Project acronym DomEQUAL
Project A Global Approach to Paid Domestic Work and Social Inequalities
Researcher (PI) Sabrina Marchetti
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH2, ERC-2015-STG
Summary How does globalisation impact the construction of social inequality? DomEQUAL tackles this question through a study on paid domestic work (PDW). Of the 52.6 million PDWs in the world today, 43 million are women and 7 million are children. The multidimensional transformations brought about by globalisation with the intensification of international migration, the urbanisation of rural and indigenous populations, and changes in household organisation and welfare regimes have a massive impact on PDWs at the global level.
New research possibilities are open since PDW has become an object of global governance. The ILO Convention 189 is the most evident sign of this. For researchers, this has the important effect of making new data and tools for analysis available. DomEQUAL profits from this opportunity to provide a global comparison of PDWs’ social positions, especially in the socio-economic and legal fields. It also provides the opportunity to experiment an ‘intersectionality’ approach to PDW on a large scale. Finally, it analyses which type of global/local actor is more effective in improving the legal framework for PDWs. In so doing, it aims at a theoretical and methodological contribution that goes beyond PDW and addresses the construction of social inequalities within globalisation more generally.
This is done through a diachronic comparison (1950s-now) of the changing situation of PDWs in the following countries: Spain, Italy and Germany in Europe; Colombia, Ecuador and Brazil in South America; and India, the Philippines and Taiwan in Asia. These nine countries are interesting cases for comparison because of their different positions within the process of globalisation, the specificities of their socio-cultural contexts, and also because they have all experienced mobilisations for PDWs’ rights. The project will be carried out by the PI and two senior post-doc researchers based in Italy, with the support of nine experts in the selected countries.
Summary
How does globalisation impact the construction of social inequality? DomEQUAL tackles this question through a study on paid domestic work (PDW). Of the 52.6 million PDWs in the world today, 43 million are women and 7 million are children. The multidimensional transformations brought about by globalisation with the intensification of international migration, the urbanisation of rural and indigenous populations, and changes in household organisation and welfare regimes have a massive impact on PDWs at the global level.
New research possibilities are open since PDW has become an object of global governance. The ILO Convention 189 is the most evident sign of this. For researchers, this has the important effect of making new data and tools for analysis available. DomEQUAL profits from this opportunity to provide a global comparison of PDWs’ social positions, especially in the socio-economic and legal fields. It also provides the opportunity to experiment an ‘intersectionality’ approach to PDW on a large scale. Finally, it analyses which type of global/local actor is more effective in improving the legal framework for PDWs. In so doing, it aims at a theoretical and methodological contribution that goes beyond PDW and addresses the construction of social inequalities within globalisation more generally.
This is done through a diachronic comparison (1950s-now) of the changing situation of PDWs in the following countries: Spain, Italy and Germany in Europe; Colombia, Ecuador and Brazil in South America; and India, the Philippines and Taiwan in Asia. These nine countries are interesting cases for comparison because of their different positions within the process of globalisation, the specificities of their socio-cultural contexts, and also because they have all experienced mobilisations for PDWs’ rights. The project will be carried out by the PI and two senior post-doc researchers based in Italy, with the support of nine experts in the selected countries.
Max ERC Funding
1 199 976 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31
Project acronym DROEMU
Project DROPLETS AND EMULSIONS: DYNAMICS AND RHEOLOGY
Researcher (PI) Mauro Sbragaglia
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI ROMA TOR VERGATA
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), PE3, ERC-2011-StG_20101014
Summary The applications of micro- and nanofluidics are now numerous, including lab-on-chip systems based upon micro-manipulation of discrete droplets, emulsions of interest in food and medical industries (drug delivery), analytical separation techniques of biomolecules, such as proteins and DNA, and facile handling of mass-limited samples. The problems involved contain diverse nano- and microstructures with a variety of lifetimes, touching atomistic scales (contact lines, thin films), mesoscopic collective behaviour (emulsions, glassy, soft-jammed systems) and hydrodynamical spatio-temporal evolutions (droplets and interface dynamics) with complex rheology and strong non-equilibrium properties. The interplay of the dynamics at the different scales involved still remains to be fully understood.
