Through the “Young Researchers” call for applications, dated 19 August 2022 (Director’s Decree 247/2022), the MUR will fund research projects submitted by young researchers in the following categories:
- Principal Investigators who have been awarded European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants under the Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe framework programmes and who have chosen a foreign Host Institution;
- Successful applicants for Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Individual Fellowships under Horizon 2020 and for MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships under Horizon Europe;
- Those who have obtained the Seal of Excellence after applying for MSCA Individual Fellowships and MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships, under the Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe framework programmes.
The resources allocated through “Young Researchers 2022” amount to €220 million.
The University of Bologna’s projects
The University of Bologna acts as Host Institution in 15 of the projects submitted in response to the call for applications.
Of the 15 projects submitted, 13 have been awarded funding: 1 within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship line and 12 within the Seal of Excellence line. After two withdrawals, 11 projects are currently in progress.
The following 11 projects are in progress:
EXBO - Extractive borders: Profiting from migrants’ forced im/mobility
- Proposing Young Researcher: Dr. Lorenzo Vianelli
- Host department: DiSCi - Storia Culture Civiltà
- Funding line: MSCA - IF
- Funding: 204.977,76 €
- Duration: 36 mesi
Abstract
EXBO investigates accumulation processes enabled by border practices that seek to govern migrants throughimmobilisation as well as forced mobility. It aims to understand the extent to which border management has increasingly become a new terrain for extractive processes and how the governance of migration and asylum is transformed as a result.
The project draws on a multi-sited qualitative analysis of three case studies, covering diverse geographical locations and practices. The first focuses on the economic implications of the UK-Rwanda Deal, which enables UK authorities to externalise asylum procedures by deporting asylum seekers. The second investigates the economic spin-off of hotspots in the Greek Aegean islands, where the prolonged confinement of asylum seekers have been benefitting local economies in multiple ways. The third concerns predatory practices whereby profits are made through the reception of people fleeing from Ukraine in cramped and substandard facilities in Italy. At least 15 in-depth semi-structured interviews will be conducted with a diverse range of actors in each case study to explore extractive dynamics and commodification processes. In the second case study, interviews will be accompanied by ethnographic observations of formal and informal economic practices facilitated by the existence of hotspot centres in the Greek Aegean islands.
EXBO will contribute to the development of a ground-breaking path of research on the extractive and predatory dimensions of border politics. This will be achieved by conceptualising the border as a tool of extraction through which migrants are made profitable even before, or regardless of, their exploitation in the labour market. By attending to the extractive character of bordering processes, EXBO will therefore go beyond the current state of the art in which little attention has been placed on the ways through which borders promote and sustain accumulation dynamics.
LIGHT-METAL - Combining visible light and metal catalysis to develop asymmetric radical cascades for the sustainable preparation of biorelevant molecules
- Proposing Young Researcher: Dr Binlin Zhao
- Host department: CHIMIND - Chimica industriale «Toso Montanari»
- Funding line: SoE
- Funding: 150.000 €
- Duration: 24 mesi
Abstract
The quest for successful lead candidates in drug discovery has challenged synthetic chemists to develop innovative strategies to rapidly generate screening collections of chiral molecules. LIGHT-METAL seeks to provide solutions by developing an effective technology to generate, in one step, architecturally complex chiral natural-like compounds. Specifically, we aim to develop visible-light-driven enantioselective radical cascade processes to synthesise chiral heterocylic scaffolds, which are common motifs in biologically active molecules. To achieve this goal, we will combine asymmetric catalysis by earth-abundant metals and photochemistry, two powerful strategies of modern chemical research with an extraordinary potential for the sustainable preparation of novel molecules. However, the control of enantioselectivity in radical cascade processes poses a fundamental scientific challenge. By developing new strategies to address this problem, LIGHT-METAL will provide effective tools for rapidly synthesising chiral natural-like compounds containing biologically relevant heterocyclic scaffolds with high stereocontrol.
