Project acronym Active-DNA
Project Computationally Active DNA Nanostructures
Researcher (PI) Damien WOODS
Host Institution (HI) NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND MAYNOOTH
Country Ireland
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), PE6, ERC-2017-COG
Summary During the 20th century computer technology evolved from bulky, slow, special purpose mechanical engines to the now ubiquitous silicon chips and software that are one of the pinnacles of human ingenuity. The goal of the field of molecular programming is to take the next leap and build a new generation of matter-based computers using DNA, RNA and proteins. This will be accomplished by computer scientists, physicists and chemists designing molecules to execute ``wet'' nanoscale programs in test tubes. The workflow includes proposing theoretical models, mathematically proving their computational properties, physical modelling and implementation in the wet-lab.
The past decade has seen remarkable progress at building static 2D and 3D DNA nanostructures. However, unlike biological macromolecules and complexes that are built via specified self-assembly pathways, that execute robotic-like movements, and that undergo evolution, the activity of human-engineered nanostructures is severely limited. We will need sophisticated algorithmic ideas to build structures that rival active living systems. Active-DNA, aims to address this challenge by achieving a number of objectives on computation, DNA-based self-assembly and molecular robotics. Active-DNA research work will range from defining models and proving theorems that characterise the computational and expressive capabilities of such active programmable materials to experimental work implementing active DNA nanostructures in the wet-lab.
Summary
During the 20th century computer technology evolved from bulky, slow, special purpose mechanical engines to the now ubiquitous silicon chips and software that are one of the pinnacles of human ingenuity. The goal of the field of molecular programming is to take the next leap and build a new generation of matter-based computers using DNA, RNA and proteins. This will be accomplished by computer scientists, physicists and chemists designing molecules to execute ``wet'' nanoscale programs in test tubes. The workflow includes proposing theoretical models, mathematically proving their computational properties, physical modelling and implementation in the wet-lab.
The past decade has seen remarkable progress at building static 2D and 3D DNA nanostructures. However, unlike biological macromolecules and complexes that are built via specified self-assembly pathways, that execute robotic-like movements, and that undergo evolution, the activity of human-engineered nanostructures is severely limited. We will need sophisticated algorithmic ideas to build structures that rival active living systems. Active-DNA, aims to address this challenge by achieving a number of objectives on computation, DNA-based self-assembly and molecular robotics. Active-DNA research work will range from defining models and proving theorems that characterise the computational and expressive capabilities of such active programmable materials to experimental work implementing active DNA nanostructures in the wet-lab.
Max ERC Funding
2 349 603 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-11-01, End date: 2023-10-31
Project acronym MISFIRES
Project Misfires and Market Innovation: Toward a Collaborative Turn in Organising Markets
Researcher (PI) Susi Geiger
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN
Country Ireland
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH3, ERC-2017-COG
Summary MISFIRES opens up new theoretical and empirical horizons for analysing and innovating ‘concerned markets’, where multiple actors’ interests, values and concerns clash. It asks how actors can engage with a market’s failures to challenge its organisation and make it more collaborative, more open to civic values and to social or political concerns. Concerned markets are contested by diverse actors with equally diverse perspectives and value measures. Evaluating such a market’s efficiency is as much of an illusion as redesigning its inner workings on a blackboard. We need new conceptual frameworks to understand how to innovate concerned markets from the inside to make them ‘better’ (as defined by concerned actors), and we urgently need empirical insights into how collaborative action in markets with such social and political stakes may translate into market change. MISFIRES relies on science and technology studies, pragmatic sociology and critical market studies to shift thinking around market organisation from failure and design to collaboration and experimentation. I devise an ethnographic and participatory inquiry to explore how a market’s failures can lead us to markets that are more attentive to and accommodating of the concerns they create. I choose three exemplary contested markets in healthcare (licensing of antiretroviral drugs, Hepatitis C pricing, and the sale of DNA information) and two emergent controversies to investigate the activities concerned actors undertake, and the instruments and devices they experiment with, to re-organise that market. MISFIRES will comprehensively map, engage in, and conceptualise this collaborative turn in organising markets. With this, MISFIRES will guide new academic and policy thinking by establishing how:
1) concerned actors voice and mobilise around the notion that a market has ‘failed’ them;
2) concerned actors seek to negotiate and address market failures;
3) this process may lead to ‘better’ markets.