The fundamental research I address in this project aims to set up the unified framework for the characterization and modelling of interfaces in confined geometries by means of an innovative micro- and nanofluidic numerical platform.
The main challenging and ambitious questions I intend to address in my project are: How the stability of micro- and nanodroplets is affected by thermal gradients? Or by boundary corrugation and modulated wettability? Or by complex rheological properties of the dispersed and/or continuous phases? How these effects can be tuned to design new optimal devices for emulsions production? What are the rheological properties of these new soft materials? How confinement in small structures changes the bulk emulsion properties? What is the molecular-hydrodynamical mechanism at the origin of contact line slippage? How to realistically model the fluid-particle interactions on the molecular scale?
The strength of the project lies in an innovative and state-of-the-art numerical approach, based on mesoscopic Lattice Boltzmann Models, coupled to microscopic molecular physics, supported by theoretical modelling, lubrication theory and experimental validation.
Summary
The applications of micro- and nanofluidics are now numerous, including lab-on-chip systems based upon micro-manipulation of discrete droplets, emulsions of interest in food and medical industries (drug delivery), analytical separation techniques of biomolecules, such as proteins and DNA, and facile handling of mass-limited samples. The problems involved contain diverse nano- and microstructures with a variety of lifetimes, touching atomistic scales (contact lines, thin films), mesoscopic collective behaviour (emulsions, glassy, soft-jammed systems) and hydrodynamical spatio-temporal evolutions (droplets and interface dynamics) with complex rheology and strong non-equilibrium properties. The interplay of the dynamics at the different scales involved still remains to be fully understood.
The fundamental research I address in this project aims to set up the unified framework for the characterization and modelling of interfaces in confined geometries by means of an innovative micro- and nanofluidic numerical platform.
The main challenging and ambitious questions I intend to address in my project are: How the stability of micro- and nanodroplets is affected by thermal gradients? Or by boundary corrugation and modulated wettability? Or by complex rheological properties of the dispersed and/or continuous phases? How these effects can be tuned to design new optimal devices for emulsions production? What are the rheological properties of these new soft materials? How confinement in small structures changes the bulk emulsion properties? What is the molecular-hydrodynamical mechanism at the origin of contact line slippage? How to realistically model the fluid-particle interactions on the molecular scale?
The strength of the project lies in an innovative and state-of-the-art numerical approach, based on mesoscopic Lattice Boltzmann Models, coupled to microscopic molecular physics, supported by theoretical modelling, lubrication theory and experimental validation.
Max ERC Funding
1 170 924 €
Duration
Start date: 2011-12-01, End date: 2016-11-30
Project acronym DynaOmics
Project From longitudinal proteomics to dynamic individualized diagnostics
Researcher (PI) Laura Linnea Maria Elo-Uhlgren
Host Institution (HI) TURUN YLIOPISTO
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), LS7, ERC-2015-STG
Summary Longitudinal omics data hold great promise to improve biomarker detection and enable dynamic individualized predictions. Recent technological advances have made proteomics an increasingly attractive option but clinical longitudinal proteomic datasets are still rare and computational tools for their analysis underdeveloped. The objective of this proposal is to create a roadmap to detect clinically feasible protein markers using longitudinal data and effective computational tools. A biomedical focus is on early detection of Type 1 diabetes (T1D). Specific objectives are:
1) Novel biomarker detector using longitudinal data. DynaOmics introduces novel types of multi-level dynamic markers that are undetectable in conventional single-time cross-sectional studies (e.g. within-individual changes in abundance or associations), develops optimization methods for their robust and reproducible detection within and across individuals, and validates their utility in well-defined samples.
2) Individualized disease risk prediction dynamically. DynaOmics develops dynamic individualized predictive models using the multi-level longitudinal proteome features and novel statistical and machine learning methods that have previously not been used in this context, including joint models of longitudinal and time-to-event data, and one-class classification type techniques.
3) Dynamic prediction of T1D. DynaOmics builds a predictive model of dynamic T1D risk to assist early detection of the disease, which is crucial for developing future therapeutic and preventive strategies. T1D typically involves a relatively long symptom-free period before clinical diagnosis but current tools to predict early T1D risk have restricted power.