The planned research combines perfectly the fellow’s experience in metal catalysis and radical chemistry with the host’s experience in light-triggered asymmetric processes to develop otherwise unachievable catalytic asymmetric radical cascade reactions. The resulting strategies will be used as an ideal platform for assembling libraries comprising enantiopure chiral small molecules that, along with biological screening carried out in collaboration with the pharmaceutical company Bayer AG, will increase the probability of success in identifying drug-candidate structures. The project’s multicultural and intersectorial nature will broaden the fellow’s ompetencies and place him in a competitive position for his next career move.
AllWom - Alliances of women in contemporary Italian literature
- Proposing Young Researcher: Dr.ssa Elisa Attanasio
- Host department: FICLIT - Filologia classica e Italianistica
- Funding line: SoE
- Funding: 150.000 €
- Duration: 24 mesi
Abstract
AllWom is a cutting-edge and interdisciplinary project that aims to construct an unprecedented and underground network of related mindsets that connected three Italian women writers (Natalia Ginzburg, Anna Maria Ortese and Goliarda Sapienza) to three feminist/post-feminist philosophers (Luce Irigaray, Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway) as part of a wider act of critically rethinking the twentieth-century literary canon. The overall aim of the project is to identify and analyse the tools through which literature can offer an alternative collective imagination that is capable of challenging the system in which it is embedded, which is marked by anindividualist, patriarchal form of “advanced capitalism”. The main scientific objective will be achieved by analysing Ginzburg’s, Ortese’s and Sapienza’s oeuvre (including unpublished texts, such as newspaper articles, letters, diary entries and interviews, which will be collected in an open access digital archive) and highlighting a number of central themes (e.g. the body, the concept of nomadism, the relation between the human and the non-human), common writing styles and comparable strategies of subversion, liberation and self-determination, which allowed for the creation of a new symbolic order. Methodologically, AllWom aims to create a groundbreaking system of alliances of thought that traverse different women writers and thinkers, different types of text, disciplinary boundaries. This broader interdisciplinary vision will allow the feminist approach to be extended to urgent issues such as ecology. Reading Ginzburg’s, Ortese’s and Sapienza’s texts from this perspective will make it possible, in an entirely innovative way, to update postfeminist and ecofeminist theories with Ecocriticism. This major finding will open up new research perspectives in the study of gender and ecological issues, which have proven to be among the most problematic aspects of our times.
POLOV - The politics of love: Marriage migration and governance in Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom
- Proposing Young Researcher: Dr.ssa Paulina Sabugal Paz
- Host department: DAR - Delle Arti
- Funding line: SoE
- Funding: 150.000 €
- Duration: 24 mesi
Abstract
At a time when migration is increasingly reduced to an object of state security, POLOV focuses on the legal, political, and, most importantly, affective relationship between state institutions, especially those in charge of migration, and migrants who are married to European citizens and who seek to regularize their legal status.
Through the paired case of Italy and Spain (southern border countries in the EU) and the United Kingdom (a country that recently left the EU), POLOV addresses the following empirical research questions: How do state bureaucracies scrutinize, evaluate, quantify and socially re-construct love in their decision-making processes about marriage migration? How do marriage migrants, especially women, experience these bureaucratic encounters? By addressing these research questions, POLOV pursues two main objectives: 1) advancing social science theorizing about the role of emotions in how state institutions operate; and 2) improving our understanding of how the everyday encounters of marriage migrants with state bureaucracies affect meanings and practices and performances of love across borders.
POLOV develops an interactional perspective focused on the relationships between the state and marriage migrants. The methodology involves the classic anthropological tools of ethnography: in-depth interviews, participant observation and semi- structured interviews. In practice, this means interviewing policymakers, lawyers and officials in embassies, police headquarters and migration offices. Since there is a methodological focus on both sides of the encounters (state bureaucrats and migrants) the researcher will also do participant observation and in- depth interviews with marriage migrants and its partners and see how they navigate state suspicion and scrutiny.
