Project acronym ACTIVENP
Project Active and low loss nano photonics (ActiveNP)
Researcher (PI) Thomas Arno Klar
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAT LINZ
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), PE3, ERC-2010-StG_20091028
Summary This project aims at designing novel hybrid nanophotonic devices comprising metallic nanostructures and active elements such as dye molecules or colloidal quantum dots. Three core objectives, each going far beyond the state of the art, shall be tackled: (i) Metamaterials containing gain materials: Metamaterials introduce magnetism to the optical frequency range and hold promise to create entirely novel devices for light manipulation. Since present day metamaterials are extremely absorptive, it is of utmost importance to fight losses. The ground-breaking approach of this proposal is to incorporate fluorescing species into the nanoscale metallic metastructures in order to compensate losses by stimulated emission. (ii) The second objective exceeds the ansatz of compensating losses and will reach out for lasing action. Individual metallic nanostructures such as pairs of nanoparticles will form novel and unusual nanometre sized resonators for laser action. State of the art microresonators still have a volume of at least half of the wavelength cubed. Noble metal nanoparticle resonators scale down this volume by a factor of thousand allowing for truly nanoscale coherent light sources. (iii) A third objective concerns a substantial improvement of nonlinear effects. This will be accomplished by drastically sharpened resonances of nanoplasmonic devices surrounded by active gain materials. An interdisciplinary team of PhD students and a PostDoc will be assembled, each scientist being uniquely qualified to cover one of the expertise fields: Design, spectroscopy, and simulation. The project s outcome is twofold: A substantial expansion of fundamental understanding of nanophotonics and practical devices such as nanoscopic lasers and low loss metamaterials.
Summary
This project aims at designing novel hybrid nanophotonic devices comprising metallic nanostructures and active elements such as dye molecules or colloidal quantum dots. Three core objectives, each going far beyond the state of the art, shall be tackled: (i) Metamaterials containing gain materials: Metamaterials introduce magnetism to the optical frequency range and hold promise to create entirely novel devices for light manipulation. Since present day metamaterials are extremely absorptive, it is of utmost importance to fight losses. The ground-breaking approach of this proposal is to incorporate fluorescing species into the nanoscale metallic metastructures in order to compensate losses by stimulated emission. (ii) The second objective exceeds the ansatz of compensating losses and will reach out for lasing action. Individual metallic nanostructures such as pairs of nanoparticles will form novel and unusual nanometre sized resonators for laser action. State of the art microresonators still have a volume of at least half of the wavelength cubed. Noble metal nanoparticle resonators scale down this volume by a factor of thousand allowing for truly nanoscale coherent light sources. (iii) A third objective concerns a substantial improvement of nonlinear effects. This will be accomplished by drastically sharpened resonances of nanoplasmonic devices surrounded by active gain materials. An interdisciplinary team of PhD students and a PostDoc will be assembled, each scientist being uniquely qualified to cover one of the expertise fields: Design, spectroscopy, and simulation. The project s outcome is twofold: A substantial expansion of fundamental understanding of nanophotonics and practical devices such as nanoscopic lasers and low loss metamaterials.
Max ERC Funding
1 494 756 €
Duration
Start date: 2010-10-01, End date: 2015-09-30
Project acronym CRIMMIGRATION
Project 'Crimmigration': Crime Control in the Borderlands of Europe
Researcher (PI) Katja Franko Aas
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITETET I OSLO
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH2, ERC-2010-StG_20091209
Summary Control of migration is becoming an increasingly important task of contemporary policing and criminal justice agencies. The purpose of this project is to map the progressive intertwining and merging of crime control and migration control practices in Europe and to examine their implications.
The project is guided by three sets of research questions: 1) How do contemporary police and criminal justice institutions deal with unwanted mobility and the influx of „aliens‟ (i.e. non-citizens) to their territories? 2) What is the relevance of citizenship for European penal systems? and 3) How do contemporary crime control practices support and perform the task of (cultural and territorial) border control?