The objectives involve innovative and unconventional approaches and address major unmet challenges in the field, having high potential to open new avenues for diagnosis and treatment of complex diseases and fundamentally novel insights towards precision medicine.
Summary
Longitudinal omics data hold great promise to improve biomarker detection and enable dynamic individualized predictions. Recent technological advances have made proteomics an increasingly attractive option but clinical longitudinal proteomic datasets are still rare and computational tools for their analysis underdeveloped. The objective of this proposal is to create a roadmap to detect clinically feasible protein markers using longitudinal data and effective computational tools. A biomedical focus is on early detection of Type 1 diabetes (T1D). Specific objectives are:
1) Novel biomarker detector using longitudinal data. DynaOmics introduces novel types of multi-level dynamic markers that are undetectable in conventional single-time cross-sectional studies (e.g. within-individual changes in abundance or associations), develops optimization methods for their robust and reproducible detection within and across individuals, and validates their utility in well-defined samples.
2) Individualized disease risk prediction dynamically. DynaOmics develops dynamic individualized predictive models using the multi-level longitudinal proteome features and novel statistical and machine learning methods that have previously not been used in this context, including joint models of longitudinal and time-to-event data, and one-class classification type techniques.
3) Dynamic prediction of T1D. DynaOmics builds a predictive model of dynamic T1D risk to assist early detection of the disease, which is crucial for developing future therapeutic and preventive strategies. T1D typically involves a relatively long symptom-free period before clinical diagnosis but current tools to predict early T1D risk have restricted power.
The objectives involve innovative and unconventional approaches and address major unmet challenges in the field, having high potential to open new avenues for diagnosis and treatment of complex diseases and fundamentally novel insights towards precision medicine.
Max ERC Funding
1 499 869 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-06-01, End date: 2021-05-31
Project acronym EarlyDev
Project Brain networks for processing social signals of emotions: early development and the emergence of individual differences
Researcher (PI) Jukka Matias Leppänen
Host Institution (HI) TAMPEREEN YLIOPISTO
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH4, ERC-2011-StG_20101124
Summary Recent research has shown that genetic variations in central serotonin function are associated with biases in emotional information processing (heightened attention to signals of negative emotion) and that these biases contribute significantly to vulnerability to affective disorders. Here, we propose to examine a novel hypothesis that the biases in attention to emotional cues are ontogenetically primary, arise very early in development, and modulate an individual’s interaction with the environment during development. The four specific aims of the project are to 1) test the hypothesis that developmental processes resulting in increased functional connectivity of visual and emotion/attention-related neural systems (i.e., increased phase-synchrony of oscillatory activity) from 5 to 7 months of age are associated with the emergence of an overt attentional bias towards affectively salient facial expressions at 7 months of age, 2) use eye-tracking to ascertain that the attentional bias in 7-month-old infants reflects sensitivity to the emotional signal value of facial expressions instead of correlated non-emotional features, 3) test the hypothesis that increased serotonergic tone early in life (through genetic polymorphisms or exposure to serotonin enhancing drugs) is associated with reduced control of attention to affectively salient facial expressions and reduced temperamental emotion-regulation at 7, 24 and 48 months of age, and 4) examine the plasticity of the attentional bias towards emotional facial expressions in infancy, particularly whether the bias can be overridden by using positive reinforcers. The proposed studies will be the first to explicate the neural bases and nature of early-emerging cognitive deficits and biases that pose a risk for emotional dysfunction. As such, the results will be very important for developing intervention methods that benefit of the plasticity of the developing brain and skill formation to support healthy development.
