ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

This project has the potential to radically change current understanding of cultic and social transformation in the post-exilic temple community of Jerusalem (c. 6th-4th centuries BCE), an important formative phase of ancient Judaism. “BABYLON” draws on recent, ground-breaking advances in the study of cuneiform texts to illuminate the Babylonian environment of the Judean exile, the socio-historical context which gave rise to the transformative era in Second Temple Judaism. In particular, these new data show that the parallels between Babylonian and post-exilic forms of cultic and social organization were substantially more far-reaching than presently recognized in Biblical scholarship. “BABYLON” will study the extent of these similarities and explore the question how Babylonian models could have influenced the restoration effort in Jerusalem. This goal will be achieved through four sub-projects. P1 will study the social dynamics and intellectual universe of the Babylonian priesthood. P2 will finalize the publication of cuneiform archives of Babylonian priests living in the time of the exile. P3 will identify the exact areas of change in the post-exilic temple community of Jerusalem. P4, the synthesis, will draw from each of these sub-projects to present a comparative study of the Second Temple and contemporary Babylonian models of cultic and social organization, and to propose a strategy of research into the possible routes of transmission between Babylonia and Jerusalem. The research will be carried out by three team members: the PI (P1 and P4), a PhD in Assyriology (P2) and a post-doctoral researcher in Biblical Studies specialized in the Second Temple period (P3 and P4). The participation of the wider academic community will be invited at two moments in the course of the project, in the form of a workshop and an international conference. “BABYLON” will adopt an interdisciplinary approach by bringing together Assyriologists and Biblical scholars for a much-needed dialogue, thereby exploding the artificial boundaries that currently exist in the academic landscape between these two fields.

1 200 000 €

Start date: 2009-09-01, End date: 2015-08-31

The aim of the proposed project is to shed light on early childhood gender-differentiated socialization and gender-specific susceptibility to parenting within families in relation to disruptive behaviour in boys and girls in the first four years of life. The popular saying boys will be boys refers to the observation that boys show more disruptive behaviours (e.g., noncompliance or aggression) than girls, a pattern that has been confirmed frequently in scientific research. There is also evidence that parents treat boys differently from girls in ways that are likely to foster boys disruptive behaviour, and that boys are more susceptible to problematic family functioning than girls. The crucial question is whether gender differences in socialization, susceptibility to socialization, and children s behavioural outcomes are also salient when the same parents are doing the parenting of both a boy and a girl. Within-family comparisons are necessary to account for structural differences between families. To this end, families with two children born 22-26 months apart will be recruited from the general population. To account for birth order and gender-combination effects, the sample includes four groups of 150 families each, with the following sibling combinations: girl-boy, boy-girl, girl-girl, and boy-boy. The study has a four-wave longitudinal design, based on the youngest sibling with assessments at ages 12, 24, 36, and 48 months, because gender differences in disruptive behaviour develop during the toddler years. Each assessment consists of two home visits: one with mother and one with father, including observations of both children and of the children separately. Parenting behaviours will be studied in reaction to specific child behaviours, including aggression, noncompliance, and prosocial behaviours.

1 611 970 €

Start date: 2010-02-01, End date: 2015-03-31

CONTEXT - Nanoporous structures are used for application in catalysis, molecular separation, fuel cells, dye sensitized solar cells etc. Given the near molecular size of the porous network, it is extremely challenging to modify the interior surface of the pores after the nanoporous material has been synthesized. THIS PROPOSAL - Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) is envisioned as a novel technique for creating catalytically active sites and for controlling the pore size distribution in nanoporous materials. ALD is a self-limited growth method that is characterized by alternating exposure of the growing film to precursor vapours, resulting in the sequential deposition of (sub)monolayers. It provides atomic level control of thickness and composition, and is currently used in micro-electronics to grow films into structures with aspect ratios of up to 100 / 1. We aim to make the fundamental breakthroughs necessary to enable atomic layer deposition to engineer the composition, size and shape of the interior surface of nanoporous materials with aspect ratios in excess of 10,000 / 1. POTENTIAL IMPACT Achieving these objectives will enable atomic level engineering of the interior surface of any porous material. We plan to focus on three specific applications where our results will have both medium and long term impacts: - Engineering the composition of pore walls using ALD, e.g. to create catalytic sites (e.g. Al for acid sites, Ti for redox sites, or Pt, Pd or Ni) - chemical functionalization of the pore walls with atomic level control can result in breakthrough applications in the fields of catalysis and sensors. - Atomic level control of the size of nanopores through ALD controlling the pore size distribution of molecular sieves can potentially lead to breakthrough applications in molecular separation and filtration. - Nanocasting replication of a mesoporous template by means of ALD can result in the mass-scale production of nanotubes.

