ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Autophagy is a conserved, lysosomal-mediated pathway required for cell homeostasis and survival. It is controlled by the master regulators of energy (AMPK) and growth (TORC1) and mediated by the ATG (autophagy) proteins. Deregulation of autophagy is implicated in cancer, immunity, infection, aging and neurodegeneration. Autophagosomes form and expand using membranes from the secretory and endocytic pathways but how this occurs is not understood. ATG9, the only transmembrane ATG protein traffics through the cell in vesicles, and is essential for rapid initiation and expansion of the membranes which form the autophagosome. Crucially, how ATG9 functions is unknown. I will determine how ATG9 initiates the formation and expansion of the autophagosome by amino acid starvation through a molecular dissection of proteins resident in ATG9 vesicles which modulate the composition and property of the initiating membrane. I will employ high resolution light and electron microscopy to characterize the nucleation of the autophagosome, proximity-specific biotinylation and quantitative Mass Spectrometry to uncover the proteome required for the function of the ATG9, and optogenetic tools to acutely regulate signaling lipids. Lastly, with our tools and knowledge I will develop an in vitro reconstitution system to define at a molecular level how ATG9 vesicle proteins, membranes that interact with ATG9 vesicles, and other accessory ATG components nucleate and form an autophagosome. In vitro reconstitution of autophagosomes will be assayed biochemically, and by correlative light and cryo-EM and cryo-EM tomography, while functional reconstitution of autophagy will be tested by selective cargo recruitment. The development of a reconstituted system and identification proteins and lipids which are key components for autophagosome formation will provide a means to identify a new generation of targets for translational work leading to manipulation of autophagy for disease related therapies.

2 121 055 €

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

According to the European Commission, to design effective policies for ensuring a “more dynamic, innovative and competitive” economy, it is essential to understand the decision-making process of firms as they differ a lot in terms of their capacities and policy responses (EC 2007). The objective of my future research is to provide such an analysis. BIGlobal will examine the sources of firm growth and market power to provide new insights into welfare and policy in a globalized world. Much of analysis of the global economy is set in the paradigm of markets that allocate resources efficiently and there is little role for policy. But big firms dominate economic activity, especially across borders. How do firms grow and what is the effect of their market power on the welfare impact of globalization? This project will determine how firm decisions matter for the aggregate gains from globalization, the division of these gains across different individuals and their implications for policy design. Over the next five years, I will incorporate richer firms behaviour in models of international trade to understand how trade and industrial policies impact the growth process, especially in less developed markets. The specific questions I will address include: how can trade and competition policy ensure consumers benefit from globalization when firms engaged in international trade have market power, how do domestic policies to encourage agribusiness firms affect the extent to which small farmers gain from trade, how do industrial policies affect firm growth through input linkages, and what is the impact of banking globalization on the growth of firms in the real sector. Each project will combine theoretical work with rich data from developing economies to expand the frontier of knowledge on trade and industrial policy, and to provide a basis for informed policymaking.

1 313 103 €

Start date: 2017-12-01, End date: 2022-11-30

Stellar evolution models are fundamental to nearly all fields of astrophysics, from exoplanet to galactic and extra-galactic research. The heart of the COBOM project is to develop a global physical picture of fundamental mixing processes in stars in order to derive robust and predictive stellar evolution models. The complex dynamics of flows at convective boundaries is a key process in stellar interiors that drives the transport of chemical species and heat, strongly affecting the structure and the evolution of many types of stars. The same physical processes can also drive transport of angular momentum, affecting the rotation evolution and the generation of magnetic field of stars. The treatment of mixing processes at convective boundaries (also referred to as overshooting) is currently one of the major uncertainties in stellar evolution theory. This mixing can dramatically affect the size of a convective core, the lifetime of major burning phases or the surface chemistry over a wide range of stellar masses. The main objectives of this project are to (1) develop a global theoretical framework to describe mixing and heat transport at convective boundaries in stellar interiors, (2) derive new physically-based transport coefficients and parametrizations for one-dimensional stellar evolution models and (3) test the new formalisms against a wide range of observations. We will accomplish these goals by performing the most comprehensive study ever performed of mixing processes in stars using a fundamentally new approach. We will combine the power of multi-dimensional fully compressible time implicit magneto-hydrodynamic simulations and rare event statistics, which are usually applied in finance or climate science. The key strength of the project is to establish a direct link between multi-dimensional results and observations (asteroseismology, eclipsing binaries, color-magnitude diagrams) via the exploitation of 1D stellar evolution models.