Summary
Recent research has shown that genetic variations in central serotonin function are associated with biases in emotional information processing (heightened attention to signals of negative emotion) and that these biases contribute significantly to vulnerability to affective disorders. Here, we propose to examine a novel hypothesis that the biases in attention to emotional cues are ontogenetically primary, arise very early in development, and modulate an individual’s interaction with the environment during development. The four specific aims of the project are to 1) test the hypothesis that developmental processes resulting in increased functional connectivity of visual and emotion/attention-related neural systems (i.e., increased phase-synchrony of oscillatory activity) from 5 to 7 months of age are associated with the emergence of an overt attentional bias towards affectively salient facial expressions at 7 months of age, 2) use eye-tracking to ascertain that the attentional bias in 7-month-old infants reflects sensitivity to the emotional signal value of facial expressions instead of correlated non-emotional features, 3) test the hypothesis that increased serotonergic tone early in life (through genetic polymorphisms or exposure to serotonin enhancing drugs) is associated with reduced control of attention to affectively salient facial expressions and reduced temperamental emotion-regulation at 7, 24 and 48 months of age, and 4) examine the plasticity of the attentional bias towards emotional facial expressions in infancy, particularly whether the bias can be overridden by using positive reinforcers. The proposed studies will be the first to explicate the neural bases and nature of early-emerging cognitive deficits and biases that pose a risk for emotional dysfunction. As such, the results will be very important for developing intervention methods that benefit of the plasticity of the developing brain and skill formation to support healthy development.
Max ERC Funding
1 397 351 €
Duration
Start date: 2012-02-01, End date: 2017-01-31
Project acronym ECONOMICHISTORY
Project Contracts, Institutions, and Markets in Historical Perspective
Researcher (PI) Maristella Botticini
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITA COMMERCIALE LUIGI BOCCONI
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH1, ERC-2011-ADG_20110406
Summary A growing number of scholars are studying the interactions between cultural values, social and religious norms, institutions, and economic outcomes. The rise of markets, as well as the development of contracts that enable mutually beneficial transactions among agents, are one of the central themes in the literature on long-term economic growth.
This project contributes to both strands of literature by studying the invention and development of marine insurance contracts in medieval Italy and their subsequent spread all over Europe. It brings the economic approach to previously unexplored historical data housed in archives in Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Palermo, Prato, and Venice.
The interest in the historical origin and development of marine insurance contracts is twofold. First, marine contracts are the “parents” of all the other insurance contracts (e.g., fire, life, health, etc) that were developed in subsequent centuries to cope with risk. Second, their invention, as well as other innovations in business practices in the Middle Ages, contributed to the growth of international trade in subsequent centuries.
The key novelty of the project stems from combining contract theory with information from thousands of insurance contracts between 1300 and 1550 to explain why marine insurance developed in medieval Italy and then Europe, to study the empirical determinants of insurance contracts in medieval Italy, and to analyze how medieval merchants coped with adverse selection and moral hazard problems.
Most scholars agree that marine insurance was unknown to the ancient world. Italian merchants developed the first insurance contracts and other innovations in business practices during and in the aftermath of the Commercial Revolution that swept Europe from roughly 1275 to about 1325. Marine insurance contracts may have developed as a spin-off of earlier contracts which shifted the risk from one party to another (e.g., sea loan, insurance loan). Alternatively, in the early or mid-fourteenth century, sedentary merchants that provided the capital to travelling merchants invented a new type of contract, when they discovered that the existing contract forms had shortcomings in transferring and dividing sea risk.
A sample of the questions that this project will address includes:
- Why did insurance contracts and a marine insurance market first develop in medieval times and not earlier despite merchants had to deal with the risks associated with maritime trade since antiquity?
- What were the empirical determinants of contract form (e.g., insurance premium) in the medieval insurance market?
- How did medieval merchants compute insurance premia without having the formal notion of probability that was developed only in the mid-seventeenth century?
- How did medieval merchants cope with the typical problems that plague insurance markets, i.e., adverse selection and moral hazard?
Summary
A growing number of scholars are studying the interactions between cultural values, social and religious norms, institutions, and economic outcomes. The rise of markets, as well as the development of contracts that enable mutually beneficial transactions among agents, are one of the central themes in the literature on long-term economic growth.
This project contributes to both strands of literature by studying the invention and development of marine insurance contracts in medieval Italy and their subsequent spread all over Europe. It brings the economic approach to previously unexplored historical data housed in archives in Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Palermo, Prato, and Venice.
The interest in the historical origin and development of marine insurance contracts is twofold. First, marine contracts are the “parents” of all the other insurance contracts (e.g., fire, life, health, etc) that were developed in subsequent centuries to cope with risk. Second, their invention, as well as other innovations in business practices in the Middle Ages, contributed to the growth of international trade in subsequent centuries.