The project aims to analyse the impact of the growing emphasis on migration control on criminal justice agencies such as the police, prisons and detention facilities. The basic hypothesis of the project is that migration control objectives are contributing to the development of novel forms of punishment and new rationalities of social control termed „crimmigration‟. The project aims to describe these novel hybrid forms of control since they constitute important conceptual challenges for criminal justice scholarship and require new theoretical perspectives. A question will be asked: what kind of break from traditional criminal justice practices and principles do they represent? Is the focus on punishment and reintegration of offenders gradually being replaced by a focus on diversion, immobilisation and deportation? Moreover what kind of legal, organisational and normative responses do they require?
Summary
Control of migration is becoming an increasingly important task of contemporary policing and criminal justice agencies. The purpose of this project is to map the progressive intertwining and merging of crime control and migration control practices in Europe and to examine their implications.
The project is guided by three sets of research questions: 1) How do contemporary police and criminal justice institutions deal with unwanted mobility and the influx of „aliens‟ (i.e. non-citizens) to their territories? 2) What is the relevance of citizenship for European penal systems? and 3) How do contemporary crime control practices support and perform the task of (cultural and territorial) border control?
The project aims to analyse the impact of the growing emphasis on migration control on criminal justice agencies such as the police, prisons and detention facilities. The basic hypothesis of the project is that migration control objectives are contributing to the development of novel forms of punishment and new rationalities of social control termed „crimmigration‟. The project aims to describe these novel hybrid forms of control since they constitute important conceptual challenges for criminal justice scholarship and require new theoretical perspectives. A question will be asked: what kind of break from traditional criminal justice practices and principles do they represent? Is the focus on punishment and reintegration of offenders gradually being replaced by a focus on diversion, immobilisation and deportation? Moreover what kind of legal, organisational and normative responses do they require?
Max ERC Funding
1 309 800 €
Duration
Start date: 2011-04-01, End date: 2016-03-31
Project acronym ENSEMBLE
Project Neural mechanisms for memory retrieval
Researcher (PI) May-Britt Moser
Host Institution (HI) NORGES TEKNISK-NATURVITENSKAPELIGE UNIVERSITET NTNU
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), LS5, ERC-2010-AdG_20100317
Summary Memory is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in biology. The mammalian brain stores billions of bits of information but the most remarkable property of memory is perhaps not its capacity but the speed at which the correct information can be retrieved from a pool of thousands or millions of competing alternatives. Despite more than hundred years of systematic study of the phenomenon, scientists are still largely ignorant about the mechanisms that enable mammalian brains to outperform even the best search engines. One of the greatest challenges has been the dynamic nature of memory. Whereas memories can be retrieved over time periods as short as milliseconds, underlying coding principles are normally inferred from activity time-averaged across many minutes. In the present proposal, I shall introduce a new ¿teleportation procedure¿ developed in my lab to monitor the representation of past and present environments in large ensembles of rat hippocampal neurons at ethologically valid time scales. By monitoring the evolution of hippocampal ensemble representations at millisecond resolution during retrieval of a non-local experience, I shall ask
(i) what is the minimum temporal unit of a hippocampal representation,
(ii) how is one representational unit replaced by the next in a sequence,
(iii) what external signals control switches between alternative representations,
(iv) how are representations synchronized across anatomical space, and
(v) when do adult-like retrieval mechanisms appear during ontogenesis of the nervous system and to what extent can their early absence be linked to infantile amnesia.
The proposed research programme is expected to identify some of the key principles for dynamic representation and retrieval of episodic memory in the mammalian hippocampus.