1 432 800 €

Start date: 2010-01-01, End date: 2014-12-31

Human rights are under pressure, in Europe as elsewhere, due to several developments, namely [1] War on terror: the pressures generated by competing discourses [2] Coping with the dangers of rights inflation [3] Conflicting rights: how to handle rights as contested claims [4] The challenges of dealing with universality under fire In this context, the human rights leadership of the European Court of Human Rights is of crucial importance. Yet the Court is not fit for purpose. Inconsistencies and sloppy legal reasoning undermine both its credibility and the impact of its decisions. The research programme that I propose will strengthen the consistency and persuasiveness of Court s legal reasoning so as to improve its accountability and transparency. My aim is to identify new technical solutions for important human rights problems, by the development and application of creative methodologies. The substantive innovations within the field of European human rights law that I propose to make are: [a] the development of new legal tools, which will consistently integrate the accommodation of the particularities of non-dominant groups into the reasoning of the European Court of Human Rights [b] the development of a new theoretical framework combining minimum and maximum approaches to human rights protection, followed by its translation into clear legal criteria for use by the European Court of Human Rights [c] the development of a script that will enable the adoption of a consistent approach by the European Court of Human Rights to conflicts between human rights My methodological approach is characterized by the combination of empirical and normative dimensions, a 360° comparison, and the integration of qualitative research methods (interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders).

1 370 000 €

Start date: 2009-11-01, End date: 2014-10-31

The project presents an economic history and socio-cultural reconstruction of Japan in the age of the great depression; it is an attempt to demonstrate the depression's 'total' or multicontextual implications by outlining different but complimentary views of what was defined as the depression's core problems (and their possible solutions) within different social classes and within different strands of thought. Seen in historical perspective, it covers the period from the 'ShMwa financial crisis' (1927) until the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War (1937). The project consists out of three components: First, it addresses the macro-economic ideas in vogue at the time. It specifically concentrates on the personalities and roles of finance ministers Inoue Junnosuke • –K© and especially Takahashi Korekiyo ØK/ ('Japan's Keynes'), who has widely been credited for smoothening the role of the global depression on the Japanese economy. The second part of the project rests with the origins of depression in Japan's official and semi-official colonies in 1927 and the role the latter played in fueling the later crisis on the Japanese mainland. The project investigates the role of speculation, and inquires to which degree the effects of depression were 'imported' from the subsidiary economies of Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, and Manchuria. Third, as this project has a strong focus on the role economic realities were identified ('semantics'), it also develops a cultural history of the age of depression. The project identifies the rise of a new vocabulary and discourse in an era obsessed with the idea of an economic and moral dead end (ikizumari).

549 442 €

Start date: 2009-10-01, End date: 2014-09-30

The world's languages differ substantially from each other. Yet, all children learn the language(s) they are born into quite easily. A major scientific question in language has been to what extent follows a universal trajectory based on an innate design for language, and to what extent it is shaped by specific properties of the language that is being learned. By comparing the acquisition of a spoken language with a language that uses a visuo-spatial format, namely signed languages, a unique window of opportunity is created for investigating this fundamental question. Compared to spoken languages, signed languages represent spatial relations in an analogue way rather than arbitrarily. The proposed study will use a novel approach to investigate whether these differences influence the trajectory of how deaf versus hearing children learn to express spatial relations in their native languages (i.e., Turkish Sign Language versus Turkish). Spatial language development of deaf children will be compared with spoken language development as well as to the co-speech gestures of hearing children as the first time. Thus the proposed study will bring together state-of-the-art research in language acquisition, sign language, and gesture studies in a unique and ground-breaking way. Furthermore gathering data on acquisition of less studied and typologically different signed and spoken languages is critical to test some of previous research results based on Western languages. Due to spread use of cochlear implants fewer deaf children learn sign languages in European countries. The context in Turkey provides an unprecedented opportunity to conduct such a study with many participants before cochlear implants are also widespread in Turkey.