The key novelty of the project stems from combining contract theory with information from thousands of insurance contracts between 1300 and 1550 to explain why marine insurance developed in medieval Italy and then Europe, to study the empirical determinants of insurance contracts in medieval Italy, and to analyze how medieval merchants coped with adverse selection and moral hazard problems.
Most scholars agree that marine insurance was unknown to the ancient world. Italian merchants developed the first insurance contracts and other innovations in business practices during and in the aftermath of the Commercial Revolution that swept Europe from roughly 1275 to about 1325. Marine insurance contracts may have developed as a spin-off of earlier contracts which shifted the risk from one party to another (e.g., sea loan, insurance loan). Alternatively, in the early or mid-fourteenth century, sedentary merchants that provided the capital to travelling merchants invented a new type of contract, when they discovered that the existing contract forms had shortcomings in transferring and dividing sea risk.
A sample of the questions that this project will address includes:
- Why did insurance contracts and a marine insurance market first develop in medieval times and not earlier despite merchants had to deal with the risks associated with maritime trade since antiquity?
- What were the empirical determinants of contract form (e.g., insurance premium) in the medieval insurance market?
- How did medieval merchants compute insurance premia without having the formal notion of probability that was developed only in the mid-seventeenth century?
- How did medieval merchants cope with the typical problems that plague insurance markets, i.e., adverse selection and moral hazard?
Max ERC Funding
1 113 900 €
Duration
Start date: 2012-07-01, End date: 2018-06-30
Project acronym EDEQS
Project ENTANGLING AND DISENTANGLING EXTENDED QUANTUM SYSTEMS IN AND OUT OF EQUILIBRIUM
Researcher (PI) Pasquale Calabrese
Host Institution (HI) SCUOLA INTERNAZIONALE SUPERIORE DI STUDI AVANZATI DI TRIESTE
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), PE2, ERC-2011-StG_20101014
Summary "It is nowadays well established that many-body quantum systems in one and two spatial dimensions exhibit unconventional collective behavior that gives rise to intriguing novel states of matter. Examples are topological states exhibiting nonabelian statistics in 2D and spin-charge separated metals and Mott insulators in 1D. An important focus of current research is to characterize both equilibrium and non-equilibrium dynamics of such systems. The latter has become experimentally accessible only during the last decade and constitutes one of the main frontiers of modern theoretical physics. In recent years it has become clear that entanglement is a useful concept for characterizing different states of matter as well as non-equilibrium time evolution.
One main aim of this proposal is to utilize entanglement measures to fully classify states of matter in low dimensional systems. This will be achieved by carrying out a systematic study of the entanglement of several disconnected regions in 1D quantum critical systems. In addition, entanglement measures will be used to benchmark the performance of numerical algorithms based on tensor network states (both in 1D and 2D) and identify the ""optimal"" algorithm for finding the ground state of a given strongly correlated many-body system.
The second main aim of this proposal is to utilize the entanglement to identify the most important features of the the non equilibrium time evolution after a ""quantum quench"", with a view to solve exactly the quench dynamics in strongly interacting integrable models. A particular question we will address is which observables ""thermalize"", which is an issue of tremendous current experimental and theoretical interest. By combining analytic and numerical techniques we will then study the non equilibrium dynamics of non integrable models, in order to quantify the effects of integrability."
Summary
"It is nowadays well established that many-body quantum systems in one and two spatial dimensions exhibit unconventional collective behavior that gives rise to intriguing novel states of matter. Examples are topological states exhibiting nonabelian statistics in 2D and spin-charge separated metals and Mott insulators in 1D. An important focus of current research is to characterize both equilibrium and non-equilibrium dynamics of such systems. The latter has become experimentally accessible only during the last decade and constitutes one of the main frontiers of modern theoretical physics. In recent years it has become clear that entanglement is a useful concept for characterizing different states of matter as well as non-equilibrium time evolution.
