than applying quantitative methods to incomplete source material, researchers will adopt a contextualized, inter-disciplinary, qualitative approach to diverse agents involved in cultural and commercial exchange.

1 998 875 €

Start date: 2016-01-01, End date: 2020-12-31

For a large family of computational problems collectively known as constrained optimization and satisfaction problems (CSPs), four decades of research in algorithms and computational complexity have led to a theory that tries to classify them as algorithmically tractable vs. intractable, i.e. polynomial-time solvable vs. NP-hard. However, there remains an important gap in our knowledge in that many CSPs of interest resist classification by this theory. Some such problems of practical relevance include fundamental partition problems in graph theory, isomorphism problems in combinatorics, and strategy-design problems in mathematical game theory. To tackle this gap in our knowledge, the research of the last decade has been driven either by finding hard instances for algorithms that solve tighter and tighter relaxations of the original problem, or by formulating new hardness-hypotheses that are stronger but admittedly less robust than NP-hardness. The ultimate goal of this project is closing the gap between the partial progress that these approaches represent and the original classification project into tractable vs. intractable problems. Our thesis is that the field has reached a point where, in many cases of interest, the analysis of the current candidate algorithms that appear to solve all instances could suffice to classify the problem one way or the other, without the need for alternative hardness-hypotheses. The novelty in our approach is a program to develop our recent discovery that, in some cases of interest, two methods from different areas match in strength: indistinguishability pebble games from mathematical logic, and hierarchies of convex relaxations from mathematical programming. Thus, we aim at making significant advances in the status of important algorithmic problems by looking for a general theory that unifies and goes beyond the current understanding of its components.

1 725 656 €

Start date: 2015-06-01, End date: 2020-05-31