InBoRC - Intermediate Bodies of the Roman Cities: Sociability and Integration from the Late Republic to the 3rd c. A.D.
- Proposing Young Researcher: Dr Simone Ciambelli
- Host department: DiSCi - Storia Culture Civiltà
- Funding line: SoE
- Funding: 150.000 €
- Duration: 24 mesi
Abstract
InBoRC wants to improve the understanding of the social and political complexity of the Roman cities from the Late Republic to the beginning of the III c. AD. It will go beyond the classical vision based on the élite and characterised by a top-down approach by also considering the actions of the non-élite population in the social, economic, and political life of the city, too. To detect the actual experience of the members of an articulated social structure, it will focus on the intermediate bodies of the cities – social aggregational cores intermediate between the family and the city – which are our best indicator of the civic action of the subaltern communities. Since these groups are attested almost exclusively in epigraphic sources, the project wants to analyse the inscriptions through a sociological and historical approach that outlines the sociability and agency of the intermediate bodies in the cities of the Roman West with particular attention to its bestdocumentedareas: Italy, Southern Gaul and North Africa. However, InBoRC is not geographically strictly limited, but it is nourished by punctual parallels coming from the epigraphical documentation of Asia Minor and Syria and the papyri of Roman Egypt.
InBoRC’s main outcomes are: i) a monograph written with a multi-disciplinary approach (epigraphy, Roman history, sociology, economic history, archaeology, and papyrology); ii) a digital expanded enrichment of the book with searchable encoded editions of inscriptions, external and internal links and an (underlying) open dataset so to integrate new open linked data within existing European e-infrastructures (e.g. Trismegistos, EDH, EDR, Pleiades).
HYBRIS - Hybrid Trajectories of Transnational Islamism
- Proposing Young Researcher: Dr.ssa Ester Sigillò
- Host department: SPS - Scienze politiche e sociali
- Funding line: SoE
- Funding: 150.000 €
- Duration: 24 mesi
Abstract
The Uprisings that broke out on the southern shores of the Mediterranean in 2011 and the waves of migration that followed have shed light on the resurgence of Islamist movements in North Africa and on the renewed presence of Islamic communities in the Western world. On the one hand, media, policymakers, and national intelligence services have increasingly focused on the integration of Muslim communities in host countries.
However, these analyses have been limited to the housekeeping relations between migrant communities and the host states and have not explored the transformative dynamics of Islamist movements when they go transnational. On the other hand, while studies on Islamic activism have effectively highlighted the role of domestic and international factors in transforming the organisation and ideology of Islamist actors, the literature has barely focused on the transnational dimension as an analytical space of inquiry. Indeed, scholarly work on the topic has not systematically investigated the impact of transnationalisation dynamics on the ideological, organizational, and socio-political dimensions of movements. This gap led to simplistic analyses based on a monolithic interpretation of Islamist movements relying on the dichotomy of moderation/ radicalisation. HYBRIS aims to overcome this gap by examining the hybrid trajectories of transnational Islamism in a systematic way and from a cross-country perspective. The project will break new ground in the field by mapping the different trajectories of Ennahda and the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) starting from the ties and networks that activists and organisations belonging to the two movements have created between geographically distant locations. It will do so by analysing two intertwined dimensions of the process of transnationalisation, digital activism, and re-localisation dynamics, taking Islamist movements and their transnational expansion in the Italy and France as case studies.