Summary
Memory is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in biology. The mammalian brain stores billions of bits of information but the most remarkable property of memory is perhaps not its capacity but the speed at which the correct information can be retrieved from a pool of thousands or millions of competing alternatives. Despite more than hundred years of systematic study of the phenomenon, scientists are still largely ignorant about the mechanisms that enable mammalian brains to outperform even the best search engines. One of the greatest challenges has been the dynamic nature of memory. Whereas memories can be retrieved over time periods as short as milliseconds, underlying coding principles are normally inferred from activity time-averaged across many minutes. In the present proposal, I shall introduce a new ¿teleportation procedure¿ developed in my lab to monitor the representation of past and present environments in large ensembles of rat hippocampal neurons at ethologically valid time scales. By monitoring the evolution of hippocampal ensemble representations at millisecond resolution during retrieval of a non-local experience, I shall ask
(i) what is the minimum temporal unit of a hippocampal representation,
(ii) how is one representational unit replaced by the next in a sequence,
(iii) what external signals control switches between alternative representations,
(iv) how are representations synchronized across anatomical space, and
(v) when do adult-like retrieval mechanisms appear during ontogenesis of the nervous system and to what extent can their early absence be linked to infantile amnesia.
The proposed research programme is expected to identify some of the key principles for dynamic representation and retrieval of episodic memory in the mammalian hippocampus.
Max ERC Funding
2 499 074 €
Duration
Start date: 2011-11-01, End date: 2017-10-31
Project acronym HEMOX
Project The male-female health-mortality paradox
Researcher (PI) Marc Luy
Host Institution (HI) OESTERREICHISCHE AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTEN
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH3, ERC-2010-StG_20091209
Summary "From the 1960s to the 1980s a common wisdom about differences between males and females in health and mortality emerged which was summarised by the well-known phrase ""women are sicker, but men die quicker"". Recently this wisdom has been increasingly questioned. Nevertheless, the general idea of a paradoxical relationship between health and mortality among women and men persists until today. The purpose of this project is to decisively advance the understanding of the paradox by demonstrating that the reverse relationship between sex on the one side and health and mortality on the other is not as paradoxical as it seems. We hypothesise that two factors are mainly responsible for causing this intuitive contradiction. First, the overall reversal in sex morbidity and sex mortality differentials occurs because conditions that figure importantly in morbidity are not very important in mortality, and vice versa. Second, it is very likely that longevity is directly related to the absolute number of life years in ill health. Thus, women show higher morbidity rates not because they are female but because they are the sex with higher life expectancy. We will test these hypotheses in a ""natural experiment"" by analysing the relationship between health and mortality among Catholic nuns and monks from Austria and Germany in comparison to women and men of the general population. Cloister studies have a long scientific tradition and provided path-breaking knowledge for human medicine and demography, including the applicant s research during the last decade. This project follows the line of this tradition and will investigate the male-female health-mortality paradox in a longitudinal setting that is as close as one can get to an ideal long-term experiment in humans."
Summary
"From the 1960s to the 1980s a common wisdom about differences between males and females in health and mortality emerged which was summarised by the well-known phrase ""women are sicker, but men die quicker"". Recently this wisdom has been increasingly questioned. Nevertheless, the general idea of a paradoxical relationship between health and mortality among women and men persists until today. The purpose of this project is to decisively advance the understanding of the paradox by demonstrating that the reverse relationship between sex on the one side and health and mortality on the other is not as paradoxical as it seems. We hypothesise that two factors are mainly responsible for causing this intuitive contradiction. First, the overall reversal in sex morbidity and sex mortality differentials occurs because conditions that figure importantly in morbidity are not very important in mortality, and vice versa. Second, it is very likely that longevity is directly related to the absolute number of life years in ill health. Thus, women show higher morbidity rates not because they are female but because they are the sex with higher life expectancy. We will test these hypotheses in a ""natural experiment"" by analysing the relationship between health and mortality among Catholic nuns and monks from Austria and Germany in comparison to women and men of the general population. Cloister studies have a long scientific tradition and provided path-breaking knowledge for human medicine and demography, including the applicant s research during the last decade. This project follows the line of this tradition and will investigate the male-female health-mortality paradox in a longitudinal setting that is as close as one can get to an ideal long-term experiment in humans."
