Given the substantial negative impact of extrapulmonary manifestations on vital clinical outcomes, including mortality, the need for new effective treatment modalities also beyond the lungs has been highlighted as an urgent challenge in the management of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), one of the most common and deadliest diseases of the 21st century. The aim of COPD-HIT is to pave the way for new understanding of the development and treatment of extrapulmonary manifestations in COPD with a focus on brain health, muscle quality, and cardiac function. To do this I will focus on the following research objectives (RO): ● RO1) Determine the effect of supramaximal High-Intensity Training (HIT) on the brain, muscle, and heart ● RO2) Determine how exercise training and inflammation impacts the trajectories of neurodegeneration ● RO3) Develop a novel in-vitro model to determine signaling pathways following various loading intensities To reach these objectives, I aim to conduct high-quality multicenter randomized controlled and experimental trials. Further, I will lead an international research alliance with access to state-of-the-art research infrastructures and enable a unique interdisciplinary approach to fulfill my goals. This includes using advanced measurement techniques for muscle, brain, and cardiorespiratory evaluations, muscle biopsy analyses, in-vivo & in-vitro strategies, and combining quantitative and qualitative methods. Taken together, with COPD-HIT, I am in a strong position to perform an international novel project that will determine how to enable extrapulmonary benefits in COPD in a hitherto unprecedented way.

In Europe today disabled people comprise some 65 million (10%). Yet they are marginalized in society and research, and little is known on how disabilities become liveable. This project challenges this bias by proposing to investigate ‘liveable disabilities’ as a function of disability and opportunity structures across time. It analyses four life course dimensions: disabled people’s (1) health and well-being; (2) involvement in education and work; (3) in a partner relationship and family; and (4) in leisure structures. Through this I identify liveable disabilities before, during and after the Swedish welfare state. The results are of significant cross-national interest as they form a useful baseline for what constitutes liveable disabilities, which helps governing bodies maximize opportunity structures for disabled people to participate fully in society. This proposal is unique in employing mixed-methods life course research across time. First, it involves quantitative analysis of Sweden’s long-term digitized population databases, which reflect how disability impacts on people’s educational, occupational, marital and survival chances. The statistical outcome is novel in demonstrating how different impairments intersect with human characteristics relative to society’s structures of the past 200 years. Second, qualitative analyses uncover how disabled people today experience and talk about the above dimensions (1-4) themselves, and how mass media depict them. Third, I make innovative studies of leisure structures, which may promote liveable disabilities. The proposal aims to establish me at the forefront of disability research. It benefits from my scholarship in history and demography and from three excellent centres at Umeå University I am connected to, funded by the Swedish Research Council. One centre researches populations, another gender. The third provides expertise in disability studies and ready access to stakeholders outside academia.

Artificial illumination is fundamental and ubiquitous in modern society, and the cuArtificial illumination is fundamental and ubiquitous in modern society, and the current large-scale commercialization of more efficient and practical technologies, in the form of LEDs and OLEDs, is therefore important. This development is not only resulting in improved luminaires and displays, but also paving the way for a wide range of applications in, e.g., medtech, security, and communication. However, a growing concern is related to that the fabrication of LEDs and OLEDs consumes large amounts of critical raw materials (CRMs) and energy, and that their recycling is poorly developed and difficult. A novel illumination technology, the light-emitting electrochemical cell (LEC), is in this context interesting, and we and others have recently developed concepts for its material- and energy-efficient and CRM-free printing fabrication and its delivery of efficient emission (although not yet on par with LED/OLED). These combined achievements now pave the way for a timely and important challenge: can the LEC become the first emissive technology that is truly sustainable through its entire lifecycle? We boldly argue that this vision can turn true if we can take control of the defining LEC feature, viz. the dynamic formation of a p-n junction by electrochemical doping. It was recently shown that current LECs suffer from severe quenching of the excitons (the photon precursors formed in the p-n junction) by too-nearby dopants, and we here introduce new insights and methodologies that address this setback through rational design and careful development of new materials. A key task is to tune the mobility of the electronic charge carriers and excitons, through guidelines established by modeling, for the attainment of a sharp p-n junction boundary. We emphasize that our proposed path to high-efficiency LECs does not depend on energy-intense processes or the use of toxic or CRM-based materials.