Project acronym ADAPT
Project Life in a cold climate: the adaptation of cereals to new environments and the establishment of agriculture in Europe
Researcher (PI) Terence Austen Brown
Host Institution (HI) THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
Country United Kingdom
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2013-ADG
Summary "This project explores the concept of agricultural spread as analogous to enforced climate change and asks how cereals adapted to new environments when agriculture was introduced into Europe. Archaeologists have long recognized that the ecological pressures placed on crops would have had an impact on the spread and subsequent development of agriculture, but previously there has been no means of directly assessing the scale and nature of this impact. Recent work that I have directed has shown how such a study could be carried out, and the purpose of this project is to exploit these breakthroughs with the goal of assessing the influence of environmental adaptation on the spread of agriculture, its adoption as the primary subsistence strategy, and the subsequent establishment of farming in different parts of Europe. This will correct the current imbalance between our understanding of the human and environmental dimensions to the domestication of Europe. I will use methods from population genomics to identify loci within the barley and wheat genomes that have undergone selection since the beginning of cereal cultivation in Europe. I will then use ecological modelling to identify those loci whose patterns of selection are associated with ecogeographical variables and hence represent adaptations to local environmental conditions. I will assign dates to the periods when adaptations occurred by sequencing ancient DNA from archaeobotanical assemblages and by computer methods that enable the temporal order of adaptations to be deduced. I will then synthesise the information on environmental adaptations with dating evidence for the spread of agriculture in Europe, which reveals pauses that might be linked to environmental adaptation, with demographic data that indicate regions where Neolithic populations declined, possibly due to inadequate crop productivity, and with an archaeobotanical database showing changes in the prevalence of individual cereals in different regions."
Summary
"This project explores the concept of agricultural spread as analogous to enforced climate change and asks how cereals adapted to new environments when agriculture was introduced into Europe. Archaeologists have long recognized that the ecological pressures placed on crops would have had an impact on the spread and subsequent development of agriculture, but previously there has been no means of directly assessing the scale and nature of this impact. Recent work that I have directed has shown how such a study could be carried out, and the purpose of this project is to exploit these breakthroughs with the goal of assessing the influence of environmental adaptation on the spread of agriculture, its adoption as the primary subsistence strategy, and the subsequent establishment of farming in different parts of Europe. This will correct the current imbalance between our understanding of the human and environmental dimensions to the domestication of Europe. I will use methods from population genomics to identify loci within the barley and wheat genomes that have undergone selection since the beginning of cereal cultivation in Europe. I will then use ecological modelling to identify those loci whose patterns of selection are associated with ecogeographical variables and hence represent adaptations to local environmental conditions. I will assign dates to the periods when adaptations occurred by sequencing ancient DNA from archaeobotanical assemblages and by computer methods that enable the temporal order of adaptations to be deduced. I will then synthesise the information on environmental adaptations with dating evidence for the spread of agriculture in Europe, which reveals pauses that might be linked to environmental adaptation, with demographic data that indicate regions where Neolithic populations declined, possibly due to inadequate crop productivity, and with an archaeobotanical database showing changes in the prevalence of individual cereals in different regions."
Max ERC Funding
2 492 964 €
Duration
Start date: 2014-02-01, End date: 2019-01-31
Project acronym AdOMiS
Project Adaptive Optical Microscopy Systems: Unifying theory, practice and applications
Researcher (PI) Martin BOOTH
Host Institution (HI) THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Country United Kingdom
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), PE7, ERC-2015-AdG
Summary Recent technological advances in optical microscopy have vastly broadened the possibilities for applications in the biomedical sciences. Fluorescence microscopy is the central tool for investigation of molecular structures and dynamics that take place in the cellular and tissue environment. Coupled with progress in labeling methods, these microscopes permit observation of biological structures and processes with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. This work has been enabled by the engineering development of diverse optical systems that provide different capabilities for the imaging toolkit. All such methods rely upon high fidelity optics to provide optimal resolution and efficiency, but they all suffer from aberrations caused by refractive index variations within the specimen. It is widely accepted that in many applications this fundamental problem prevents optimum operation and limits capability. Adaptive optics (AO) has been introduced to overcome these limitations by correcting aberrations and a range of demonstrations has shown clearly its potential. Indeed, it shows great promise to improve virtually all types of research or commercial microscopes, but significant challenges must still be met before AO can be widely implemented in routine imaging. Current advances are being made through development of bespoke AO solutions to individual imaging tasks. However, the diversity of microscopy methods means that individual solutions are often not translatable to other systems. This proposal is directed towards the creation of theoretical and practical frameworks that tie together AO concepts and provide a suite of scientific tools with broad application. This will be achieved through a systems approach that encompasses theoretical modelling, optical engineering and the requirements of biological applications. Additional outputs will include practical designs, operating protocols and software algorithms that will support next generation AO microscope systems.
