The researcher will design computational models of brain structure and function by incorporating realistic developmental processes. These models will be used to study how brain structure and function evolve together over time. The goal is to create more accurate simulations that can predict individual cognitive development trajectories in children, providing insights into neurodevelopmental difficulties.

This project focuses on reproductive identities associated with infertility in the decades before infertility began to be commercialised through assisted reproductive technologies (ART). The invention of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) in 1978 is often seen as a watershed facilitating the public visibility of a range of reproductive identities: from cross-border reproductive tourists and surrogate mothers, to same-sex parents and desperate single-childless women. However, little is known about how seemingly different reproductive identities of previous generations, such as adoptive parents, birth mothers, impotent husbands and childless wives, have shaped contemporary views both on infertility, reproduction and parenthood, and on the emergence of adoption and voluntary childlessness as global trends. This project aims to investigate reproductive identities associated with infertility and how they were constructed though intimate struggles, professional practices and public discourses of seeking and providing infertility treatments in the era when medical infertility treatments had just started to emerge and when the pronatalist norm on heterosexual parenting was the strongest. The project takes Britain, a leader in medical research on reproductive medicine and the birthplace of IVF, as a social laboratory to trace these continuities from c.1945 to 1980.

For todays Europeans, the existence of a collective musical past is a given. The past is heard and negotiated in the concert hall, and when we listen to or perform popular oldies; countless political and emotional narratives are attached to it, demonstrating the extent to which the musical past can be instrumentalised. Our project explores the mechanisms by which Europeans of a distant past (c. 1200-1600) used collective musical memory to shape cultural and political behaviour. In which ways are these mechanisms relevant to the societies of 21st-century Europe? We investigate how a new notion of a musical past came about in 13th-century France, and how it was applied by communities in the Low Countries, northern Germany, Bohemia and Poland, c. 1400-1600. If the compilers of the magnus liber organi (c. 1250) proudly collected their sonic past in lavish books as a record of achievement, followers of the devotio moderna, Hussites and early Lutheran communities often favoured archaic musical styles because returning to the simpler sounds of the uncorrupted past, to them as to many today, held promise of a better future. University communities in Central Europe in turn imported sophisticated music of a century or two ago from France and Italy; like classical music today, cultivating the sounds of the past symbolised international outlook, education, power, and social prestige. Five teams in the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic implement this project through joint meetings, a workshop, an international conference, and an array of scholarly publications (monographs, an essay volume, and articles). The singers of the Ascoli Ensemble (Associated Partner) contribute as experimental musicologists and help disseminate the sounding results to the European public through a series of concerts and recordings.

This project aims to inform strategies to increase democratic resilience by studying the mechanisms “exclusionary populists” use to increase their power by undermining the Rule of Law in the areas of law, the economy, and the media. The project also seeks to identify the “coping strategies” societal actors use when faced with exclusionary populism. This topic is highly relevant to the call themes by investigating the politics and economics of threat (Theme 2 – work packages 1 and 2); the democratisation of information (Theme 3 – WP3); and the changing authority of and trust in institutions (Theme 5 – all WPs). Adopting an interdisciplinary approach spanning political economy, legal-, management-, and media studies, we compare Austria, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, all of which have experienced populist success. Besides high-impact publications, the findings of the project will inform concrete solutions for challenges to democratic governance. We collaborate with the Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy, which will create five International Policy Fellowships for key stakeholders from the countries studied. These will constitute channels for evidence-based input from world-leading academics to inform coping strategies and stimulate cross-country knowledge exchange. Furthermore, we seek to reach a broader non-academic audience by collaborating with performing artists to stage a participatory performance in four cities to engage a dialogue with citizens from the countries we study. This project will be organised into four WPs, focussing on legal changes (WP1), business and economics (WP2), media and communications (WP3), and impact (WP4).

Galaxies grow when gas is drawn in from their environment. They probably regulate their growth via young stars and black holes that blast much of the gas back into the intergalactic space via enormous shock waves. We will study these poorly understood processes using observations with the new instrument MUSE at the Very Large Telescope and with computer simulations of both populations of galaxies as individual galaxies.