Throughout its history, Rome has been a leading centre for culture and science, and still today the city and its environs are home to Italy’s largest concentration of research centres, laboratories and universities; in fact one of the largest concentration in Europe. In 2019, the ScieNcETogether NETwork was established, primarily just by those roman research organizations that had a long-standing tradition of interaction and cooperation among them and with international scientific contests and wanted to lay the foundation for an active collaboration also in science dissemination. In these four years of joint work taught us that to make the Night a more engaging and inclusive experience and address a large number of citizens and young people, joining forces and collaboration is key and brings added value. Consequently we have developed a formula to celebrate the Night: a major event with researchers from all NET partners institutions and representative of the stakeholder groups in Rome (the NET village) but, at the same time, we are also aware that celebrating the ERN means feeling part of a larger European community. So, on the one hand we are inviting the partners’ branch laboratories and research centres scattered all over Italy (20 cities from north to south Italy) to share NET’s objectives and contribute to a national celebration, on the other hand we have searched for partners/project stakeholders outside Italy that could help us enhance the European and international dimension of the ERN. Having based our communication strategy on Marie Slodowska Curie as NET Night goodmother, it has been almost natural to look at Poland (Polish Academy of Sciences), France – (Marie Curie Museum) and Sweden (Tekniska museet | National Museum of Science and Technology), the three countries that sort of represent three different stages in the scientist’s life.

NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance)-based approaches have affirmed as extremely valuable for applications in neurosciences. Nonetheless, the exquisite flexibility of tissue contrast in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that can be obtained by proper manipulation of nuclear spins still offers room for technological improvements which can be quickly expanded to clinical routine. In particular, there is extreme need of imaging methods that allow a correct assessment of microstructural damage in many brain diseases, including – but not limited to – neurodegenerative diseases. Indeed, current MRI techniques suffer from poor specificity and ultimately lack the ability to identify the microscopic biophysical and biological mechanisms related to the specific features of the pathology. This project aims at expanding the set of MR based techniques available to neuroscientists to characterize microstructural damage, assessing the usefulness of these approaches in some specific pathologies where they offer more promise. Notably, this project aims also at establishing the increased specificity and sensitivity of newly developed and current techniques when merged in a truly multiparametric analysis approach. This project is heavily based on networking activities for exchanging the complimentary knowledge available at the different world-class academic and commercial EU and third country sites. The novel MRI pulse sequences and data analyses approaches tested and validated during the course of the project will be available at each site of the consortium, and will be made available to the scientific community as well.