Summary
MISFIRES opens up new theoretical and empirical horizons for analysing and innovating ‘concerned markets’, where multiple actors’ interests, values and concerns clash. It asks how actors can engage with a market’s failures to challenge its organisation and make it more collaborative, more open to civic values and to social or political concerns. Concerned markets are contested by diverse actors with equally diverse perspectives and value measures. Evaluating such a market’s efficiency is as much of an illusion as redesigning its inner workings on a blackboard. We need new conceptual frameworks to understand how to innovate concerned markets from the inside to make them ‘better’ (as defined by concerned actors), and we urgently need empirical insights into how collaborative action in markets with such social and political stakes may translate into market change. MISFIRES relies on science and technology studies, pragmatic sociology and critical market studies to shift thinking around market organisation from failure and design to collaboration and experimentation. I devise an ethnographic and participatory inquiry to explore how a market’s failures can lead us to markets that are more attentive to and accommodating of the concerns they create. I choose three exemplary contested markets in healthcare (licensing of antiretroviral drugs, Hepatitis C pricing, and the sale of DNA information) and two emergent controversies to investigate the activities concerned actors undertake, and the instruments and devices they experiment with, to re-organise that market. MISFIRES will comprehensively map, engage in, and conceptualise this collaborative turn in organising markets. With this, MISFIRES will guide new academic and policy thinking by establishing how:
1) concerned actors voice and mobilise around the notion that a market has ‘failed’ them;
2) concerned actors seek to negotiate and address market failures;
3) this process may lead to ‘better’ markets.
Max ERC Funding
1 923 780 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-08-01, End date: 2023-07-31
Project acronym NeoplAT
Project Neoplatonism and Abrahamic Traditions. A Comparative Analysis of the Middle East, Byzantium and the Latin West (9th-16th Centuries)
Researcher (PI) Dragos Gheorghe CALMA
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN
Country Ireland
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH5, ERC-2017-COG
Summary NeoplAT offers a fresh and thoroughly documented account of the impact of Pagan Neoplatonism on the Abrahamic traditions. It focuses mainly, but not exclusively, on the Elements of Theology of Proclus (fifth century) which occupies a unique place in the history of thought. Together with its ninth-century Arabic adaptation, the Book of Causes, it has been translated, adapted, refuted and commented upon by Muslim, Jewish and Christian thinkers across centuries, up to the dawn of modernity. Despite a renewed interest in Proclus’ legacy in recent years, one still observes a tendency to repeat conventional hypotheses focused on a limited range of well-studied authors. This project radically challenges these conservative narratives both by analysing invaluable, previously ignored resources and by developing an innovative comparative approach that embraces a variety of research methods and disciplines. Specialists in Arabic, Greek and Latin history of ideas, philology, palaeography and lexicography develop an intense interdisciplinary research laboratory investigating the influence of Proclus on the mutual exchanges between the scriptural monotheisms from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries. Based on fundamental archival examinations in underused library collections, NeoplAT aims (1) to identify new Arabic and Latin manuscripts and to continue to explore a corpus of texts recently discovered by the PI, representing a largely unknown intellectual heritage; (2) to retrace the scholarly networks by which Neoplatonism was transmitted between the Middle East, Byzantium and the Latin West, with particular attention to the dynamics of exchange within each cultural milieu; (3) to analyse the impact of Proclus on the history of metaphysics and on the relations between philosophy and theology within the Abrahamic traditions. NeoplAT achieves these goals through a collaborative, adapted methodology; its specific outputs will provide research tools for the broader academic community.