Summary
Recent technological advances in optical microscopy have vastly broadened the possibilities for applications in the biomedical sciences. Fluorescence microscopy is the central tool for investigation of molecular structures and dynamics that take place in the cellular and tissue environment. Coupled with progress in labeling methods, these microscopes permit observation of biological structures and processes with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. This work has been enabled by the engineering development of diverse optical systems that provide different capabilities for the imaging toolkit. All such methods rely upon high fidelity optics to provide optimal resolution and efficiency, but they all suffer from aberrations caused by refractive index variations within the specimen. It is widely accepted that in many applications this fundamental problem prevents optimum operation and limits capability. Adaptive optics (AO) has been introduced to overcome these limitations by correcting aberrations and a range of demonstrations has shown clearly its potential. Indeed, it shows great promise to improve virtually all types of research or commercial microscopes, but significant challenges must still be met before AO can be widely implemented in routine imaging. Current advances are being made through development of bespoke AO solutions to individual imaging tasks. However, the diversity of microscopy methods means that individual solutions are often not translatable to other systems. This proposal is directed towards the creation of theoretical and practical frameworks that tie together AO concepts and provide a suite of scientific tools with broad application. This will be achieved through a systems approach that encompasses theoretical modelling, optical engineering and the requirements of biological applications. Additional outputs will include practical designs, operating protocols and software algorithms that will support next generation AO microscope systems.
Max ERC Funding
3 234 789 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2022-02-28
Project acronym BAYNET
Project Bayesian Networks and Non-Rational Expectations
Researcher (PI) Ran SPIEGLER
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
Country United Kingdom
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH1, ERC-2015-AdG
Summary "This project will develop a new framework for modeling economic agents having ""boundedly rational expectations"" (BRE). It is based on the concept of Bayesian networks (more generally, graphical models), borrowed from statistics and AI. In the framework's basic version, an agent is characterized by a directed acyclic graph (DAG) over the set of all relevant random variables. The DAG is the agent's ""type"" – it represents how he systematically distorts any objective probability distribution into a subjective belief. Technically, the distortion takes the form of the standard Bayesian-network factorization formula given by the agent's DAG. The agent's choice is modeled as a ""personal equilibrium"", because his subjective belief regarding the implications of his actions can vary with his own long-run behavior. The DAG representation unifies and simplifies existing models of BRE, subsuming them as special cases corresponding to distinct graphical representations. It captures hitherto-unmodeled fallacies such as reverse causation. The framework facilitates behavioral characterizations of general classes of models of BRE and expands their applicability. I will demonstrate this with applications to monetary policy, behavioral I.O., asset pricing, etc. I will extend the basic formalism to multi-agent environments, addressing issues beyond the reach of current models of BRE (e.g., formalizing the notion of ""high-order"" limited understanding of statistical regularities). Finally, I will seek a learning foundation for the graphical representation of BRE, in the sense that it will capture how the agent extrapolates his belief from a dataset (drawn from the objective distribution) containing ""missing values"", via some intuitive ""imputation method"". This part, too, borrows ideas from statistics and AI, further demonstrating the project's interdisciplinary nature."