2 500 000 €

Start date: 2018-09-01, End date: 2023-08-31

The identity of the dark matter is a fundamental problem in Physics whose solution will have major implications for cosmology, astronomy and particle physics. There is compelling evidence that the dark matter consists of elementary particles created shortly after the Big Bang, but searches for them in the laboratory and from astrophysical sources have proved inconclusive. The currently favoured candidate is cold dark matter or CDM. This forms the basis of the standard model of cosmology, LCDM, whose predictions, dating back to the 1980s, turned out to agree remarkably well with observations covering a staggering range of epochs and scales, from the temperature structure of the cosmic microwave background radiation to the large-scale pattern of galaxy clustering. Yet, this agreement is not exclusive to CDM: models based on other types of particles -- warm, self-interacting or asymmetric, for example -- agree equally well with these data but differ on scales smaller than individual bright galaxies. These are the scales targeted in this application in which we propose a comprehensive investigation of small-scale structure, with the aim of testing dark matter candidates, by focusing on three key astrophysical diagnostics: strong gravitational lensing, dwarf galaxies and stellar halos. We propose a joint theoretical and observational programme exploiting three major developments: SWIFT, a new code developed at Durham that will enable cosmological hydrodynamics simulations an order of magnitude larger than is possible today; SuperBIT, an innovative balloon-borne wide-field imaging telescope that will collect gravitational lensing data for hundreds of galaxy clusters; and DESI, a spectro-photometric survey that will acquire 10 times more spectra of stars in the Milky Way than previous surveys. The particle models that we will consider have predictive power and are disprovable. Our programme has the potential to rule out many dark matter particle candidates, including CDM.

2 493 439 €

Start date: 2018-10-01, End date: 2023-09-30

This proposal presents three broad projects on information frictions in households' credit markets and on the consequences of these frictions for durable good markets. Specifically, an influential theoretical literature in information economics has shown that borrowing constraints can arise in equilibrium when borrowers and lenders have asymmetric information about borrowers' risks. Hence, the first project aims to provide the first empirical analyses of markets (i.e., demand and supply) with asymmetric information and nonexclusive trades---i.e., markets in which households can purchase multiple insurance contracts, such as in life insurance markets, or can open multiple credit lines, such as in credit card markets. The second project aims to study recent regulations of fees and prices in markets for consumer financial products, such as mortgages, that could have the unintended consequences of increasing households' cost of credit and, thus, of tightening their borrowing constraints. Finally, the third project aims to study the role of borrowing constraints in durable goods markets, with a special focus on car markets during the Great Recession. All these projects aim to develop and estimate structural models using data from different markets. I further plan to use the estimated structural parameters to perform counterfactual policy analyses in each of the specific markets analyzed in these projects.

1 550 945 €

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

Within the first few hundred million years after the Big-Bang the first galaxies and stars were born. Sometime soon after, these first objects produced enough energetic photons to reionization the neutral gas in the universe. This frontier of early galaxy assembly has not yet been observed, but will be uncovered by deep imaging and spectroscopy taken with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Key problems include: how the very first galaxies were assembled, and evolved, in their first few Gyr, and the history of reionization. With this ERC funded EPOCHS project I will lead a major effort to investigate these questions using JWST GTO time discovering galaxies before, during, and after the epoch of reionization. This proposal has three interconnected and complementary themes: (i) Identifying the first galaxies and characterizing their UV luminosities, stellar masses, and star formation rates at 7<z<12. JWST imaging and spectroscopy will allow us to make significant progress beyond the current state of the art, and to use these measures to test models of the earliest galaxy assembly. (ii) Using these galaxies we will map the process of reionization: the sources of it, and the time-scale of its onset and duration. Using new diagnostics we will address uncertainties that currently plague this calculation, including escape fractions and the number of ionizing photons, using UV emission lines, spectral shapes, and measuring hardness ratios with radiative transfer models. (iii) We will measure the rest-frame optical structures of galaxies at 3<z<7 to reveal the formation modes of galaxies when they assembled their first masses and structures. We will determine how and when compact galaxies, mergers, dissipative formation in star forming disks, and the formation of bulges and disks are occurring. This includes measuring the formation history of internal components in 3<z<7 galaxies, allowing us to examine how quenching is occurring ‘inside-out’ or ‘outside-in’.