One main aim of this proposal is to utilize entanglement measures to fully classify states of matter in low dimensional systems. This will be achieved by carrying out a systematic study of the entanglement of several disconnected regions in 1D quantum critical systems. In addition, entanglement measures will be used to benchmark the performance of numerical algorithms based on tensor network states (both in 1D and 2D) and identify the ""optimal"" algorithm for finding the ground state of a given strongly correlated many-body system.
The second main aim of this proposal is to utilize the entanglement to identify the most important features of the the non equilibrium time evolution after a ""quantum quench"", with a view to solve exactly the quench dynamics in strongly interacting integrable models. A particular question we will address is which observables ""thermalize"", which is an issue of tremendous current experimental and theoretical interest. By combining analytic and numerical techniques we will then study the non equilibrium dynamics of non integrable models, in order to quantify the effects of integrability."
Max ERC Funding
1 108 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2011-09-01, End date: 2016-08-31
Project acronym EINITE
Project "Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe, 1300-1800"
Researcher (PI) Guido Alfani
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITA COMMERCIALE LUIGI BOCCONI
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2011-StG_20101124
Summary "The aim of EINITE is to clarify the dynamics of economic inequality in Europe from the late Middle Ages up until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Very little data about economic inequality during such an early period is available today. Apart from some studies focussed on single years and small areas (usually only one city or a village), the only European region which has been the object of a large research project is Holland.
The project will collect an extensive database about economic inequality, mainly of wealth (for which better documentation exists), focussing on Italy from a wider European perspective. Archival research will be concentrated on Italy where particularly good sources exist, but the Italian case will be placed in the varying European context. Published data and existing databases from all over the continent will be collected as terms of comparison. The final version of the project database will be made public.
The activity of ENITE will be organized around four main research questions:
1) What is the long-term relationship between economic growth and inequality?
This is the main question to which the others are all connected.
2) What were the effects of plagues and other severe mortality crises on property structures?
3) What is the underlying relationship between immigration and urban inequality?
4) How was economic inequality perceived in the past, and how did its perception change over time?
The project will also help to explain the origin of the property structures and inequality levels to be found on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Then, it will provide information relevant to the ‘Kuznets curve’ debate. Overall the project will lead to a better knowledge of economic inequality in the past, which is also expected to help understanding recent developments in inequality levels in Europe and elsewhere."
Summary
"The aim of EINITE is to clarify the dynamics of economic inequality in Europe from the late Middle Ages up until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Very little data about economic inequality during such an early period is available today. Apart from some studies focussed on single years and small areas (usually only one city or a village), the only European region which has been the object of a large research project is Holland.
The project will collect an extensive database about economic inequality, mainly of wealth (for which better documentation exists), focussing on Italy from a wider European perspective. Archival research will be concentrated on Italy where particularly good sources exist, but the Italian case will be placed in the varying European context. Published data and existing databases from all over the continent will be collected as terms of comparison. The final version of the project database will be made public.
The activity of ENITE will be organized around four main research questions:
1) What is the long-term relationship between economic growth and inequality?
This is the main question to which the others are all connected.
2) What were the effects of plagues and other severe mortality crises on property structures?
3) What is the underlying relationship between immigration and urban inequality?
4) How was economic inequality perceived in the past, and how did its perception change over time?
The project will also help to explain the origin of the property structures and inequality levels to be found on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Then, it will provide information relevant to the ‘Kuznets curve’ debate. Overall the project will lead to a better knowledge of economic inequality in the past, which is also expected to help understanding recent developments in inequality levels in Europe and elsewhere."
Max ERC Funding
995 400 €
Duration
Start date: 2012-01-01, End date: 2016-12-31
Project acronym ELR1K
Project Enhancing Large-scale chemical Reactions based on Elementary Kinetics
Researcher (PI) Joris Wilfried Maria Cornelius THYBAUT
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Call Details Proof of Concept (PoC), PC1, ERC-2015-PoC
Summary A proof-of-concept software tool for microkinetic model construction, ready for commercialization will be developed starting from an available version of the tool that has been validated in an academic research context.