Summary
"This project will develop a new framework for modeling economic agents having ""boundedly rational expectations"" (BRE). It is based on the concept of Bayesian networks (more generally, graphical models), borrowed from statistics and AI. In the framework's basic version, an agent is characterized by a directed acyclic graph (DAG) over the set of all relevant random variables. The DAG is the agent's ""type"" – it represents how he systematically distorts any objective probability distribution into a subjective belief. Technically, the distortion takes the form of the standard Bayesian-network factorization formula given by the agent's DAG. The agent's choice is modeled as a ""personal equilibrium"", because his subjective belief regarding the implications of his actions can vary with his own long-run behavior. The DAG representation unifies and simplifies existing models of BRE, subsuming them as special cases corresponding to distinct graphical representations. It captures hitherto-unmodeled fallacies such as reverse causation. The framework facilitates behavioral characterizations of general classes of models of BRE and expands their applicability. I will demonstrate this with applications to monetary policy, behavioral I.O., asset pricing, etc. I will extend the basic formalism to multi-agent environments, addressing issues beyond the reach of current models of BRE (e.g., formalizing the notion of ""high-order"" limited understanding of statistical regularities). Finally, I will seek a learning foundation for the graphical representation of BRE, in the sense that it will capture how the agent extrapolates his belief from a dataset (drawn from the objective distribution) containing ""missing values"", via some intuitive ""imputation method"". This part, too, borrows ideas from statistics and AI, further demonstrating the project's interdisciplinary nature."
Max ERC Funding
1 379 288 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-07-01, End date: 2022-06-30
Project acronym BEEHIVE
Project Bridging the Evolution and Epidemiology of HIV in Europe
Researcher (PI) Christopher Fraser
Host Institution (HI) THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Country United Kingdom
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), LS2, ERC-2013-ADG
Summary The aim of the BEEHIVE project is to generate novel insight into HIV biology, evolution and epidemiology, leveraging next-generation high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics to produce and analyse whole-genomes of viruses from approximately 3,000 European HIV-1 infected patients. These patients have known dates of infection spread over the last 25 years, good clinical follow up, and a wide range of clinical prognostic indicators and outcomes. The primary objective is to discover the viral genetic determinants of severity of infection and set-point viral load. This primary objective is high-risk & blue-skies: there is ample indirect evidence of polymorphisms that alter virulence, but they have never been identified, and it is not known how easy they are to discover. However, the project is also high-reward: it could lead to a substantial shift in the understanding of HIV disease.
Technologically, the BEEHIVE project will deliver new approaches for undertaking whole genome association studies on RNA viruses, including delivering an innovative high-throughput bioinformatics pipeline for handling genetically diverse viral quasi-species data (with viral diversity both within and between infected patients).
The project also includes secondary and tertiary objectives that address critical open questions in HIV epidemiology and evolution. The secondary objective is to use viral genetic sequences allied to mathematical epidemic models to better understand the resurgent European epidemic amongst high-risk groups, especially men who have sex with men. The aim will not just be to establish who is at risk of infection, which is known from conventional epidemiological approaches, but also to characterise the risk factors for onwards transmission of the virus. Tertiary objectives involve understanding the relationship between the genetic diversity within viral samples, indicative of on-going evolution or dual infections, to clinical outcomes.
Summary
The aim of the BEEHIVE project is to generate novel insight into HIV biology, evolution and epidemiology, leveraging next-generation high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics to produce and analyse whole-genomes of viruses from approximately 3,000 European HIV-1 infected patients. These patients have known dates of infection spread over the last 25 years, good clinical follow up, and a wide range of clinical prognostic indicators and outcomes. The primary objective is to discover the viral genetic determinants of severity of infection and set-point viral load. This primary objective is high-risk & blue-skies: there is ample indirect evidence of polymorphisms that alter virulence, but they have never been identified, and it is not known how easy they are to discover. However, the project is also high-reward: it could lead to a substantial shift in the understanding of HIV disease.
Technologically, the BEEHIVE project will deliver new approaches for undertaking whole genome association studies on RNA viruses, including delivering an innovative high-throughput bioinformatics pipeline for handling genetically diverse viral quasi-species data (with viral diversity both within and between infected patients).