Max ERC Funding
999 999 €
Duration
Start date: 2011-04-01, End date: 2016-09-30
Project acronym LUISE
Project An integrated socioecological approach to land-use intensity: Analyzing and mapping biophysical stocks/flows and their socioeconomic drivers
Researcher (PI) Karlheinz Erb
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAET KLAGENFURT
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH3, ERC-2010-StG_20091209
Summary Land-use intensity is an essential aspect of the human use of terrestrial ecosystems. In the course of history, intensification of land use allowed to overcome Malthusian traps and supported population growth and im-proved diets. It can be anticipated that intensification will become even more decisive in the future, in the light of a growing world population, surges in biofuel consumption, and the simultaneous mandate to protect the world’s forests. Despite its importance, there is a lack of comprehensive, consistent, systematic, and spa-tially explicit metrics of land-use intensity. In consequence, the causal understanding of the factors, mecha-nisms, determinants and constraints underlying land intensification is unsatisfactory. This is due to the main-stream in land use research that predominantly operates with nominal scales, subdividing the Earth’s surface into discrete land cover units. This hampers the analysis of gradual changes, in particular those which are not related to changes in land cover. Intensification leads exactly to such changes. The overall goal of LUISE is the conceptualization and quantification of land use intensity and to contribute to an improved causal under-standing of land intensification. By applying and significantly extending existing methods of the material and energy flow analysis framework (MEFA), the full cycle of land intensification will be studied: Socioeco-nomic inputs to ecosystems, structural changes within ecosystems, changes in outputs of ecosystems to soci-ety, and the underlying socioeconomic constraints, feedbacks, and thresholds, from top-down macro perspec-tives as well as applying bottom-up approaches. The anticipated new empirical results and insights can allow further conceptualizations and quantifications of land modifications (land change without land cover change), and improve the understanding of the dynamic and complex interplay of society and nature that shapes spatial patterns as well as changes of land systems over time.
Summary
Land-use intensity is an essential aspect of the human use of terrestrial ecosystems. In the course of history, intensification of land use allowed to overcome Malthusian traps and supported population growth and im-proved diets. It can be anticipated that intensification will become even more decisive in the future, in the light of a growing world population, surges in biofuel consumption, and the simultaneous mandate to protect the world’s forests. Despite its importance, there is a lack of comprehensive, consistent, systematic, and spa-tially explicit metrics of land-use intensity. In consequence, the causal understanding of the factors, mecha-nisms, determinants and constraints underlying land intensification is unsatisfactory. This is due to the main-stream in land use research that predominantly operates with nominal scales, subdividing the Earth’s surface into discrete land cover units. This hampers the analysis of gradual changes, in particular those which are not related to changes in land cover. Intensification leads exactly to such changes. The overall goal of LUISE is the conceptualization and quantification of land use intensity and to contribute to an improved causal under-standing of land intensification. By applying and significantly extending existing methods of the material and energy flow analysis framework (MEFA), the full cycle of land intensification will be studied: Socioeco-nomic inputs to ecosystems, structural changes within ecosystems, changes in outputs of ecosystems to soci-ety, and the underlying socioeconomic constraints, feedbacks, and thresholds, from top-down macro perspec-tives as well as applying bottom-up approaches. The anticipated new empirical results and insights can allow further conceptualizations and quantifications of land modifications (land change without land cover change), and improve the understanding of the dynamic and complex interplay of society and nature that shapes spatial patterns as well as changes of land systems over time.
Max ERC Funding
887 121 €
Duration
Start date: 2010-10-01, End date: 2016-06-30
Project acronym MULTIRIGHTS
Project The Legitimacy of Multi-level Human Rights Judiciary
Researcher (PI) Andreas Follesdal
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITETET I OSLO
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH2, ERC-2010-AdG_20100407
Summary The proliferation of human rights treaties at regional and global levels may offer moral foundations for international law. However, many worry that this growth of supervisory organs is illegitimate. Consider, for instance
• The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is overburdened.
• The human rights organs may disagree e.g. on how to balance freedom of expression against protection from hate speech. Which should be obeyed?
• Citizens of well-functioning democracies ask: why should such international organs intervene?
