ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Every year a brain stroke will impair approximately 2 million Europeans. Notwithstanding recent progress, many of these individuals will have persistent cognitive deficits, impacting their personality, degrading their quality of life and preventing their return to work. Early identification of anatomical predictors of brain recovery may significantly reduce the burden of these deficits on patients, their families and wider society, while also leading to the discovery of new targets for treatments. I have pioneered the development of imaging techniques that allow for the exploration of the relationship between brain disconnection and neuropsychological syndromes. With these tools, I aim to demonstrate that the structural organisation of the human brain's connections is the common denominator supporting functional specialisation and, when damaged, neuropsychological disorders. Building on my expertise, I plan to (1) establish an atlas mapping the function of white matter for the entire human brain, (2) fractionate the stroke population according to disconnection profiles, (3) predict neuropsychological symptoms based on disconnection profiles, and (4) characterise and manipulate the fine biology involved in the disconnection recovery.In so doing, this project will introduce a paradigm shift in the relationship between brain structure, function and behavioural/cognitive disorders. I will deliver a comprehensive biological model of the neurocircuitry that supports neuropsychological syndromes, which will gather the modular organisation of primary idiotypic functions with the integrative organisation of highly associative levels of functions. In the long term, this project will allow me to determine if measures of brain ‘connectivity’ can be translated into advanced standard procedures that provide for a more personalised medicine, that focuses upon rehabilitation and improving the prediction of symptom recovery, while providing new targets for pharmacological treatment.

1 999 201 €

Start date: 2019-09-01, End date: 2024-08-31

With the ever-increasing use of internet-connected devices, such as computers, smart grids, IoT appliances and GPS-enabled equipments, personal data are collected in larger and larger amounts, and then stored and manipulated for the most diverse purposes. Undeniably, the big-data technology provides enormous benefits to industry, individuals and society, ranging from improving business strategies and boosting quality of service to enhancing scientific progress. On the other hand, however, the collection and manipulation of personal data raises alarming privacy issues. Both the experts and the population at large are becoming increasingly aware of the risks, due to the repeated cases of violations and leaks that keep hitting the headlines. The objective of this project is to develop the theoretical foundations, methods and tools to protect the privacy of the individuals while letting their data to be collected and used for statistical purposes. We aim in particular at developing mechanisms that: (1) can be applied and controlled directly by the user, thus avoiding the need of a trusted party, (2) are robust with respect to combination of information from different sources, and (3) provide an optimal trade-off between privacy and utility. We intend to pursue these goals by developing a new framework for privacy based on the addition of controlled noise to individual data, and associated methods to recover the useful statistical information, and to protect the quality of service.

2 223 779 €

Start date: 2019-10-01, End date: 2024-09-30

Migrations are a central issue of the modern period, particularly since World War One. At the same time, the implementation of a systematic policy of categorization, discrimination, persecution, and extermination of European Jews is one of the major events of the first half of the 20th century. How should the relations between these two histories be understood? The goal of this project is to explore the links between migration and the Holocaust from a transnational microhistorical perspective. To this end, it will implement an original method: producing the collective biography of the Jewish inhabitants from the Polish shtetl of Lubartow from the 1920s to the 1950s, whether they emigrated or stayed behind, whether they were exterminated or survived the Holocaust. This research will, for the first time, reconstruct the trajectories of a group of persecution victims across the different places they travelled through, which is possible today thanks to new access to an impressive body of archives and the affordances of the digital humanities. The methodological and archival challenge is immense. This transnational collective biography explores the directions of individual journeys, the diversity of fates, as well as the connections between those who remained and those who left. By doing so, the LUBARTWORLD project addresses some prominent theoretical issues: the dynamics of a social structure drawn into a major disruption, the variability of social categorizations in diverse national and political contexts, and the complex making of identities. From an epistemological point of view, it will develop innovative ways of reconstructing and analyzing life-course information. Although the project begins with Lubartow, it leads to the world in its globality. Lubartow residents crisscrossed the globe, and their trajectories outline and embody in their own way the upheavals of Europe’s relations with the world before, during, and after the Holocaust.

1 985 083 €

Start date: 2019-09-01, End date: 2024-08-31

SLAVEVOICES has two main groundbreaking scientific goals. First, it aims at fully renewing our approach of the end of slavery, a crucial social transformation in North Africa as a part of the Muslim world. So far historians have explained the abolition and slow vanishing of slavery in this region either as the outcome of European imperialistic interventions or to a lesser extent as resulting from debates among Muslim scholars and leaders who were owning slaves. SLAVEVOICES will instead interpret the end of slavery through the testimonies of the ones who experienced and acted for the end of slavery: namely the testimonies of the slaves and their descendants written in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and European languages. Second, by studying together –and not apart as is often the case– the various groups of slaves in North Africa hailing from Africa, Europe and Asia, SLAVEVOICES will propose a new way of conceiving and writing the history of North Africa. Instead of studying each historical phenomenon according to each national part of this region (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt) as it is has often been the case, SLAVEVOICES will be a concrete attempt at writing a globalized and connected history of modern North Africa. It will explore the reshaping of the connections that groups of slaves built up within North African societies and between this part of the Muslim world and other adjoining societies in Africa, Asia and Europe in the abolition era. SLAVEVOICES will innovate in resituating slave testimonies within a broader history of literacy in North Africa throughout a long nineteenth century, a period in which literacy and written sources underwent major changes in Ottoman and colonial North Africa. Finally through a website, a book, a play, and videos SLAVEVOICES will bring back the voices, the speeches and emotions of nineteenth century slaves to a present audience as new forms of enslavement and social dependency are resurfacing across the Mediterranean.

1 999 975 €

Start date: 2019-10-01, End date: 2024-09-30