The project also includes secondary and tertiary objectives that address critical open questions in HIV epidemiology and evolution. The secondary objective is to use viral genetic sequences allied to mathematical epidemic models to better understand the resurgent European epidemic amongst high-risk groups, especially men who have sex with men. The aim will not just be to establish who is at risk of infection, which is known from conventional epidemiological approaches, but also to characterise the risk factors for onwards transmission of the virus. Tertiary objectives involve understanding the relationship between the genetic diversity within viral samples, indicative of on-going evolution or dual infections, to clinical outcomes.
Max ERC Funding
2 499 739 €
Duration
Start date: 2014-04-01, End date: 2019-03-31
Project acronym BESTDECISION
Project "Behavioural Economics and Strategic Decision Making: Theory, Empirics, and Experiments"
Researcher (PI) Vincent Paul Crawford
Host Institution (HI) THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Country United Kingdom
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH1, ERC-2013-ADG
Summary "I will study questions of central microeconomic importance via interwoven theoretical, empirical, and experimental analyses, from a behavioural perspective combining standard methods with assumptions that better reflect evidence on behaviour and psychological insights. The contributions of behavioural economics have been widely recognized, but the benefits of its insights are far from fully realized. I propose four lines of inquiry that focus on how institutions interact with cognition and behaviour, chosen for their potential to reshape our understanding of important questions and their synergies across lines.
The first line will study nonparametric identification and estimation of reference-dependent versions of the standard microeconomic model of consumer demand or labour supply, the subject of hundreds of empirical studies and perhaps the single most important model in microeconomics. It will allow such studies to consider relevant behavioural factors without imposing structural assumptions as in previous work.
The second line will analyze history-dependent learning in financial crises theoretically and experimentally, with the goal of quantifying how market structure influences the likelihood of a crisis.
The third line will study strategic thinking experimentally, using a powerful new design that links subjects’ searches for hidden payoff information (“eye-movements”) much more directly to thinking.
The fourth line will significantly advance Myerson and Satterthwaite’s analyses of optimal design of bargaining rules and auctions, which first went beyond the analysis of given institutions to study what is possible by designing new institutions, replacing their equilibrium assumption with a nonequilibrium model that is well supported by experiments.
The synergies among these four lines’ theoretical analyses, empirical methods, and data analyses will accelerate progress on each line well beyond what would be possible in a piecemeal approach."
Summary
"I will study questions of central microeconomic importance via interwoven theoretical, empirical, and experimental analyses, from a behavioural perspective combining standard methods with assumptions that better reflect evidence on behaviour and psychological insights. The contributions of behavioural economics have been widely recognized, but the benefits of its insights are far from fully realized. I propose four lines of inquiry that focus on how institutions interact with cognition and behaviour, chosen for their potential to reshape our understanding of important questions and their synergies across lines.
The first line will study nonparametric identification and estimation of reference-dependent versions of the standard microeconomic model of consumer demand or labour supply, the subject of hundreds of empirical studies and perhaps the single most important model in microeconomics. It will allow such studies to consider relevant behavioural factors without imposing structural assumptions as in previous work.
The second line will analyze history-dependent learning in financial crises theoretically and experimentally, with the goal of quantifying how market structure influences the likelihood of a crisis.
The third line will study strategic thinking experimentally, using a powerful new design that links subjects’ searches for hidden payoff information (“eye-movements”) much more directly to thinking.
The fourth line will significantly advance Myerson and Satterthwaite’s analyses of optimal design of bargaining rules and auctions, which first went beyond the analysis of given institutions to study what is possible by designing new institutions, replacing their equilibrium assumption with a nonequilibrium model that is well supported by experiments.
The synergies among these four lines’ theoretical analyses, empirical methods, and data analyses will accelerate progress on each line well beyond what would be possible in a piecemeal approach."