Megahalos - Radio Megahalos: a new probe for galaxy cluster outskirts
- Proposing Young Researcher: Dr.ssa Virginia Cuciti
- Host department: DIFA - Fisica e Astronomia
- Funding line: SoE
- Funding: 150.000 €
- Duration: 24 mesi
Abstract
Clusters of galaxies are the most massive structures of our Universe, consisting of thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity and embedded in a diffuse intergalactic medium. They form at the knots of the cosmic web, where dark and luminous matter is accreted through cosmic filaments. This accretion process occurs in the outskirts of clusters, however, due to the low plasma density in these regions, galaxy cluster outskirts have remained so far largely unexplored. Thanks to the low observing frequency and unprecedented sensitivity to the large scale emission of the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), I recently discovered a new type of diffuse sources in galaxy clusters, that I named “radio megahalos”. These sources can be up to 3 Mpc in size and fill the entire volume of galaxy clusters, from the central region to the outskirts. With this project I intend to leverage on the discovery of megahalos to carry out the first step towards the systematic exploration of the large scale structure of the Universe. The aim of this proposal is to understand the nature of megahalos and thus constrain the physical properties of galaxy cluster outskirts, including magnetic fields, acceleration mechanisms and energetic content of relativistic particles. These results will be achieved through an interdisciplinary approach that combines LOFAR radio observations and cutting-edge cosmological simulations. While I am an expert radio astronomer, during this project I will be trained in the production and analysis of cosmological simulations. These will be used to perform the first theoretical modelling of this new class of objects. For this reason, I propose the UNIBO as the host institution and Prof. Franco Vazza as the supervisor, since he is a leading expert in the modelling of non-thermal phenomena in galaxy clusters with numerical simulations.
StorAtlas – Building up an archaeological atlas of agricultural storage in the Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age: the Mesara plain on Crete as a case-study
- Proposing Young Researcher: Dr Santo Privitera
- Host department: DiSCi - Storia Culture Civiltà
- Funding line: SoE
- Funding: 150.000 €
- Duration: 24 mesi
Abstract
StorAtlas aims to achieve an in-depth diachronic understanding of the diverse economic and social strategies and technologies concerning staple storage that were carried out in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age (late fourth through late second millennium BC). It aggregates evidence from the built environment, artifact distribution patterns and cultural formation processes to make sense of the way storage areas were laid out and used through their final destruction or abandonment in a variety of contexts. It argues the need to develop multi-layered material understandings of the groups who store agricultural surplus, before attempting to extrapolate larger socio-political inferences from the archaeological record. The data collected will form an archaeological atlas that will record archaeological finds, botanical finds, as well as the built environment that they belonged to and, where such evidence exists, administrative documents, both written and non-written. As a case- study, it will focus on a well-defined area on the island of Crete, the plain of the Mesara, that has the highest informative potential because of its long-established and well-documented archaeological exploration as well as the available outstanding archaeological record, comprising the renown sites of Phaistos, Hagia Triada, Kommos, and Gortyn-Mitropolis. The Atlas will record a complex documentation and will offer a useful interpretative tool for archaeologists and scholars of ancient economy that are engaged both with the excavation and interpretation of agricultural storage facilities and with the study of agricultural surplus in the ancient Mediterranean as a whole.
ELeMEnT-Enhanced Locally resonant Metamaterials for Train-induced vibration mitigation
- Proposing Young Researcher: Dr Farhad Zeighami
- Host department: DICAM - Ingegneria civile, chimica, ambientale e dei Materiali
- Funding line: SoE
- Funding: 150.000 €
- Duration: 24 mesi
Abstract
The ELeMEnt project proposes a research framework to devise, design, fabricate, and test an innovative Compact Resonant Wave Barrier (CRWB) to mitigate railway ground vibrations. The proposed device aims at overcoming some limitations of the available railway vibration mitigation technologies, namely trenches and pile barriers. By exploiting the locally resonant metamaterial concept, the proposed approach allows for designing resonant wave barriers with significant attenuation capabilities and practical engineering dimensions.
