The new policies issued by the European Commission support the concept of bioeconomy and circular economy to develop a new value chain in the market across the implementation of innovative technologies for the production of bio-based compounds from (bio)waste and wastewater. In this scenario, REFRAME project aims to upgrade wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) into Water Resource Recovery Facilities (WRRF) in which wastewater and sewage sludge are used as raw materials for the production of different bio-based compounds. A bio-based compound is defined as a product that is derived from materials of biological origin. The main objective of REFRAME is to develop a new hybrid biological system assisted by an oxidation-reduction potential (ORP) based control for the combined production and purification processes of targeted bio-based volatile fatty acids (VFAs) and polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). REFRAME will be the platform for chemicals, precursors for bioplastics, and feed ingredients ready for the market. A WWTP becomes a WRRF that attempts to produce valuable and marketable bio-based products, such as cellulose by utilizing the organic matter from the wastewater as raw material. The recovery of cellulosic primary sludge (CPS) could be biologically converted to other bio-based compounds, such as VFAs and PHAs. The project will advance the state of the art of the field by the investigation of a new type of bioprocess and bacterial metabolisms to fill the current lack of the long-term stability, quality, and purity of isolated bio-based compounds (VFAs and PHAs) produced from CPS as raw materials. The applicant has a proven record of biological processes control, a fundamental skill required for REFRAME. He will thrive in the environment of the University of Verona, department of biotechnology. This project will enrich and broaden the applicant's expertise in this field and fortify his international research career.

Authoritarian political forces are a growing global phenomenon. In critical theory, this is explained either through material factors, running the risk of economic reductionism, or through psychological traits, individualizing the matter in a problematic way. To date, no theoretical framework integrates the two dimensions in a consistent way, leading to deep rifts in political analysis. The proposed research programme introduces the term phantom possession in order to bridge between the material and the psychological level. The notion of phantom possession allows the reconstruction of authoritarianism as driven by property logic. Conceptualised as a domain requiring control and defence, the phantasmatic entitlement becomes a reference point for authoritarian mobilization. Consequently, the subject of authoritarianism can be characterized as a phantom owner. The full theory of the authoritarian personality as phantom owner consists of three components. The first is an account of the politics of phantom owners. As Hannah Arendt mentioned in her analysis of modern mass-politics, authoritarianism is destructive in a way prefigured by early modern property discourse. I analyse destructiveness as the core characteristic of authoritarian politics. The second component investigates the psychology of phantom owners. To understand the psychological basis of authoritarianism, I link the Frankfurt School approach of authoritarian character formation with newer trends in feminist object-relations theory. On this basis, prejudices can be understood as defensive mechanisms, and defensiveness as the defining feature of authoritarian psyches. The third component implements my account. I show how the dual license to violence implied by property – the right to destroy and the right to aggressively defend one’s property – structures current authoritarian mobilization around such disparate domains as abortion, immigration, gender, and environmental politics.

While for a long time historians of ideas have highlighted the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Northern European liberal genesis of the idea of tolerance, recent historical research has indeed revealed its medieval and early modern gestation across the Mediterranean area. SPACES aims to originally investigate these attitudes by analyzing the links between two apparently disjointed aspects: religious and sexual toleration in the early modern Mediterranean world. Thanks to a survey of the sources I have already carried out in the archives of the Spanish and Roman Inquisition, I have uncovered a not yet investigated 'heresy' that circulated in the Italian peninsula between the 16th and 18th centuries. The defendants thought that Adam and Eve practiced anal sex in the terrestrial paradise, praising the pleasures of unreproductive sexuality. They also stated that ‘all can be saved in their own law’, that is, that the eternal salvation was not limited to any specific religious or cultural tradition. These heretical ideas were partially influenced by Islamic beliefs, although through the meditation of Christian anti-Islamic writings. Some of the defendants were also charged with apostasy to Islam. These facts further prove the influence of Islamic thought on religious heterodoxy in early modern Europe. I aim to prove that, in these cases, questioning the religious prescriptions regulating sexual morality prepared the ground for a wider critique of the political and social order, stimulating more inclusive understandings of religious identities. Uncovering a past in which toleration was practiced and theorized despite an ongoing religious war contrasts the simplified interpretation of today interactions with Islam in the public discourse in terms of a 'Clash of Civilizations'. Furthermore, the focus on sexuality allows SPACES to interrogate the complex relations between religious and sexual identities in an increasingly multicultural world.

The manufacturing world is experiencing what many recognize as “the fourth industrial revolution”, characterized by production lines turning into complex cyber-physical systems (CPSs). This transformation offers unprecedented opportunities but brings a series of intellectual and engineering challenges. The DeFacto (Design Automation for Smart Factories) project aims at advancing the field of CPS design and its automation by developing novel modeling paradigms, scalable algorithms, and tools to aid the design of smart manufacturing systems, ultimately fostering their widespread adoption. DeFacto’s methodology reasons about systems using reliable compositional abstractions of system behaviors based on assume-guarantee (A/G) contracts. An A/G contract represents the interface of a component as a pair of assumptions and guarantees. Assumptions are the behaviors that a component expects from the environment; guarantees are the behaviors the component promises in the context of the assumptions. Contracts are mathematical models that provide rigorous composition rules and mechanisms to analyze complex system behaviors, validate the design requirements, and develop system components in a modular and hierarchical way. CPSs challenge the existing notions of “modularity”, “hierarchy”, and “separation of concerns” in electronic design. DeFacto rethinks these notions to enable effective and computationally tractable compositional abstractions for industrial CPSs, by blending techniques from formal methods, simulation, and optimization for virtual prototyping and algorithmic synthesis of control software. DeFacto is a major step for my personal growth and my career as a well-rounded, independent researcher. It allows broadening my horizons with new approaches to CPS design automation and develops the necessary skills to address major scientific and technological challenges to be faced by the European economies and societies.