Max ERC Funding
1 985 373 €
Duration
Start date: 2014-04-01, End date: 2019-03-31
Project acronym BM
Project Becoming Muslim: Conversion to Islam and Islamisation in Eastern Ethiopia
Researcher (PI) Timothy Insoll
Host Institution (HI) THE UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
Country United Kingdom
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2015-AdG
Summary "
Why do people convert to Islam? The contemporary relevance of this question is immediately apparent.""Becoming Muslim"" will transform our knowledge about Islamisation processes and contexts through archaeological research in Harar, Eastern Ethiopia, and examine this in comparison to other regions in sub-Saharan Africa via publication and a major conference. Assessing genuine belief is difficult, but the impact of trade, Saints, Sufis and Holy men, proselytisation, benefits gained from Arabic literacy and administration systems, enhanced power, prestige, warfare, and belonging to the larger Muslim community have all been suggested. Equally significant is the context of conversion. Why were certain sub-Saharan African cities key points for conversion to Islam, e.g. Gao and Timbuktu in the Western Sahel, and Harar in Ethiopia? Archaeological engagement with Islamisation processes and contexts of conversion in Africa is variable, and in parts of the continent research is static. This exciting 4-year project explores, for the first time, Islamic conversion and Islamisation through focusing on Harar, the most important living Islamic centre in the Horn of Africa, and its surrounding region.
Islamic archaeology has been neglected in Ethiopia, and is wholly non-existent in Harar. Excavation at 5 key sites: 2 shrines, 2 abandoned settlements, 1 urban site, will permit evaluation of urban Islam, the veneration of saints, pilgrimage and shrine based practices, rural Islam, architecture and jihad, changes in lifeways, and early and comparative evidence for Islam and long-distance trade, through analysis of, e.g. architecture, epigraphy, burial orientation, imported artifacts, and faunal and botanical remains. Although it is fully acknowledged that conversion to Islam and Islamisation processes are not universal, my project is groundbreaking in developing and applying a transferable methodology for the archaeological explanation of ""Becoming Muslim"" in sub-Saharan Africa."
Summary
"
Why do people convert to Islam? The contemporary relevance of this question is immediately apparent.""Becoming Muslim"" will transform our knowledge about Islamisation processes and contexts through archaeological research in Harar, Eastern Ethiopia, and examine this in comparison to other regions in sub-Saharan Africa via publication and a major conference. Assessing genuine belief is difficult, but the impact of trade, Saints, Sufis and Holy men, proselytisation, benefits gained from Arabic literacy and administration systems, enhanced power, prestige, warfare, and belonging to the larger Muslim community have all been suggested. Equally significant is the context of conversion. Why were certain sub-Saharan African cities key points for conversion to Islam, e.g. Gao and Timbuktu in the Western Sahel, and Harar in Ethiopia? Archaeological engagement with Islamisation processes and contexts of conversion in Africa is variable, and in parts of the continent research is static. This exciting 4-year project explores, for the first time, Islamic conversion and Islamisation through focusing on Harar, the most important living Islamic centre in the Horn of Africa, and its surrounding region.
Islamic archaeology has been neglected in Ethiopia, and is wholly non-existent in Harar. Excavation at 5 key sites: 2 shrines, 2 abandoned settlements, 1 urban site, will permit evaluation of urban Islam, the veneration of saints, pilgrimage and shrine based practices, rural Islam, architecture and jihad, changes in lifeways, and early and comparative evidence for Islam and long-distance trade, through analysis of, e.g. architecture, epigraphy, burial orientation, imported artifacts, and faunal and botanical remains. Although it is fully acknowledged that conversion to Islam and Islamisation processes are not universal, my project is groundbreaking in developing and applying a transferable methodology for the archaeological explanation of ""Becoming Muslim"" in sub-Saharan Africa."
Max ERC Funding
1 031 105 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31
Project acronym C-SENSE
Project Exploiting low dimensional models in sensing, computation and signal processing
Researcher (PI) Michael DAVIES
Host Institution (HI) THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
Country United Kingdom
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), PE7, ERC-2015-AdG
Summary The aim of this project is to develop the next generation of compressive and computational sensing and processing techniques.
The ability to identify and exploit good signal representations is pivotal in many signal and data processing tasks. During the last decade sparse representations have provided stunning performance gains for applications such as: imaging coding, computer vision, super-resolution microscopy and most recently in MRI, achieving many-fold acceleration through compressed sensing (CS).
