Traditionally, natural products are classified into "natural product families". Within a family all congeners display specific structure elements, owing to their common biosynthetic pathway. This suggests a bio-inspired or "collective synthesis", as has been devised by D: W. MacMillan. However, a biosynthetic pathway is confined to these structure elements, thus limiting synthesis with regard to structure diversification. In this research proposal the applicant exemplarily devises a strategic concept to overcome these limitations, by replacing the dogma of "retrosynthetic analysis" with "structure pattern recognition". This concept is termed "Artificial Natural Product Systems Synthesis — ANaPSyS", and aims to supersede the current "logic of chemical synthesis" as a standard practice in this field. ANaPSyS exclusively categorizes natural products based on structural relationships — regardless of biogenetic origin. The structure pattern analysis groups natural products according to their shared core structure, and thereof creates a common precursor called "privileged intermediate (PI)". This intermediate is resembled in each of these natural products and is architecturally less complex. As a result every member of this natural product group can originate from a different natural product family and is obtained via this "privileged intermediate", which serves as basis for the artificial synthetic network. With ANaPSyS a synthetic route is not restricted to a single target structure anymore (as in conventional synthesis). In comparison with bio-inspired synthesis, which is limited to a single natural product family, ANaPSyS enables the synthesis of a whole set of natural product families. With every synthesis accomplished, the network is upgraded — hence diversification leads to a rise in revenue. As a consequence, synthetic efficiency is drastically enhanced, therefore profoundly boosting and facilitating lead structure development.

MULTIMAT addresses (1) the industrial and societal need for affordable materials that have a highly defined and large porosity together with the required (mechanical, chemical and/or thermal) robustness for application in thermal insulation, catalysts, fuel cells and oil spill remediation and (2) the scientific need to better understand the mechanisms underlying the assembly of small building blocks into larger structures that are ordered hierarchally across multiple scales ("multiscale assembly"). Together this will contribute to achieving MULTIMAT's future aim: Understanding and ultimately steering the bottom-up construction of materials with complex hierarchical structures. MULTIMAT will train a next generation of scientists (13 ESRs) able to master this complex design-and-assembly process. The MULTIMAT research activities include 1) the design and synthesis of building blocks with tailor made shapes and sizes, 2) their (co)-assembly into ordered structures with predefined mesoscale organisation, 3) the in-situ analysis of the development of morphology of structure during these processes, 4) the simulation of the structure formation from the molecular to the mesoscale level and the prediction of related physical properties, 5) the evaluation and testing of the properties and performance in selected technological applications. MULTIMAT brings together leading scientists from all relevant disciplines, and a large number of industrial partners, multinationals as well as SMEs. This strong involvement of industry clearly demonstrates the need for researchers educated in steering colloidal self-organisation. Direct outcomes of the project will include novel building blocks, (super-)porous materials with outstanding properties and novel tools for in situ imaging and molecular modelling.

During the last decade, active matter has been attracting increasing interest because its study can shed light on far-from- equilibrium physics and provide tantalizing options to perform tasks not easily achievable with other available techniques on the micro- and nanoscale. We are now on the threshold of breakthroughs that will permit us to gain a deeper understanding of the fundamental challenges associated with far-from-equilibrium physics (e.g. the physics of living organisms, tissue formation and cancer growth) and to address several key technological challenges of great societal and economic impact (e.g. biomimetic materials, targeted localization, pick-up and transport of nanoscopic cargoes in drug delivery, bioremediation and chemical sensing). However, there are still several open challenges that need to be addressed in order to achieve the full scientific and technological potential of active matter in real-life settings: 1. to develop biocompatible active particles, reducing their footprint by scaling them down towards the nanoscale; 2. to determine their emergent and synergistic behaviors in complex and crowded environments; 3. to engineer self-assembly in dense active and living matter systems. This ETN will provide the necessary infrastructure to train a new generation of physicists in the highly interdisciplinary fields related to active matter. ESRs will master the theoretical, numerical and experimental tools currently employed in the study of active matter, will create new tools for understanding active matter systems, and, through collaboration with companies, will be able to transfer this knowledge to biomedical, bioremediation and sustainability applications. Our ESRs will acquire highly demanded transferable skills increasing their future employability in academia and industry. Extending the reach of this ETN, we will also prepare interdisciplinary and interactive lecturing material to serve as foundation for study programs in active matter.

Sleep is a biological imperative for all animals: insufficient sleep can have detrimental effects on individuals’ health, cognition, social functioning and overall fitness. Even among gregarious species, sleep has largely been studied in lone individuals in laboratory settings, divorced from relevant socio-ecological context, limiting our ability to understand how social environments shape, and are shaped by, the sleep patterns of their members. My goal is to bring the study of sleep into the collective context, understand how social processes structure the sleep patterns of individuals, groups and populations, and test how gregarious animals navigate the opportunities and constraints imposed by sleeping as part of a group. To do this, I will integrate cutting-edge technologies with traditional field-observation methods to measure and model the collective dynamics of sleep among wild baboons. To continuously monitor movement, position, and sleep of baboons at the individual, group, and population levels, I will use GPS and accelerometry tracking of members of 30 troops of wild baboons. This will be combined with 3-D laser scanning of the physical sleep environment, overnight thermal videography, sleep-disruption field experiments, focal sampling of social behaviors, and advanced computational modeling to shed light on how differentiated and multi-faceted social relationships shape individual and collective sleep decisions, and how these decisions, in turn, shape the overall social dynamics of groups. This ground-breaking project will be the first to measure the collective sleep behavior of animal groups in a socially and ecologically relevant context. As such, it has the potential to shed wholly new light on social and ecological trade-offs that gregarious species – like our own – must balance to satisfy the biological imperative of sleep.