ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The key objective of my FATHERCHILD project is to provide novel insights into the questions whether, why, and in what ways, fathers influence their children’s social, behavioral, emotional, and cognitive outcomes. More specifically, this project investigates how inequalities in child outcomes develop through fathers’ parenting practices across childhood and adolescence, and how context may buffer or strengthen fathers’ role in this development of inequalities. The idea underlying the proposed research is that much can be learned about fathers’ role in child outcomes by linking sociological stratification questions to developmental psychology research on father involvement. The relevance of the current project is apparent: inequality is rising all across Europe, people are increasingly relying on their families to get by, and father involvement has become more polarized according to fathers’ socioeconomic position over the decades. The project aims to be innovative in four ways. Firstly, the application of new observation methods and state-of-the-art analytical techniques allows me to tap, more closely than hitherto, into the mechanisms underlying fathers’ influence on child outcomes. Second, unlike previous studies, this project will not limit its focus to the father-child dyad. The use of multi-actor data enables me to assess the relative importance of fathers as transmitters of inequality in the context of the wider family. Thirdly, by expanding the focus beyond the early years of children’s lives, it is possible to obtain a comprehensive understanding of how and why fathers’ role in the transmission of inequality changes across childhood and adolescence. Finally, an important contribution of the project is its potential to compare fathers’ impact on child outcomes longitudinally across three countries, allowing me to investigate the extent to which and why there is cross-national variation in the development of inequalities through fathers’ parenting practices.

1 261 246 €

Start date: 2018-01-01, End date: 2022-12-31

The proposed research project is a multi-sited ethnography of an emergent global health intervention to improve nutrition in the first 1000 days of life. The intervention links growth during this 1000-day window to chronic and mental illness, human capital, food security, and ecosystem sustainability, positing early life nutrition as the key to meeting the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. The intervention draws numerous disciplines and geographic regions together in a holistic pursuit of a sustainable and healthy collective future. It then unfolds in different settings in diverse and localized ways. The research team will work with first 1000 days experts as well as study deployment sites in the Netherlands, Guatemala, and the Philippines. The innovative anthropological techniques of contrasting and co-laboring will allow us to both analyze the intervention and contribute to its further fine-tuning. Health experts currently recognize that there are social complexities within and differences between the sites involved, but tend to treat these as obstacles to overcome. The innovative force of our research is to consider the adaptive transformations of the intervention as a source of inspiration rather than a hindrance. Where experts currently prioritize the question of how to translate expert knowledge into interventions in the field, we will ask how lessons from the field might be translated back into expert knowledge and, where relevant, made available elsewhere. In the process we will enrich the anthropological repertoire, moving it beyond a choice between criticism or endorsement, turning living with/in difference into both a social ideal and a research style.

1 499 977 €

Start date: 2018-06-01, End date: 2023-05-31

Glycosylation, the expression of carbohydrate structures on proteins and lipids, is found in all the domains of life. The collection of all glycans found on a cell is called the “glycome” which is information rich and a key player in a plethora of physiological and pathological processes. The information that the glycome holds can be written, read and erased by glycosyltransferases, lectins and glycosidases, respectively. The immense structural complexity and the fact that glycan biosynthesis is not under direct genetic control makes it very difficult to study the glycome. The glycosylation pattern of cancer cells is very different from that of healthy cells. It is still unclear whether aberrant glycosylation of cancer cells is a cause or consequence of tumorigenesis but it is associated with aggressive and invasive forms of cancer and hence poor prognosis. Malignant glycans are directly involved in a number of mechanisms that suppress the immune response, increase migration and extravasation (metastasis), block apoptosis and increase resistance to chemotherapy. The aim of this proposal is develop new glycomimetics that can be used to edit the glycome of cancer cells to target such evasive mechanisms. Using combinations of new glycan based inhibitors, a coordinated attack on the cancer glycome can be carried out which is expected to severely cripple the cancers ability to grow and metastasize. This will make the tumor more susceptible to immune mediated killing which may be further enhanced in combination with other anti-cancer strategies. To minimize systemic side effects, new methods for the local delivery/activation of glycan inhibitors will be developed. The developed methods are expected to have a much broader than just cancer alone since the studied mechanisms are also associated with autoimmune and neurodegenerative disease.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2017-11-01, End date: 2022-10-31

The success of humans depends on their ability to cooperate. Cooperation requires learning to avoid actions that harm others and select those that balance benefits for self and others. Reinforcement leaning captures how individuals learn to optimize benefits for themselves, by associating actions and outcomes for the self. The social context requires to incorporate outcomes for others into that equation by transforming them into the currency used to value our own outcomes. Research on empathy, by suggesting that we transform the emotions of others into neural representation of how we would feel in their stead, provides testable mechanistic hypotheses of how we do that. The painful facial expression of our friend after we kick him would be transformed into the pain we would feel when kicked, associating kicking with negative value, thereby motivating us to stop kicking. Testing this hypothesis would require altering brain activity in the anterior insula and cingulate involved in this process, and showing that these changes alter decision making. Because current tools in humans cannot selectively modulate activity in these deeper regions we however remain frustratingly powerless to do so. Here we will develop a brand new method using ultrasounds to modulate brain activity at any depth to brake down this barrier. Using fmri, we will measure vicarious activity and compare it with computational models. This will push our understanding of our social nature to a new computational level, and pave the way to a more causal understanding of prosociality that can inform successful interventions for so far untreatable antisocial disorders. More generally deep brain stimulation via US, and the understanding of how US modulate brain activity, will unleash affective neuroscience to noninvasively explore what had remained beyond our reach: the causal relationship between deeper (limbic) structures and behavior and cognition.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2018-07-01, End date: 2023-06-30