However in most real world sensing it is generally not possible to fully adopt the random sampling strategies advocated by CS. Systems are often nonlinear, measurements have limited dynamic range, noise is rarely Gaussian and reconstruction is not always the final goal. Furthermore, iterative reconstruction techniques are often not adopted in commercial imaging systems as they typically incur at least an order of magnitude more computation than traditional techniques. Thus there is a real need for a new framework for generalized computationally accelerated sensing and processing techniques.
The research proposed here will build on the PIs recent work in this area and will develop and analyse a much richer class of hierarchical low dimensional signal models, accommodating everything from physical laws to data-driven models such as deep neural networks. It will provide quantitative guidance for system design and address sensing tasks beyond reconstruction including detection, classification and statistical estimation. It will also exploit low dimensional structure to reduce computational cost as well as estimation accuracy, challenging the notion that exploiting prior information must come at a computational cost.
This research will result in a new generation of data-driven, physics-aware and task-orientated sensing systems in application domains such as advanced radar, CT and MR imaging and emerging sensing modalities such as multispectral time-of-flight cameras.
Summary
The aim of this project is to develop the next generation of compressive and computational sensing and processing techniques.
The ability to identify and exploit good signal representations is pivotal in many signal and data processing tasks. During the last decade sparse representations have provided stunning performance gains for applications such as: imaging coding, computer vision, super-resolution microscopy and most recently in MRI, achieving many-fold acceleration through compressed sensing (CS).
However in most real world sensing it is generally not possible to fully adopt the random sampling strategies advocated by CS. Systems are often nonlinear, measurements have limited dynamic range, noise is rarely Gaussian and reconstruction is not always the final goal. Furthermore, iterative reconstruction techniques are often not adopted in commercial imaging systems as they typically incur at least an order of magnitude more computation than traditional techniques. Thus there is a real need for a new framework for generalized computationally accelerated sensing and processing techniques.
The research proposed here will build on the PIs recent work in this area and will develop and analyse a much richer class of hierarchical low dimensional signal models, accommodating everything from physical laws to data-driven models such as deep neural networks. It will provide quantitative guidance for system design and address sensing tasks beyond reconstruction including detection, classification and statistical estimation. It will also exploit low dimensional structure to reduce computational cost as well as estimation accuracy, challenging the notion that exploiting prior information must come at a computational cost.
This research will result in a new generation of data-driven, physics-aware and task-orientated sensing systems in application domains such as advanced radar, CT and MR imaging and emerging sensing modalities such as multispectral time-of-flight cameras.
Max ERC Funding
2 212 048 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31
Project acronym COS
Project "The Cult of Saints: a christendom-wide study of its origins, spread and development"
Researcher (PI) Bryan Ward-Perkins
Host Institution (HI) THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Country United Kingdom
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2013-ADG
Summary "An investigation of the origins and development of a central feature of late-antique, medieval and modern culture: the belief that dead saints can act as mediators between a distant God and humankind, and that they are active on earth in many different ways (such as healing the sick, punishing the irreverent, or even controlling the weather).
The project will investigate the emergence of this belief by systematically collecting all the available evidence - across several academic disciplines and six linguistic cultures (Latin, Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian), from the first stirrings of the phenomenon in the third century until around the year 700, by which time the cult of saints was fully developed and firmly rooted throughout the Christian world, from Ireland to Iran.
The work will be done by a team of researchers (under expert supervision for four of the eastern languages), closely co-ordinated by the PI. The project will operate concurrently at two levels. The individual researchers will produce free-standing regional studies on aspects of the cult of saints that are essential to the wider project, but at present under-researched. While doing this, they will collect the full range of evidence from their regions within a single searchable database. This will provide the basis for a christendom-wide monograph on the emergence of the cult of saints authored by the PI, and also the context essential to give breadth and depth to the regional studies.
For the first time it will be possible to tell the history of the emergence of the cult of saints across the full geographical and cultural range of early Christendom. Of great importance in itself, this will also link, and thereby enhance, the many pre-existing works of scholarship on aspects of the cult of saints.