A detailed understanding of the elementary steps involved in large-scale chemical reactions provides several advantages: it may not only lead to a better control of the corresponding processes and, hence, safer operation, it also provides a sound basis for enhanced process design. More particularly in the area of catalysis, material development has typically occurred using trial-and-error procedures. While the number of catalysts that could be evaluated has been augmented by so-called high-throughput techniques, an adequate understanding of the underlying phenomena was still limited. Microkinetic modeling is ideally suited to get a view on these phenomena, as it accounts for all elementary steps in the reaction mechanism without any simplifying assumption.
The construction of such microkinetic models and corresponding determination of kinetics and catalyst descriptors is not straightforward and requires dedicated (software) tools. The microkinetic engine (μKE), developed within the ‘Catalytic Reaction Engineering’ research group of the Laboratory for Chemical Technology at Ghent University, is such a unique piece of software to facilitate microkinetic model construction. Without requiring any programming from the end-user, kinetic models based on elementary steps can be developed. It allows identifying the kinetically relevant steps that entail the opportunity to further improve the concerned catalytic materials and, implicitly, also the reactors and processes in which they are employed. The microkinetic engine has been validated against in-house data as well as within a limited number of - exclusive - collaborations. Its anticipated commercialization requires enhanced robustness, complementary functionalities and an increased user friendliness.
Summary
A proof-of-concept software tool for microkinetic model construction, ready for commercialization will be developed starting from an available version of the tool that has been validated in an academic research context.
A detailed understanding of the elementary steps involved in large-scale chemical reactions provides several advantages: it may not only lead to a better control of the corresponding processes and, hence, safer operation, it also provides a sound basis for enhanced process design. More particularly in the area of catalysis, material development has typically occurred using trial-and-error procedures. While the number of catalysts that could be evaluated has been augmented by so-called high-throughput techniques, an adequate understanding of the underlying phenomena was still limited. Microkinetic modeling is ideally suited to get a view on these phenomena, as it accounts for all elementary steps in the reaction mechanism without any simplifying assumption.
The construction of such microkinetic models and corresponding determination of kinetics and catalyst descriptors is not straightforward and requires dedicated (software) tools. The microkinetic engine (μKE), developed within the ‘Catalytic Reaction Engineering’ research group of the Laboratory for Chemical Technology at Ghent University, is such a unique piece of software to facilitate microkinetic model construction. Without requiring any programming from the end-user, kinetic models based on elementary steps can be developed. It allows identifying the kinetically relevant steps that entail the opportunity to further improve the concerned catalytic materials and, implicitly, also the reactors and processes in which they are employed. The microkinetic engine has been validated against in-house data as well as within a limited number of - exclusive - collaborations. Its anticipated commercialization requires enhanced robustness, complementary functionalities and an increased user friendliness.
Max ERC Funding
150 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2017-08-31
Project acronym EMoBookTrade
Project The Early Modern Book Trade: An Evidence-based Reconstruction of the Economic and Juridical Framework of the European Book Market
Researcher (PI) Angela NUOVO
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2015-AdG
Summary This project will explore the idea – and gather the evidence to prove it – that the so-called printing revolution does not consist in a change in book-making technology but in the process, prolonged over the entire course of the early modern age, of the formation of the printed book market and the creation of readers as purchasers and consumers of books. In order to demonstrate this, the project will reconstruct the economic and legal framework of the European book market by applying an interdisciplinary approach to the economic study of book history. By using unique and hitherto unexplored documentary evidence, this project addresses four fundamental questions relating to the growth of a fully developed book trade and the rise of a society of book consumers within the social and religious context of early modern Europe: the economic issue of book prices; the juridical and political issue of the book privilege system (which in turn influenced the process of book pricing); the management of the bookselling business (focusing on businesses in two major cities in the European book trade, Venice (Bernardino Giunti) and Antwerp (Christopher Plantin)); the technique of building and managing a transnational network for book distribution and sale (analyzing groundbreaking new evidence, an entire year (1522) of correspondence from a Venetian wholesale bookseller, Giovanni Bartolomeo Gabiano). These four research areas will feed into an overarching project which will examine the impact of books and the access of readers to them, together with the development in patterns of cultural consumption which meant that printed books lost the luxury status which they had had throughout the incunabula period to become transformed into ‘popoluxe’ goods.