1 951 138 €

Start date: 2020-05-01, End date: 2025-04-30

"Over the past 15 years, my team have pushed the frontier for the most distant known objects to higher redshifts, exploring galaxies when the Universe was young using the Hubble Space Telescope and large ground-based telescopes. As well as discovering galaxies within the first billion years (90percent of the way back in time to the Big Bang), our knowledge of the composition of the Universe has also grown - dark matter and dark energy dictate the expansion history and initial collapse of structures which ultimately form galaxies. We now know that the gas between the galaxies, initially plasma, became mostly neutral about 300,000 years after the Big Bang, but again became plasma about a billion years later. The first few generations of stars to form, with a contribution from high redshift quasars, might be responsible for this reionization, but we have yet to find the galaxies accounting for the bulk of the ionizing photons and key questions remain: what is the contribution from the faintest dwarf galaxies in the luminosity function at high redshift? what fraction of ionizing photons emitted by stars reach the intergalactic gas? is the first generation of stars forming from primordial hydrogen and helium more efficient in producing ionizing photons? I am in a privileged position to address these questions, as a member of the ESA Instrument Science Team since 2005 for the near-infrared spectrograph (NIRSpec) on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), due to launch in May 2020. Much of our 900 hours of guaranteed time will be spectroscopy of high redshift galaxies, and I am leading the deep tier of our survey to get accurate redshifts (vital for luminosity functions), measure the stellar populations (ages and star formation rates), assess the escape fractions of ionizing photons and determine the metal enrichment (potentially finding the long-sought ""Population III"", the first stars to form). With this ERC grant I aim to assemble a team to achieve these science goals. "

2 049 961 €

Start date: 2020-05-01, End date: 2025-04-30

Whether (and why) the market for consumer credit is inefficient is still an open question with important implications for household well-being. The research in this proposal will study sources of inefficiencies in two burgeoning consumer credit institutions: high-cost credit and on-line marketplaces. Each institution serves borrowers on opposite ends of the wealth and credit risk spectrum. Thus, they provide an ideal laboratory for studying the wide range of economic frictions that shape the access and price of credit for households. Despite growing attention from academics and severe scrutiny by policymakers, the economic and social impact of both institutions are yet not well understood. The first stream of projects in the proposal is aimed at providing new evidence on the trade-offs involved in the use of high-cost credit. High-cost credit, such as Payday loans, is often the only source of funding for poor households. Alleviating liquidity shortages with high-cost credit may have negative long term consequences for financial health, an effect often attributed to borrower self-control problems. In the first project of the stream I use data from a Payday lender in the U.K. to explore a new channel for this effect—reputation—that does not rely on borrower irrationality. The second project combines data from 21 police forces in the U.K. to evaluate the social consequences of high-cost credit through the lens of criminal behavior. The second stream of projects characterizes previously unexplored sources of adverse selection in credit markets, with substantive positive and normative implications. Using data from the largest on-line marketplace in the U.S., I aim to demonstrate how asymmetric information distorts maturity choice, and how information gathering by the lender can drive away low-risk borrowers. The final project of this stream will use previously unavailable data to produce the first comprehensive characterization of on-line credit marketplaces worldwide.

1 017 851 €

Start date: 2018-08-01, End date: 2021-07-31

The last decade had seen an increasing recognition that financial markets play a key role over the business cycle. Still, there have not been many detailed, systematic, empirical investigations on the consumption, employment and investment effects of the interaction between macroeconomic policies and the evolving structure of credit markets. This proposal aims to develop a research agenda over the next five years that combines insights from disaggregated data sets --which are either newly available or I propose to construct-- on (i) mortgage originations, (ii) the supply of household financial products and (iii) firms’ debt originations, with the development of theoretical frameworks that introduce credit supply and demand heterogeneity in the analyses of consumption and investment decisions. Three features of this proposal make it of potentially high impact. On the empirical side, the analysis of existing and novel detailed households’, firms’ and lenders’ data sets will allow us to identify new stylized facts on the transmission of monetary policy to real activity through financial markets (and leverage and asset prices in particular). On the theoretical side, these stylized facts will be used to develop and discriminate among competing channels of macroeconomic policy transmission. Finally, the regularity highlighted in both the empirical and theoretical analyses will inform the public debate on the design of future monetary and macro-prudential policy interventions.Each project (i)-(iv) describes an overall theme, which is expected to have several ramifications in terms of publishable papers, policy reports and possibly dissertation contents for PhD student(s).

1 135 940 €

Start date: 2018-08-01, End date: 2021-07-31