Bucharest University

One of the solutions almost generally accepted for counteracting the negative effects of the economic and financial crisis on public budgets is the balanced budget rule, perceived as key to maintaining sound and sustainable public finances. As the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union (TSCG or Fiscal Compact) requires its parties to include the balanced budget rule in their national law through binding and permanent provisions, preferably at constitutional level, a major legislative reform process, involving potentially a constitutional reform, has to be completed in 25 European states in order to allow for national mechanisms to ensure compliance with the balanced budget rule. The efforts for this purpose will inevitably reflect the specifics of each national system and will be fairly complex and potentially controversial. A straightforward implementation of the rules in the Fiscal Compact will not suffice, as any further compliance with such rules will require specific legislative measures directed at reducing public expenditure or at increasing public income. Accordingly, other rules or principles placed at the same level are likely to be incident on such legislative measures. Any legislative reform designed to insert a new principle into the national legal system has to consider other potentially applicable principles, to understand the effects of any collision of applicable principles and to identify adequate solutions. In 2009 Romania avoided the effects of the financial crisis through a joint loan package provided by the EU, IMF and IBRD, whose conditionality required measures for reducing the public deficit. By choosing fallible or entirely wrong legal solutions for deficit reduction in order to achieve a balanced budget, the state not only failed to reduce public expenditure, but it increased such expenses with additional amounts consisting of compensation the government was ordered to pay by the courts. In the French legal system the balanced budget principle has to some extent a legal form, but no effective application. In an attempt to limit public expenditure by referring to a balanced budget, the constitutional revision of 2008 introduced a new type of programming laws but full respect of the new imperatives proved to be rather difficult and their interpretation by the constitutional judge generated additional problems. The scope of the proposed project is the structuring of a legal mechanism for inserting in the national legal systems of Romania and France the balanced budget rules provided by the Fiscal Compact in a manner that will be complementary to the existing principles, rules and jurisprudence. The main benefit of exploring, structuring and charting such mechanisms will be a comprehensive proposal for a harmonized legal system that contains no contradiction between principles and also provides for solutions for cases when inherent collision of principles cannot be avoided. The research will also consider the intended effect of the Fiscal Compact as ultimately being an attempt at constitutional harmonization at EU level. To date, no comprehensive analysis has been conducted regarding the challenges facing the transposition of the balanced budget rule provided by TSCG into the national legal systems. Most studies relating to the balanced budget principle are focused on its validity as a principle as well as on the assessment of its economic impact. A joint analysis of the Romanian and French cases is of particular interest due to the similarity of their political systems and, to some extent, of their legal systems. Differences between the two legal systems will be used as an additional test of the viability of the normative approach developed within the project, also to assess the flexibility of the resulting legislative harmonization mechanism. This could represent a pilot project for similar analyses related to the 25 EU Member States