The main research objectives of the project include: (i) analytical design of CRWB guided by dispersion laws and exploiting Multiple Scattering theory, (ii) numerical design and optimization of CRWB by using the wave finite element method, and (iii) prototyping and testing of CRWB on the field. The development of the ELeMEnt project demands an interdisciplinary approach integrating civil engineering, applied physics, and material engineering. In-depth knowledge of advanced analytical methods, numerical approaches, fabrication, and measurement techniques is planned to be acquired via a high-level training-through-research framework. The outcomes of the ELeMEnt project will provide major advancements beyond current state-of-the-art within the metamaterial and civil engineering communities from a fundamental and applied perspective. Attending training courses and seminars, publishing research results in top international journals, and obtaining new transversal skills will reinforce the career of the research fellow. Overall, the ELeMEnt project aims to contribute to the "infrastructures for sustainable mobility" mission of PNRR by safeguarding railway infrastructures against train-induced vibrations.
LATTICE - Wire-and-Arc Additively Manufactured lattice elements for a new class of green steel structures
- Proposing Young Researcher: Dr.ssa Vittoria Laghi
- Host department: DICAM - Ingegneria civile, chimica, ambientale e dei Materiali
- Funding line: SoE
- Funding: 150.000 €
- Duration: 24 mesi
Abstract
The digitalization of the construction sector could potentially produce more efficient structures, reduce material waste and increase work safety. Current strategies for the realization of automated steel constructions see the application of metal 3D printing processes (and in particular Wire-and-Arc Additive Manufacturing) as an opportunity to build a new generation of efficient steel structures with reduced material use. This, though, requires advanced multidisciplinary knowledge in manufacturing, metallurgy, structural engineering and computational design. Lattice structures are characterized by high efficiency (in terms of high stiffness and minimized material use), however their application at the scale of the single element (“meso-scale”), such as beams and columns, is still hampered by the issue of the connection at nodes (in terms of geometry complexity, assembly and production cost). The LATTICE project proposes a comprehensive digital design and fabrication framework for a new generation of steel 3D printed lattice diagrid structural elements for various applications in Architecture, Engineering and Construction. The ambition of the LATTICE project is to propose a new class of efficient structural elements by exploiting the efficiency of lattice structures at the meso-scale through the adoption of WAAM production technology. The increased efficiency of lattice structures is provided by their high structural performances and reduced environmental impact, through the adoption of digital fabrication and optimization techniques for construction. The idea comes from the preliminary result recently awarded with the “Special Mention by Autodesk” at the 3DPioneers Challenge 2021 and a further development in terms of a patent for the realization of efficient lattice geometries. The project activities will contribute to increase the application of 3D printing in construction, with the aim of creating a new generation of metal 3D-printed efficient structures.
Mabel - Metabolomics Approach for the assessment of Baby-Mother Enteric microbiota Legacy
- Proposing Young Researcher: Dr Gianfranco Picone
- Host department: DISTAL - Scienze e Tecnologie agro-alimentari
- Funding line: SoE
- Funding: 150.000 €
- Duration: 24 mesi
Abstract
Gut microbiota represents the microbe healthy population living in our intestine, playing key roles in several metabolic, nutritional, physiological, and immunological processes. After birth, is known that the composition of infant gut microbiota derives from both horizontal (method of delivery and environmental conditions) and vertical transmission from mother to child, which is strictly related to how the infant is fed (breastfed or infant formula). The possibility that a preliminary microbiota could form during pregnancy, although the womb is considered a sterile environment, has been recently becoming the subject of studies. Detailed information on the development of the microbiota during pregnancy is lacking, and its acquisition represents a fundamental step in the knowledge of how perinatal and neonatal factors modulate the development of the microbiota in infants. Thus, the focus of the MABEL project is to apply novel methodologies, based on Machine learning and data mining from multi-omis platforms such s of High-Resolution Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectra, genetic and Gas Chromatography analysis to investigate the notion of vertical transmission of microbiota, by the assessment of breast/formula milk, stool, and infant meconium. This experimentation is fundamental as the bacterial ecosystem in early life plays a role in microbial composition and disease susceptibility throughout life such as obesity or allergic sensitization. The Department of Agriculture and Food Science (DISTAL) of the University of Bologna (UNIBO) offers key tools in muti-omics data analysis. These tools together with my deep experience in NMR data acquisition and interpretation are a perfect combination for the development of this project.
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