The project addresses the entangled histories of deliberative decision making, political representation and constitutionalism on the territories of the former Russian and Qing Empires and focuses on the cases of Russia, Ukraine, China and Mongolia between 1905 and 2005. Employing the perspectives of the New Imperial History and Transcultural Studies, the project overcomes narrow state-centered approaches and takes advantage of multidisciplinary methodology crossing history and political science. The project traces parliamentary developments, the interactions among imperial and post-imperial intellectuals and their engagement in global discussions, shared imperial legacies, mutual borrowings and references, imperial and post-imperial political practices and translatability of concepts. It seeks to refute the stereotypes about inclinations towards democracy in particular national contexts by tracing relevant transnational practices and interactions and providing a nuanced political and intellectual history of parliamentarism. The team of five researchers (the PI, three PhD students and a post-doctoral researcher), will discuss and develop five individual and three cooperative studies. The PI will write a global history of parliaments and quasi-parliamentary institutions in Russia’s imperial formations (the State Duma of the Russian Empire, the congresses of soviets and the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation). The three PhD students with relevant language skills will focus on parliamentary developments in the Ukrainian, Chinese (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) and Mongolian contexts. The post-doctoral researcher will explore the translatability of concepts between Russian, Chinese, Mongolian, Ukrainian and English. The three cooperative projects will focus on traditional institutions of deliberative decision making in the abovementioned contexts; the Communist International and institutional exchange; and the role of parliaments in major social transformations.

The production of fully functional ribosomes is vital for every cell, with failure causing human diseases called ribosomopathies. Eukaryotic ribosome assembly is catalyzed by ~200 assembly factors that guarantee efficient and accurate production of ribosomal subunits along a temporally and spatially ordered pathway. About one third of these factors are utilized in the formation of the earliest biogenesis intermediate, termed 90S pre-ribosome or small subunit processome. Recent insight into the 90S structure from a eukaryotic thermophile, Chaetomium thermophilum, has provided a first spatial impression on this most sophisticated process, which includes co-transcriptional RNA folding and processing, and incorporation of ribosomal proteins. Our key discovery was that the nascent ribosomal RNA, which if linear would form a long thread, is co-transcriptionally mounted into a mold formed by a highly interconnected RNA-protein scaffold on the 90S pre-ribosome. This finding raises a novel concept in RNA biology that nascent RNA folds and matures in a protected environment, which is reminiscent of protein folding that can also occur in folding chambers. I plan to challenge the idea that the 90S particle indeed encapsulates the RNA transiently, in order to protect it from unproductive interactions, allowing stepwise folding and maturation in a cascade of interdependent reactions and the involvement of energy-consuming enzymes. The groundbreaking aim of this proposal is to decipher how these processes occur in an encapsulated environment, using C. thermophilum as a model organism. This high-risk project will depend on the successful establishment of novel assays that recapitulate eukaryotic ribosome assembly in vitro, exploiting the thermostable nature of the 90S pre-ribosome. Mechanistic insight into ribosome biogenesis will lead to a better understanding of how this multifaceted process is linked to other key cellular pathways and development of diseases including cancer.

The “holy grail” of exoplanet research today is the detection of an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. Doppler spectroscopy is an indispensable tool for finding and characterizing extrasolar planets; however, detecting an Earth twin by measuring the radial velocity (RV) perturbation it imposes on the parent star requires nearly one order of magnitude better RV precision than the best current spectrographs provide. A key component in addressing the limitations of existing instruments is the development of extremely precise calibration light sources that can be used to track drifts and imperfections of the spectrograph, removing them from the science data. A stable, reliable, and relatively inexpensive calibrator solves a “chicken and egg” problem in the field – motivating the building of more stable spectrographs, secure in the knowledge that they will be able to perform to their potential. Project STABLE_FABRY consists of developing a novel calibration technique that can be applied to a wide range of high resolution spectrographs. This technique uses a broadband Fabry-Perot etalon to provide the calibration spectrum; the etalon is stabilized by referencing it to an atomic transition using standard laser spectroscopy methods. Our preliminary work already indicates that a stability of 3 cm/s can be reached with this method, making it precise enough for detection of Earth-like planets. The only other currently available calibration technology with demonstrated precision at that level is the laser frequency comb, which is an order of magnitude more complex and significantly more expensive. Our technique can easily be adapted to different echelle spectrographs in the visible and near infrared by simply using an etalon optimized for that particular spectrograph. Developing this concept into an observatory-ready system will present a major breakthrough for high precision spectrographs, enabling detections of Earth twins with Doppler spectroscopy.