Summary
This project will explore the idea – and gather the evidence to prove it – that the so-called printing revolution does not consist in a change in book-making technology but in the process, prolonged over the entire course of the early modern age, of the formation of the printed book market and the creation of readers as purchasers and consumers of books. In order to demonstrate this, the project will reconstruct the economic and legal framework of the European book market by applying an interdisciplinary approach to the economic study of book history. By using unique and hitherto unexplored documentary evidence, this project addresses four fundamental questions relating to the growth of a fully developed book trade and the rise of a society of book consumers within the social and religious context of early modern Europe: the economic issue of book prices; the juridical and political issue of the book privilege system (which in turn influenced the process of book pricing); the management of the bookselling business (focusing on businesses in two major cities in the European book trade, Venice (Bernardino Giunti) and Antwerp (Christopher Plantin)); the technique of building and managing a transnational network for book distribution and sale (analyzing groundbreaking new evidence, an entire year (1522) of correspondence from a Venetian wholesale bookseller, Giovanni Bartolomeo Gabiano). These four research areas will feed into an overarching project which will examine the impact of books and the access of readers to them, together with the development in patterns of cultural consumption which meant that printed books lost the luxury status which they had had throughout the incunabula period to become transformed into ‘popoluxe’ goods.
Max ERC Funding
1 434 375 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31
Project acronym ENLIGHT
Project The interplay between quantum coherence and environment in the photosynthetic electronic energy transfer and light-harvesting: a quantum chemical picture
Researcher (PI) Benedetta Mennucci
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITA DI PISA
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), PE4, ERC-2011-StG_20101014
Summary Photon energy absorption and electronic energy transfer (EET) represents the first fundamental step in both natural and artificial light-harvesting systems. The most striking example is photosynthesis, in which plants, algae and bacteria are able to transfer the absorbed light to the reaction centers in proteins with almost 100% quantum efficiency. Recent two-dimensional spectroscopic measurements suggest that the role of the environment (a protein or a given embedding supramolecular architecture) is fundamental in determining both the dynamics and the efficiency of the process. What is still missing in order to fully understand and characterize EET is a new theoretical and computational approach which can reproduce the microscopic dynamics of the process based on an accurate description of the playing actors, i.e. the transferring pigments and the environment. Such an approach is a formidable challenge due to the large network of interactions which couples all the parts and makes the dynamics of the process a complex competition of random fluctuations and coherences. Only a strategy based upon an integration of computational models with different length and time scales can achieve the required completeness of the description. This project aims at achieving such an integration by developing completely new theoretical and computational tools based on the merging of quantum mechanical methods, polarizable force fields and dielectric continuum models. Such a strategy in which the fundamental effects of polarization between the pigments and the environment will be accounted for in a dynamically coupled way will allow to simulate the full dynamic process of light harvesting and energy transfer in complex multichromophoric supramolecular systems.
Summary
Photon energy absorption and electronic energy transfer (EET) represents the first fundamental step in both natural and artificial light-harvesting systems. The most striking example is photosynthesis, in which plants, algae and bacteria are able to transfer the absorbed light to the reaction centers in proteins with almost 100% quantum efficiency. Recent two-dimensional spectroscopic measurements suggest that the role of the environment (a protein or a given embedding supramolecular architecture) is fundamental in determining both the dynamics and the efficiency of the process. What is still missing in order to fully understand and characterize EET is a new theoretical and computational approach which can reproduce the microscopic dynamics of the process based on an accurate description of the playing actors, i.e. the transferring pigments and the environment. Such an approach is a formidable challenge due to the large network of interactions which couples all the parts and makes the dynamics of the process a complex competition of random fluctuations and coherences. Only a strategy based upon an integration of computational models with different length and time scales can achieve the required completeness of the description. This project aims at achieving such an integration by developing completely new theoretical and computational tools based on the merging of quantum mechanical methods, polarizable force fields and dielectric continuum models. Such a strategy in which the fundamental effects of polarization between the pigments and the environment will be accounted for in a dynamically coupled way will allow to simulate the full dynamic process of light harvesting and energy transfer in complex multichromophoric supramolecular systems.
Max ERC Funding
1 300 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2011-09-01, End date: 2016-08-31