"Intracerebral EEG (stereotaxic EEG, SEEG) is an invasive measure of brain activity performed during the presurgical evaluation of epilepsy, involving up to 250 distinct channels that record directly from brain structures, at the mesoscopic scale (a few millimetres). SEEG is performed on purely diagnostic motivations; collaterally, it provides a unique opportunity for investigating cognitive brain networks in humans across multiple frequencies with an exquisite spatial specificity, and matchless signal-to-noise ratio. Recently, the microscopic scale has been obtained thanks to microcontacts added to the SEEG probes. The analysis of such SEEG recordings at the meso- and micro- scales has fuelled advances in cognitive neuroscience, notably in the fields of memory and language. Still, SEEG provides only a partial view of brain activity due to its patient-specific limited spatial sampling. Non-invasive methods such as EEG and MEG remain the only way to obtain a large-scale view of brain activity at its natural temporal scale (i.e., at the millisecond level) with a macroscopic spatial scale. Recent research has started to bridge the gap between the macroscopic an mesoscopic scales in humans, by recording simultaneously invasive (SEEG) and non-invasive (EEG, MEG) neurophysiological signals. Such recordings could be used jointly for characterizing brain networks, surpassing the simple addition of modalities. Crucially, simultaneous recordings provide a view of the exact same brain activity at the different scales, and allows applying powerful single-trial analysis which would not be available on separate recordings. Our goal is to better define the spatio-temporal signature of the brain networks involved in simple cognitive tasks using simultaneous surface and depth recordings. Depth recordings will be instrumental in guiding the exploration of functional task networks, either by allowing analyses at the level of single trials, or by providing high resolution seeds for connectivity measures. In one centre, we will explore the possibility of adding micro recordings, thus reaching for the first time the three scales: micro-, meso- and macro-. Part of the project will be dedicated to methodological (signal processing) advances. The other part will focus on the application of this unique technique to unravelling multi-scale cognitive networks. The partners involved have extensive experience on non-invasive electrophysiology (EEG, MEG), on (intracerebral) SEEG recordings, as well as on their simultaneous recording. The consortium includes experts on signal processing for brain neurophysiological data, notably in the service of cognitive questions. The resulting datasets will be made available to the scientific community. Such reference datasets should be particularly useful for i) optimizing signal processing methods on surface data by providing a ""ground truth"" (SEEG) and ii) developing computational models of brain activity that incorporate knowledge from activity both at local and global scales. In summary, simultaneous multi-scale recordings expand the view of each modality taken separately, and allow unprecedented developments in signal analysis. This project will thus i) help improving signal processing methods ii) bring a better understanding of cognitive networks, and iii) will provide unique reference data-sets for computational neuroscientists."

The Human Immunodeficiency Virus HIV is the causative retrovirus of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome AIDS. Although the available antiretroviral treatments have been successful in reducing both the mortality and the morbidity of HIV infection, no effective treatment or vaccine has yet been achieved. HIV-1 entry inhibitors are a class of antiviral agents that exhibits promising inhibition profiles. These inhibitors act extracellularly, at different steps of the entry process, preventing target cell infection. Despite the potential of these therapeutic molecules, their clinical application is considerably limited by ineffective delivery to the site of action. Liposomal carrier systems, namely cationic liposomes, are known to be biocompatible and efficient drug delivery systems that can be used to overcome this problem. The successful conclusion of the work outlined in this proposal will allow the use of cationic liposomes as drug delivery systems, to efficiently deliver HIV entry inhibitors. Vírus da Imunodeficiência Humana HIV é o retrovírus causador do síndrome da imunodeficiência adquirida SIDA. Embora os tratamentos anti-retrovirais disponíveis tenham vindo a ser bem sucedidos na redução da mortalidade e morbilidade da infecção pelo HIV, não há tratamento eficaz e ainda não foi alcançada uma vacina. Os inibidores de entrada do HIV-1 são uma família de agentes anti-virais que apresenta perfis de inibição encorajadores. Estes inibidores actuam extracelularmente em diferentes etapas do processo de entrada, impedindo a infecção das células alvo. Contudo, apesar do potencial destas moléculas terapêuticas, a sua aplicação clínica é consideravelmente limitada devido à ineficácia da sua entrega no local de acção. Os sistemas transportadores baseados em lipossomas, nomeadamente os lipossomas catiónicos, são conhecidos por serem sistemas de distribuição de fármacos eficazes e biocompatíveis, podendo ser utilizadas para superar este problema. A conclusão bem sucedida do trabalho descrito na presente proposta permitirá o uso de lipossomas catiónicos como sistemas de distribuição e entrega de fármacos, de inibidores de entrada do HIV.

