ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

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: 2021-06-30

Epithelial barriers protect the body against physical, chemical, and microbial insults. Intestinal epithelium is one of the most actively renewing tissues in the body and a major site of carcinogenesis. Functional in vitro models of intestinal epithelium have been pursued for a long time. They are key elements in basic research, disease modelling, drug discovery, and tissue replacing and have become prime models for adult stem cell research. By taking advantage of the self-organizing properties of intestinal stem cells, intestinal organoids have been recently established, showing cell renewal’s kinetics resembling to the one found in vivo. However, the development of in vitro 3D tissue equivalents accounting for the dimensions, architecture and access to the luminal contents of the in vivo human intestinal tissue together with its self-renewal properties and cell complexity, remains a challenge. The goal of this project is to engineer intestinal epithelial tissue models that mimic physiological characteristics found in in vivo human intestinal tissue, to open up new areas of research on human intestinal diseases. The proposed models will address the in vivo intestinal epithelial cell renewal and migration, the multicell-type differentiation and the epithelial cell interactions with the underlying basement membrane while providing access to the luminal content to go beyond the state-of-the-art organoid models. To do this, we propose to develop an experimental setup that combines microfabrication techniques, tissue engineering components and recent advances in intestinal stem cell research, exploiting stem cell self-organizing characteristics. We anticipate this setup to recapitulate the 3D morphology, the spatio-chemical gradients and the dynamic microenvironment of the living tissue. We expect the new device to prove useful in understanding cell physiology, adult stem cell behaviour, and organ development as well as in modelling human intestinal diseases.

1 997 190 €

Start date: 2015-12-01, End date: 2021-05-31

To build interfaces between the electronic domain and the human nervous system is one of the most demanding challenges of nowadays engineering. Fascinating developments have already been performed such as visual cortical implants for the blind and cochlear implants for the deaf. Yet implantation of most electrical stimulation systems requires complex surgeries which hamper their use for the development of so-called electroceuticals. More importantly, previously developed systems based on central stimulation units are not adequate for applications in which a large number of sites must be individually stimulated over large and mobile body parts, thus hindering neuroprosthetic solutions for patients suffering paralysis due to spinal cord injury or other neurological disorders. A solution to these challenges could consist in developing addressable single-channel wireless microstimulators which could be implanted with simple procedures such as injection. And, indeed, such solution was proposed and tried in the past. However, previous attempts did not achieve satisfactory success because the developed implants were stiff and too large. Further miniaturization was prevented because of the use of inductive coupling and batteries as energy sources. Here I propose to explore an innovative method for performing electrical stimulation in which the implanted microstimulators will operate as rectifiers of bursts of innocuous high frequency current supplied through skin electrodes shaped as garments. This approach has the potential to reduce the diameter of the implants to one-fifth the diameter of current microstimulators and, more significantly, to allow that most of the implants’ volume consists of materials whose density and flexibility match those of neighbouring living tissues for minimizing invasiveness. In fact, implants based on the proposed method will look like short pieces of flexible thread.

1 999 813 €

Start date: 2017-05-01, End date: 2022-04-30

Extreme events often cause local-initial damage to the critical elements of building structures, followed by a cascade of further failures in the rest of the building; a phenomenon known as “progressive collapse”. Current design philosophies are based on giving buildings extensive continuity, so that when a critical element fails its load can be re-distributed among the rest of the structure. However, in certain situations (e.g. initial failure of several columns) this extensive continuity introduces undesirable effects and actually increases the risk of progressive collapse. Segmenting a building into individual units connected only by means of fuses would avoid a failure in one zone propagating to others. While such fuses would provide continuity for normal loads or small local-initial failure, they would “isolate” the different parts of the building when otherwise the forces generated by the initial failure would pull down the rest of the structure. Although fuse segmentation is probably the only alternative that can fill the gaps in the present design philosophies, so far, no studies have been carried out on the possibility of applying it to buildings. Endure’s overall aim is to develop a novel fuse-based segmentation design approach to limit or arrest the propagation of failures in building structures subjected to extreme events. The project will be multidisciplinary and highly ambitious, and will achieve its overall aim by: 1) Developing a performance-based approach for the design of fuse-segmented buildings; 2) Designing, manufacturing and testing fuses for segmenting buildings; and 3) Implementing fuses in segmented realistic building prototypes and testing and validating the new fuse-based approach in these structures. Endure will open up a new research area and design approach, and also deliver novel construction procedures. The project will lead to safer buildings, especially in the case of extreme events with severe consequences for building integrity.