Summary
NeoplAT offers a fresh and thoroughly documented account of the impact of Pagan Neoplatonism on the Abrahamic traditions. It focuses mainly, but not exclusively, on the Elements of Theology of Proclus (fifth century) which occupies a unique place in the history of thought. Together with its ninth-century Arabic adaptation, the Book of Causes, it has been translated, adapted, refuted and commented upon by Muslim, Jewish and Christian thinkers across centuries, up to the dawn of modernity. Despite a renewed interest in Proclus’ legacy in recent years, one still observes a tendency to repeat conventional hypotheses focused on a limited range of well-studied authors. This project radically challenges these conservative narratives both by analysing invaluable, previously ignored resources and by developing an innovative comparative approach that embraces a variety of research methods and disciplines. Specialists in Arabic, Greek and Latin history of ideas, philology, palaeography and lexicography develop an intense interdisciplinary research laboratory investigating the influence of Proclus on the mutual exchanges between the scriptural monotheisms from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries. Based on fundamental archival examinations in underused library collections, NeoplAT aims (1) to identify new Arabic and Latin manuscripts and to continue to explore a corpus of texts recently discovered by the PI, representing a largely unknown intellectual heritage; (2) to retrace the scholarly networks by which Neoplatonism was transmitted between the Middle East, Byzantium and the Latin West, with particular attention to the dynamics of exchange within each cultural milieu; (3) to analyse the impact of Proclus on the history of metaphysics and on the relations between philosophy and theology within the Abrahamic traditions. NeoplAT achieves these goals through a collaborative, adapted methodology; its specific outputs will provide research tools for the broader academic community.
Max ERC Funding
1 992 590 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-05-01, End date: 2023-04-30
Project acronym THE FALL
Project The Fall of 1200BC: The role of migration and conflict in social crises at end of the Bronze Age in South-eastern Europe
Researcher (PI) Barry MOLLOY
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN
Country Ireland
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH6, ERC-2017-COG
Summary This project explores changes in migration and conflict at the end of the Bronze Age (ca.1300-1000 BC) and their relevance for understanding the collapse of Europe’s first urban civilisation in the Aegean and proto-urban groups of the Balkans. The objective is to uncover the human face of this turning point in European prehistory by directly tracing the movement of people and the spread of new social practices across cultural boundaries. Hotly debated ancient tales of migrations are tested for the first time using recent advances in genetic and isotopic methods that can measure human mobility. Combined with mortuary research, this will precisely define relations between personal mobility and status, gender, identity and health to explore social scenarios in which people moved between groups.
To better understand the context of mobility, the project also evaluates social networks through which cultural traditions moved within and between distinct societies. For this purpose, regionally particular ways for making and using objects are analysed to explore how practices were exchanged and how types of objects shaped, and were shaped by, their new contexts of use. Metalwork is chosen for this research because new forms came to be widely shared across the region during the crisis, and we can employ a novel suite of analytic methods that explore how this material exposes wider social changes.
As personal and cultural mobility took place in social landscapes, the changing strategies for controlling access and mobility in settlement organisation are next explored. The character and causes of conflicts arising through these diverse venues for interaction are identified and we assess if they were catalysts for, or consequences of, unstable social systems.
THE FALL uses new primary research to test how this interplay between local developments, cultural transmissions and movement of people shaped the processes and events leading to the collapse of these early complex societies
Summary
This project explores changes in migration and conflict at the end of the Bronze Age (ca.1300-1000 BC) and their relevance for understanding the collapse of Europe’s first urban civilisation in the Aegean and proto-urban groups of the Balkans. The objective is to uncover the human face of this turning point in European prehistory by directly tracing the movement of people and the spread of new social practices across cultural boundaries. Hotly debated ancient tales of migrations are tested for the first time using recent advances in genetic and isotopic methods that can measure human mobility. Combined with mortuary research, this will precisely define relations between personal mobility and status, gender, identity and health to explore social scenarios in which people moved between groups.
To better understand the context of mobility, the project also evaluates social networks through which cultural traditions moved within and between distinct societies. For this purpose, regionally particular ways for making and using objects are analysed to explore how practices were exchanged and how types of objects shaped, and were shaped by, their new contexts of use. Metalwork is chosen for this research because new forms came to be widely shared across the region during the crisis, and we can employ a novel suite of analytic methods that explore how this material exposes wider social changes.
As personal and cultural mobility took place in social landscapes, the changing strategies for controlling access and mobility in settlement organisation are next explored. The character and causes of conflicts arising through these diverse venues for interaction are identified and we assess if they were catalysts for, or consequences of, unstable social systems.
THE FALL uses new primary research to test how this interplay between local developments, cultural transmissions and movement of people shaped the processes and events leading to the collapse of these early complex societies
Max ERC Funding
1 998 779 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-04-01, End date: 2023-03-31