Natural and weather hazards are affecting 2bn people and exposure is expected to grow due to climate change. Despite trillions of public funds invested, current flood risk reduction and spatial planning policies are failing to reduce risks and losses of lives. The SU-DRS01-Human factors, and social, societal, and organisational aspects for disaster-resilient societies call aims at addressing the current gaps in the level of preparedness of European society for disasters, and therefore highlighted the importance of increasing risk awareness, and hence resilience among people and decision-makers in Europe. There is a mismatch between the rising application of risk, vulnerability and resilience assessment methods and the understanding of their empirical validity. Whilst the behaviour of individuals, groups, businesses and public services before, during and after a disaster can have a significant impact on damages, resilience and adaptation, assessments rarely include such a critical factor. Current understanding of responses and behaviour is based on outdated research: social and technological changes have widened the gaps in our knowledge, which makes new empirical research necessary. The ambition of the BRIP project is to bridge this risk perception and behavioural gap in order to consolidate a common European conception of resilience, to improve tools, indicators and databases on vulnerability and resilience to disasters and climate change, and to help actors at different levels (European, national, regional, metropolitan, local) in improving risk communication, strengthening risk culture and promoting preparedness, adaptation and resilience behaviour. Bringing together a multidisciplinary research network representing a wide range of approaches, the originality of the project is to develop new tools to remove these barriers and then validate the results with 4 to 6 pilots representing the full diversity of the EU, by combining the experiences of practitioners, researchers and field actors from Western, Eastern and Southern Europe. The project is crossing the boundaries between fields of research and disciplines to overcome the obstacles to the integration of actual risk perception and behaviours into risk, vulnerability, and resilience assessments. The challenge is to combine the wide range of disciplines, approaches and theories involved in risk perception and human behaviour (geography, sociology, psychology, political ecology, economy, anthropology, complex systems). The project is building on a European conference and a previous workshop that have already identified the main challenges and the approaches to overcome them. They have already led the project partners to work together and to join forces with decision-makers and stakeholders from the rescue and security services of several European countries. The main contribution of the project will be to provide a European risk perception and behaviour baseline, which is currently the main barrier to understanding the diversity of risk representations (including terrorism), their factors and their relationship to behaviour, as well as to improving prevention and population preparedness. By targeting a positive approach to communication, risk culture, crisis preparedness and resilience, seeking to change behaviour without fear or angst appeal, focusing on response behaviours and community resilience, the project will make a technical contribution to public prevention policies and the practices of relief and security actors. The project is based on the development of new tools, protocols and guides to good practice (communication, comparison between different technical solutions and alert and information scenario). Once validated in the field, these innovations will be transferable all across Europe.

For ten years, the European Union considers the notion of gender equality through the lens of a liberal political mindset, aiming to rally an entire highly-skilled workforce to maintain the continent’s economic competitiveness internationally. Research and academia are at the same time dramatically evolving through the generalisation of competitive funding and the establishment of excellence policies. Observing that in this context, female researchers remain underrepresented, the RESET project (Rethinking gender Equality and Scientific Excellence Together) aims to address the following question: how, and to which extent, do scientific excellence norms have an impact on female researcher’s careers, with regard to the local academic and national labour markets? Supported by Equal Opportunities Officers from several European universities, most of whom are researchers involved in Social Sciences and Humanities, RESET brings research and political action together. It intends to make the most out of its practical and organisational dimension to address research areas currently ignored by SSH research on the obstacles to women’s career progression in academia. European literature traditionally analyses women’s position in academic careers in three categories: at micro (individuals), meso (organisations) or macro level (society) (Lefeuvre 2016). Corrective actions that form the GEP tie these three dimensions together. Through the questions we raise and the data we collect, the project intends firstly to provide answers to the “grey area” of comparative analysis at a European level identified by Nicky Lefeuvre. In the context of RESET, mechanisms of women’s inclusion/exclusion in scientific careers with regard to the national academic labour market will be compared on four criteria: duration and status of the granting of tenure after the PhD, methods of selection for professorial positions, distribution of positions between “local” and “national” candidates, decisions related to the allocation of resources (salaries). Beyond the use of qualitative and quantitative methods of survey, the definition and implementation of the GEPs shall collect information of the effects of the norm of scientific excellence on the gender of academic careers, depending on the state of the academic labour market for each university and of each national context. The guideline of the corrective actions of the GEPs is to act upon the academic career continuum (PhD enrolment, allocation of a tenured position, access to senior/higher positions; emeritus, honours and academic acknowledgements). The second major research guiding principle of the RESET project will consist in addressing the impact of the international norm of scientific excellence on gender-related career inequalities among the partner European universities. The most common analytical frame used to describe the evolution of the higher education and research landscape is the new public management (Musselin 2017). In an operational perspective, the implementation will be closest to the laboratories and involving its members and directions. It relies on interviews, which approach is twofold: practice- and research-oriented.