ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Aggregates of proteins such as amyloid-beta and alpha-synuclein circulate the extracellular space of the brain (ECS) and are thought to be key players in the development of neurodegenerative diseases. The clearance of these aggregates (among other toxic metabolites) is a fundamental physiological feature of the brain which is poorly understood due to the lack of techniques to study the nanoscale organisation of the ECS. Exciting advances in this field have recently shown that clearance is enhanced during sleep due to a major volume change in the ECS, facilitating the flow of the interstitial fluid. However, this process has only been characterised at a low spatial resolution while the physiological changes occur at the nanoscale. The recently proposed “glymphatic” pathway still remains controversial, as there are no techniques capable of distinguishing between diffusion and bulk flow in the ECS of living animals. Understanding these processes at a higher spatial resolution requires the development of single-molecule imaging techniques that can study the brain in living animals. Taking advantage of the strategies I have recently developed to target single-molecules in the brain in vivo with nanoparticles, we will do “nanoscopy” in living animals. Our proposal will test the glymphatic pathway at the spatial scale in which events happen, and explore how sleep and wake cycles alter the ECS and the diffusion of receptors in neuronal plasma membrane. Overall, BrainNanoFlow aims to understand how nanoscale changes in the ECS facilitate clearance of protein aggregates. We will also provide new insights to the pathological consequences of impaired clearance, focusing on the interactions between these aggregates and their putative receptors. Being able to perform single-molecule studies in vivo in the brain will be a major breakthrough in neurobiology, making possible the study of physiological and pathological processes that cannot be studied in simpler brain preparations.

1 552 948 €

Start date: 2018-12-01, End date: 2023-11-30

The world is in the midst of a sea change in approaches to development. The rise of nationalist politics in the U.S., U.K. and Europe have questioned commitments to global governance at the same time that China has emerged as a champion of globalization, a turn of geo-political events that would have been unfathomable ten years ago. Through its own multi-lateral institutions, China is setting a new agenda for development from Europe to Oceania. China’s approach differs from Anglo/Euro/American approaches to “law and development” (LD). Whereas LD orthodoxy has sought to improve legal institutions in poor states, Chinese do not foster rule of law abroad. Instead, Chinese view law as one set of rules, among others, to facilitate economic transactions and not to foster democratization. This distinction has sparked a global debate about the so-called “China model” as an alternative to LD. Yet there is little empirical data with which to assess the means and ends of China’s expanded footprint, a question with long-term implications for much of the developing world. This project addresses that problem by proposing that even if Chinese cross-border development does not operate through transparent rules, it nonetheless has its own notion of order. The project adopts a multi-sited, mixed method, and interdisciplinary approach—at the intersection of comparative law, developmental studies, and legal anthropology—to understand the nature of China’s order. The project has two objectives: 1. To establish the conceptual bases for the study of China’s approach to law and development by developing the first systematic study of the impacts of Chinese investment on the legal systems of developing economies. 2. To experiment with a comparative research design to theorize how China’s approach suggests a type of order that extends through a conjuncture of regional and local processes and manifests itself differently in diverse contexts.

1 499 381 €

Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31

The main objective of this project is to research the economic implications of default and collateral in financial markets. It is motivated from the observation that much of the lending in modern economies is secured by some form of collateral and by the empirical fact that modern economies experience a substantial amount of default and bankruptcy. From a theoretical perspective, the research aims to explore new ways of modelling default and collateral and employ them to evaluate the impact of default and collateral on market outcomes. From a policy recommendation perspective, the research aims to develop models with testable implications that can be used by practitioners to discuss the consequences of a wide range of policies. In particular, to explore which kind of regulation procedures should be implemented in order to lower the risk of default and at the same time not to reduce too much risk-sharing. The agenda includes two research directions. The first research direction will focus on the implications of default and collateral in economies with bounded rational agents. Our aim is to understand how default and collateral affect market outcomes in environments where agents are allowed to have very divergent and therefore possibly incorrect beliefs about endogenous economic variables like future prices and delivery rates. The second research direction will focus on the implications of default and collateral in economies with an open ended horizon. Our aim is to investigate endogenous debt constraints that are compatible with equilibrium and simultaneously allow for as much risk sharing as possible.

156 538 €

Start date: 2010-06-01, End date: 2012-06-30

Empathy – sharing and understanding others’ emotions and thoughts – is a defining feature of what it means to be human. However, we lack knowledge about the origins of empathy and to what extent its sub-components reflect species and cultural universals. Studying infants and great apes enables us to identify the developmental and evolutionary origins of empathy and the extent of its human uniqueness. Until now, it has largely been assumed that infants and great apes lack the capacity for empathy. However, this claim may reflect a lack of adequate methodologies and research attention, leaving infant and great ape empathy underestimated. Now, combining novel techniques to investigate empathy comparatively (thermal-imaging, pupillometry and eye-tracking) with longitudinal observations and innovative experiments, EMPORIGIN will overcome this issue to provide the first comparative investigation of empathy development in humans and bonobos, our closest living relatives. Rich datasets on bonobo (wild and semi-captive) infant development and caregiver interactions will be compared to those from human infants in two small-scale, traditional societies – Vanuatu and Samoa. Both societies show distributed-caregiving but vary in societal structure and emotional expressivity. Using a cross-species and cross-cultural approach, EMPORIGIN will deliver step-change insights into empathy development that go far beyond the State-of-the-Art. We will test the hypothesis that humans and bonobos share a core capacity for empathy, but humans diverge in a greater motivation to ameliorate others’ emotional states and a capacity for reciprocal emotional exchange. These capacities could lead to a cascade of human-unique forms of sharing and co-operation. Combining approaches across biology, psychology, ethology and anthropology, EMPORIGIN will advance our understanding of the origins of empathy, one of our most remarkable capacities, and challenge current perspectives about its human uniqueness.

1 499 829 €

Start date: 2019-03-01, End date: 2024-02-29