The ‘Cult of Saints’ will result in a major summative monograph, a comprehensive international conference, a series of ground-breaking regional studies, and a freely-available database."
Summary
"An investigation of the origins and development of a central feature of late-antique, medieval and modern culture: the belief that dead saints can act as mediators between a distant God and humankind, and that they are active on earth in many different ways (such as healing the sick, punishing the irreverent, or even controlling the weather).
The project will investigate the emergence of this belief by systematically collecting all the available evidence - across several academic disciplines and six linguistic cultures (Latin, Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian), from the first stirrings of the phenomenon in the third century until around the year 700, by which time the cult of saints was fully developed and firmly rooted throughout the Christian world, from Ireland to Iran.
The work will be done by a team of researchers (under expert supervision for four of the eastern languages), closely co-ordinated by the PI. The project will operate concurrently at two levels. The individual researchers will produce free-standing regional studies on aspects of the cult of saints that are essential to the wider project, but at present under-researched. While doing this, they will collect the full range of evidence from their regions within a single searchable database. This will provide the basis for a christendom-wide monograph on the emergence of the cult of saints authored by the PI, and also the context essential to give breadth and depth to the regional studies.
For the first time it will be possible to tell the history of the emergence of the cult of saints across the full geographical and cultural range of early Christendom. Of great importance in itself, this will also link, and thereby enhance, the many pre-existing works of scholarship on aspects of the cult of saints.
The ‘Cult of Saints’ will result in a major summative monograph, a comprehensive international conference, a series of ground-breaking regional studies, and a freely-available database."
Max ERC Funding
2 499 240 €
Duration
Start date: 2014-01-01, End date: 2018-12-31
Project acronym DENDRITECIRCUITS
Project The origins of dendritic computation within mammalian neural circuits
Researcher (PI) Michael HAUSSER
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
Country United Kingdom
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), LS5, ERC-2015-AdG
Summary This proposal aims to address a simple question: what is the fundamental unit of computation in the brain? Answering this question is crucial not only for understanding how the brain works, but also if we are to build accurate models of brain function, which require abstraction based on identification of the essential elements for carrying out computations relevant to behaviour. In this proposal, we will build on recent work demonstrating that dendrites are highly electrically excitable to test the possibility that single dendritic branches may act as individual computational units during behaviour, challenging the classical view that the neuron is the fundamental unit of computation. We will address this question using a combination of electrophysiolgical, anatomical, imaging, molecular, and modeling approaches to probe dendritic integration in pyramidal cells and Purkinje cells in mouse cortex and cerebellum.
We will first define the computational rules for integration of synaptic input in single and multiple dendrites by examining the somatic and dendritic responses to different spatiotemporal patterns of excitatory and inhibitory inputs in brain slices. Next, we will determine how these rules are engaged by patterns of sensory stimulation in vivo, by using various strategies to map the spatiotemporal patterns of synaptic inputs onto single dendrites. To understand how physiological patterns of activity in the circuit engage these dendritic computations, we will use anatomical approaches to map the wiring diagram of synaptic inputs to individual dendrites. Finally, we will perturb the dendritic computational rules by manipulating dendritic function using molecular and optogenetic tools, in order to provide causal links between specific dendritic computations and sensory processing relevant to behaviour.
These experiments will provide us with deeper insights into how single neurons act as computing devices.
Summary
This proposal aims to address a simple question: what is the fundamental unit of computation in the brain? Answering this question is crucial not only for understanding how the brain works, but also if we are to build accurate models of brain function, which require abstraction based on identification of the essential elements for carrying out computations relevant to behaviour. In this proposal, we will build on recent work demonstrating that dendrites are highly electrically excitable to test the possibility that single dendritic branches may act as individual computational units during behaviour, challenging the classical view that the neuron is the fundamental unit of computation. We will address this question using a combination of electrophysiolgical, anatomical, imaging, molecular, and modeling approaches to probe dendritic integration in pyramidal cells and Purkinje cells in mouse cortex and cerebellum.