2 509 375 €

Start date: 2022-01-01, End date: 2026-12-31

The epithelium is a cohesive two-dimensional layer of cells attached to a fluid-filled fibrous matrix, which lines most free surfaces and cavities of the body. It serves as a protective barrier with tunable permeability, which must retain integrity in a mechanically active environment. Paradoxically, it must also be malleable enough to self-heal and remodel into functional 3D structures such as villi in our guts or tubular networks. Intrigued by these conflicting material properties, the main idea of this proposal is to view epithelial monolayers as living engineering materials. Unlike lipid bilayers or hydrogels, widely used in biotechnology, cultured epithelia are only starting to be integrated in organ-on-chip microdevices. As for any complex inert material, this program requires a fundamental understanding of the structure-property relationships. (1) Regarding their effective in-plane rheology, at short time-scales epithelia exhibit solid-like behavior while at longer times they flow as a consequence of the only qualitatively understood dynamics of the cell-cell junctional network. (2) As for material failure, excessive tension can lead to epithelial fracture, but as we have recently shown, matrix poroelasticity can also cause hydraulic fracture under stretch. However, it is largely unknown how adhesion molecules, membrane, cytoskeleton and matrix interact to give epithelia their robust and flaw-tolerant resilience. (3) Regarding shaping 3D epithelial structures, besides the classical view of chemical patterning, mechanical buckling is emerging as a major morphogenetic driving force, suggesting that it may be possible design 3D epithelial structures in vitro by mechanical self-assembly. Towards understanding (1,2,3), we will combine a broad range of theoretical, computational and experimental methods. Besides providing fundamental mechanobiological understanding, this project will provide a framework to manipulate epithelia in bioinspired technologies.

1 989 875 €

Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31

This project examines the normative significance of procreation and parenthood for theories of justice. Important questions of justice about the family arise once we acknowledge and keep in view that procreation and parenthood are both integral to the existence of any society (and therefore, a just society), and that they involve substantial benefits and burdens for parents, children, and society at large. Yet existing theories of justice generally neglect these questions by assuming that the principles they formulate are to regulate the main institutions of societies constituted by fully formed adult individuals whose creation and care are taken as given. The project identifies and analyses three main sets of questions about family justice: 1) Does justice require that parents and non-parents share, and share equally, the costs and benefits of having children, and how do different answers to this question bear on our theory of distributive justice? 2) What are the claims of justice that we have as children, how do they relate to those we have as adults, and who bears the correlative duties? 3) Do all contemporaries, regardless of whether they are parents or non-parents, have the same obligations of justice towards future generations, and how, if at all, are the justification and the content of those obligations affected by considerations about what parents owe their children and parents and non-parents owe to each other? Addressing these questions contributes to developing normative-theoretical framework needed to address pressing public policy concerns, and also turns out to be more central to the formulation of a complete and defensible theory of justice than political philosophers have realised to date.