The MultiRights team of international lawyers and political theorists will first scrutinize the claims of legitimacy deficits. We then consider reform proposals for global and European human rights organs: We develop four plausible models, ranging from Primacy of National Courts to a World Court of Human Rights. We will assess the models by four Contested Constitutional Principles of legitimacy, revised for our multilevel legal order: Human Rights values, the Rule of Law, Subsidiarity, and Democracy.
MultiRights thereby provides reasoned comparative assessment of models for human rights regime reforms, and contributes to better standards of legitimacy for international institutions. The findings also help us understand and assess the alleged ‘Constitutionalisation of International Law” - an urgent topic under globalization, when governance beyond states increases in density and impact.
The academic contributions of MultiRights will also benefit several reforms:
• the Interlaken Process on how to improve the ECtHR,
• the accession of the EU to the European Convention on Human Rights under the Lisbon Treaty,
• the UN Secretary General’s calls to reform the Human Rights treaty body system, and
• challenges to the democratic credentials of such human rights review.
Summary
The proliferation of human rights treaties at regional and global levels may offer moral foundations for international law. However, many worry that this growth of supervisory organs is illegitimate. Consider, for instance
• The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is overburdened.
• The human rights organs may disagree e.g. on how to balance freedom of expression against protection from hate speech. Which should be obeyed?
• Citizens of well-functioning democracies ask: why should such international organs intervene?
The MultiRights team of international lawyers and political theorists will first scrutinize the claims of legitimacy deficits. We then consider reform proposals for global and European human rights organs: We develop four plausible models, ranging from Primacy of National Courts to a World Court of Human Rights. We will assess the models by four Contested Constitutional Principles of legitimacy, revised for our multilevel legal order: Human Rights values, the Rule of Law, Subsidiarity, and Democracy.
MultiRights thereby provides reasoned comparative assessment of models for human rights regime reforms, and contributes to better standards of legitimacy for international institutions. The findings also help us understand and assess the alleged ‘Constitutionalisation of International Law” - an urgent topic under globalization, when governance beyond states increases in density and impact.
The academic contributions of MultiRights will also benefit several reforms:
• the Interlaken Process on how to improve the ECtHR,
• the accession of the EU to the European Convention on Human Rights under the Lisbon Treaty,
• the UN Secretary General’s calls to reform the Human Rights treaty body system, and
• challenges to the democratic credentials of such human rights review.
Max ERC Funding
2 430 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2011-06-01, End date: 2016-05-31
Project acronym NANOPHYS
Project Nanophysiology of fast-spiking, parvalbumin-expressing GABAergic interneurons
Researcher (PI) Peter Jonas
Host Institution (HI) INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGYAUSTRIA
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), LS5, ERC-2010-AdG_20100317
Summary In the present proposal, we plan to examine the dendrites, axons, and presynaptic terminals of fast-spiking, parvalbumin-expressing GABAergic interneurons using subcellular patch-clamp methods pioneered by the PI, imaging techniques, and computational approaches.
The goal is to obtain a quantitative nanophysiological picture of signaling in this key type of interneuron. By incorporating realistic BC models into dentate gyrus network models, we will be able to test the contribution of this important type of GABAergic interneuron to complex functions of the dentate gyrus, such as pattern separation, temporal deconvolution, and conversion from grid to place codes. The results may lay the basis for the development of new therapeutic strategies for treatment of diseases of the nervous system, targeting interneurons at subcellularly defined locations.
Summary
In the present proposal, we plan to examine the dendrites, axons, and presynaptic terminals of fast-spiking, parvalbumin-expressing GABAergic interneurons using subcellular patch-clamp methods pioneered by the PI, imaging techniques, and computational approaches.
The goal is to obtain a quantitative nanophysiological picture of signaling in this key type of interneuron. By incorporating realistic BC models into dentate gyrus network models, we will be able to test the contribution of this important type of GABAergic interneuron to complex functions of the dentate gyrus, such as pattern separation, temporal deconvolution, and conversion from grid to place codes. The results may lay the basis for the development of new therapeutic strategies for treatment of diseases of the nervous system, targeting interneurons at subcellularly defined locations.
Max ERC Funding
2 500 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2011-06-01, End date: 2017-02-28