We will first define the computational rules for integration of synaptic input in single and multiple dendrites by examining the somatic and dendritic responses to different spatiotemporal patterns of excitatory and inhibitory inputs in brain slices. Next, we will determine how these rules are engaged by patterns of sensory stimulation in vivo, by using various strategies to map the spatiotemporal patterns of synaptic inputs onto single dendrites. To understand how physiological patterns of activity in the circuit engage these dendritic computations, we will use anatomical approaches to map the wiring diagram of synaptic inputs to individual dendrites. Finally, we will perturb the dendritic computational rules by manipulating dendritic function using molecular and optogenetic tools, in order to provide causal links between specific dendritic computations and sensory processing relevant to behaviour.
These experiments will provide us with deeper insights into how single neurons act as computing devices.
Max ERC Funding
2 495 563 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-07-01, End date: 2021-06-30
Project acronym DEVOCHROMO
Project Chromosome structure and genome organization in early mammalian development
Researcher (PI) Peter Fraser
Host Institution (HI) THE BABRAHAM INSTITUTE
Country United Kingdom
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), LS2, ERC-2013-ADG
Summary "The spatial organization of the genome inside the cell nucleus is tissue-specific and has been linked to several nuclear processes including gene activation, gene silencing, genomic imprinting, gene co-regulation, genome maintenance, DNA replication, DNA repair, chromosomal translocations and X chromosome inactivation. In fact, just about any nuclear/genome function has a spatial component that has been implicated in its control. We know surprisingly little about chromosome conformation and spatial organization or how they are established. The extent to which they are a cause or consequence of genome functions are current topics of considerable debate, however emerging data from my group and many other groups world-wide indicate that nuclear location and organization are drivers of genome functions, which in cooperation with other features including epigenetic marks, non-coding RNAs and trans-factor binding bring about genome control. Thus, genome spatial organization can be considered on a par with other epigenetic features that together contribute to overall genome control. The classical paradigm of early mammalian development arguably represents the most dramatic and yet least understood process of genome reprogramming, where a single cell undergoes a series of divisions to ultimately give rise to the hundreds of different cell types found in a mature organism. Study of pre-implantation embryo development is hindered by the very nature of the life form, composed of extremely low cell numbers at each stage, which severely limits the options for investigation. My lab has recently developed a novel technique called single cell Hi-C, which has the power to detect tens of thousands of simultaneous chromatin contacts from a single cell. In this application I propose to apply this technology to study chromosome structure and genome organization during mouse pre-implantation development along with single cell transcriptome analyses from the same cells."
Summary
"The spatial organization of the genome inside the cell nucleus is tissue-specific and has been linked to several nuclear processes including gene activation, gene silencing, genomic imprinting, gene co-regulation, genome maintenance, DNA replication, DNA repair, chromosomal translocations and X chromosome inactivation. In fact, just about any nuclear/genome function has a spatial component that has been implicated in its control. We know surprisingly little about chromosome conformation and spatial organization or how they are established. The extent to which they are a cause or consequence of genome functions are current topics of considerable debate, however emerging data from my group and many other groups world-wide indicate that nuclear location and organization are drivers of genome functions, which in cooperation with other features including epigenetic marks, non-coding RNAs and trans-factor binding bring about genome control. Thus, genome spatial organization can be considered on a par with other epigenetic features that together contribute to overall genome control. The classical paradigm of early mammalian development arguably represents the most dramatic and yet least understood process of genome reprogramming, where a single cell undergoes a series of divisions to ultimately give rise to the hundreds of different cell types found in a mature organism. Study of pre-implantation embryo development is hindered by the very nature of the life form, composed of extremely low cell numbers at each stage, which severely limits the options for investigation. My lab has recently developed a novel technique called single cell Hi-C, which has the power to detect tens of thousands of simultaneous chromatin contacts from a single cell. In this application I propose to apply this technology to study chromosome structure and genome organization during mouse pre-implantation development along with single cell transcriptome analyses from the same cells."
Max ERC Funding
2 401 393 €
Duration
Start date: 2014-02-01, End date: 2019-01-31