1 159 000 €

Start date: 2010-01-01, End date: 2014-12-31

Stem cells at the base of the intestinal crypts are in a dynamic equilibrium with their differentiated derivatives. Homeostatic equilibria depend on the presence of negative feedback loops. The role of the Wnt signaling pathway as a driver of epithelial stem cell self renewal and proliferation in the intestine has been relatively well characterized. Much less is known about the negative feedback signals that must exist to control stem cell behavior and the way these may be deregulated in disease. We found that Indian hedgehog is secreted by differentiated intestinal epithelial cells and acts as a negative feedback signal. Hedgehog signaling acts as a break on Wnt signaling in intestinal precursor cells via a secondary signal in the mesenchyme. We will use conditional mutant mice, our large biobank of patient materials and in vitro experiments to further characterize the signals involved in this feedback loop. Our objective is to study the role of this epithelial mesenchymal signaling circuit in the normal intestine and examine the way it is deregulated in intestinal cancer development and inflammation.

1 524 462 €

Start date: 2009-10-01, End date: 2014-09-30

Living organisms change and evolve because of mutations in their DNA. Recent findings suggest that some DNA sequences are hypervariable and evolvable , while others are extremely robust and remain constant over evolutionary timescales. The long-term goal of our research is to combine theory and experiments to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying genetic robustness and evolvability. Apart from the fundamental aspects, we also plan to explore practical facets, including swift evolution of pathogens and construction of hypervariable modules for synthetic biology. In this proposal we focus on one specific topic, namely the role of tandem repeats as hypervariable modules in genomes. Tandem repeats are short DNA sequences that are repeated head-to-tail. Such repeats have traditionally been considered as non-functional junk DNA and they are therefore mostly ignored. However, our ongoing research shows that tandem repeats often occur in coding and regulatory sequences. The repeats show mutation rates that are 10 to 10.000 fold higher than mutation rates in the rest of the genome. These frequent mutations alter the function and/or expression of genes, allowing organisms to swiftly adapt to novel environments. Hence, repeats may be a common mechanism for organisms to generate potentially beneficial variability in certain regions of the genome, while keeping other regions stable and robust (Rando and Verstrepen, Cell 128: 655; Verstrepen et al., Nature Genetics 37: 986; Verstrepen et al., Nature Microbiol. 2: 15). We propose a multidisciplinary systems approach to unravel the biological role of repeats. First, we will use bioinformatics to screen various model genomes and identify, categorize and analyze all tandem repeat loci in the model eukaryote Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Using this data, we will select a subset of repeats and apply experimental techniques to investigate the functional consequences of mutations in these repeats.

1 753 527 €

Start date: 2009-12-01, End date: 2014-11-30

Tropical forests cover just 7% of the Earth s surface, but store 25% of the global terrestrial carbon pool. Since they are so rich in carbon, net loss or uptake of carbon by tropical forests has important implications for atmospheric CO2 levels. Thus, tropical forests can speed up climate change by net emission of CO2 or slow it down by net sequestration. The rise in atmospheric CO2 level since the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the resulting climatic changes have certainly affected tropical forest dynamics. Understanding the impacts of these changes so far is crucial to predict future responses. Recent studies have shown that tropical forests have acted as carbon sinks over the last decades. However, it is unclear whether these forests have accumulated biomass already over the longer periods of time during which CO2 levels have risen and climate has changed. It is also unknown what has caused the observed biomass increase. The proposed study has the objective to detect, explain and predict long-term climate change effects on tropical tree dynamics. To this end, I will apply three techniques which are new to this field: tree ring analysis, stable isotope measurements and tree growth modelling. This is the first pan-tropical study that analyses centennial-scale tree growth. The study will be conducted at three sites (Bolivia, Cameroon, Thailand) and includes 15 tree species. I will test for gradual changes in long-term tree growth using tree ring data. Stable isotopes (C, O) will be measured to reconstruct past climate and detect responses to CO2 rise. The influence of changes in forest dynamics on tree growth will also be assessed. Finally, I will develop and apply physiological tree growth models and population models to unravel the complex interactive effects of climatic changes, CO2 rise and light climate on tree growth and population dynamics.

1 729 200 €

Start date: 2010-02-01, End date: 2015-01-31