811 750 €

Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2021-02-28

This project aims to go significantly beyond the state of the art in several fundamental questions in PDEs with a clear geometric flavor. Central to this proposal is the Euler equation for an incompressible fluid, where the topics that I will be concerned with range from free boundary problems where I will strive to prove that the curvature of the interface blows up in finite time due to the appearance of kinks of controlled geometry, to the existence of smooth stationary solutions that feature chaotic trajectories confined in knotted vortex tubes of any topology, as conjectured by V.I. Arnold over fifty years ago. I will also consider a number of questions in spectral theory about the geometry of the eigenfunctions of the Laplacian and of the curl operator (the so called Beltrami fields, of crucial importance in the study of stationary Euler flows), analyze the process of creation and destruction of vortex structures in the 3D Navier-Stokes and Gross-Pitaevskii equations, consider blowup problems in magnetohydrodynamics, develop global approximation theorems for dispersive equations, and study the limiting measures of a sequence of solutions to the Seiberg-Witten equation. Key for the feasibility of this deep, ambitious project is that these topics are by no means disjoint, so some common themes and fundamental ideas keep coming up in protean forms throughout the research project, and that I have already achieved major results in essentially all the topics covered in the proposal. This includes the proofs of well-known conjectures in fluid mechanics and spectral theory due to Lord Kelvin (1875), V.I. Arnold (1965), S.T. Yau (1993) and M. Berry (2001). The award of a Consolidator Grant would allow me to consolidate both my position as a leader in my fields of interest and the top-level research group on these topics that I am building.

1 825 163 €

Start date: 2021-03-01, End date: 2026-02-28

Following promising early breakthroughs, progress in the development of high-performance multicomponent organic energy materials has stalled due to a bottleneck in device optimization. FOREMAT will develop a breakthrough technology to overcome this bottleneck by shifting from fabrication-intense to measurement-intense assessment methods, enabling rapid multi-parameter optimization of novel systems. Our goal is to deliver organic material systems with a step-change in performance, bringing them close to the expected market turn point, including panchromatic organic photovoltaics with ca 15% efficiencies and thermoelectric devices that could revolutionize waste heat recovery by their flexibility, lightweight and high power factor. The development of multicomponent materials promises to dramatically improve the cost, efficiency and stability of organic energy devices. For example, they allow to engineer broad-band absorption in photovoltaics matched to the sun’s spectrum, or to create composites that conduct electricity like metals while thermally insulate like cotton yielding thermoelectric devices beyond the state-of-the-art. Despite these advantages, the long time required to evaluate promising organic multinaries currently limits their development. We will circumvent this problem by developing a high-throughput technology that will allow evaluation times up to two orders of magnitude faster saving, at the same time, around 90% of material. To meet these ambitious goals, we will advance novel fabrication tools and create samples bearing a high density of information arising from 2-dimensional gradual variations in relevant parameters that will be sequentially tested with increasing resolution in order to determine optimum values with high precision. This quantitative step will enable a disruptive qualitative change as in depth multidimensional studies will lead to design rationales for multicomponent systems with step-change performance in energy applications.

2 423 894 €

Start date: 2015-10-01, End date: 2022-01-31

Researchers and policymakers alike have highlighted the potential efficiency gains of a global production structure. However, such linkages also raise the possibility of risks. This proposal tackles both empirical and theoretical challenges in incorporating the microeconomic structure of trade and international production networks in the study of the propagation of shocks internationally, and their impact on macroeconomic interdependence. Using newly constructed micro-level datasets, I provide quantitative analysis of the importance of the linkages in multicountry general equilibrium models of trade. First, using firm export and imported-input linkages, I provide a novel model-based estimation strategy to identify the role of country and firm-level shocks, and the implications of these estimates for the transmission of shocks across borders. By using structural trade models to estimate shocks at the firm level and studying the implications for the transmission of shocks across borders, I help bridge the micro-macro nexus in international economics. Second, I take an even more granular focus by studying the role of firm-to-firm production linkages in transmitting shocks across countries. To do so, I exploit a novel matching procedure between a country’s administrative dataset and cross-country firm-level data. I further build on these data by adding in domestic bank-firm relationships. This strategy allows for the study of how financial shocks are exported abroad via firms’ trade and multinational linkages. Third, I incorporate the insights from the empirical work into a full-scale multicountry general equilibrium model of trade, which allows for firm-level heterogeneity and microeconomic and macroeconomics shocks. I use the model for a quantitative study of the cross-country transmission of the different shocks via trade. This allows me to perform counterfactuals and examine the impact of policies, such as how opening to trade impacts macroeconomic interdependence.

1 381 250 €

Start date: 2017-05-01, End date: 2022-04-30