The 4rd call for applications for the Fellows-in-Residence programme will be launched on 18 November 2021 for the recruitment of a maximum of 9 researchers. Applications are submitted in two stages: a pre-submission (summary of the research project) before 13 January 2022 at 13:00 CET and a submission of the full application before 9 February 2022 at 13:00 CET.
The Fellows-in-Residence programme, run by CY Advanced Studies (CY AS), is a residential programme for researchers from outside CY Initiative for a period of 4 months to one year. This programme aims to promote interdisciplinary exchanges, international collaborations and to strengthen the attractiveness of CY Initiative partners.
During the academic year 2022-2023, the Fellows-in-Residence program will host a maximum of 9 fellows-in-residence. All fields of research are eligible. Fellows are encouraged to develop their research programme in line with the research activity carried out by the CY Initiative laboratories.
Three types of fellowships will be offered:
Junior fellowships: for researchers who have obtained their PhD within the last ten years, with or without a permanent position at a university or research institute. Junior fellowships are awarded for one year and may be renewed for an additional year.
Senior fellowships: for researchers who have obtained their PhD more than ten years ago, with a permanent position at a university or research institute. Senior fellowships are awarded for a period of 4 to 10 months. In case of long-term collaboration, it is possible to divide the duration of the fellowship into two or three annual stays.
National fellowships at junior or senior level: for researchers and professors holding a permanent position at French higher education or research institutions. For a period of 6 months, CY AS offers the possibility to host researchers during a CRCT or délégation period by reimbursing teaching costs to their home institution. This scheme is open also to researchers from partner universities outside France.
A detailed description of the Fellows-in-Residence program and application documents will be available from Thursday 18 November 2021 via the platform. A pre-submission of the summary of the research project should be done in English before Thursday 13 January 2022 at 13:00 CET, the submission of the full application in English before Wednesday 9 February 2022 at 13:00 CET.
Théo Aiolfi
Presentation
AIOLFI Théo Aiolfi is an MSCA Cofund EUTOPIA Science and Innovation Fellow working at CY Cergy Paris University, in collaboration with Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). He was formerly an Early Career Teaching Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) and Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL) of the University of Warwick, where he was awarded his PhD in 2022. His doctoral research was conducted at the department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS) in collaboration with the department of Theatre and Performance Studies (TPS), under the joint supervision of Shirin Rai and Silvija Jestrovic.
Théo’s interdisciplinary research is located at the intersection of politics and performance studies. His thesis developed a comparative case study of the political communication of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen during their presidential campaigns of 2016 and 2017, examining the complex intersection between populism and exclusionary nationalism. His doctoral work focused on populism, defining it as a political style, an open-ended repertoire of political performances articulating any ideological content through an opposition between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, transgression and the articulation of crisis.
In addition to populism, performativity and politics as performance, Théo's research interests also include discourse and visual analysis, semiotics, popular culture and theories of International Relations.
Research Project
Performers of the Climate Crisis: Eco-populism and Political Representation in the Anthropocene
Because of its global threat for life, the climate crisis is the most important challenge ever faced by humankind. The consequences of human activity on the planet have become increasingly alarming, backed by a unanimous scientific consensus. Yet, despite the extreme salience of these changes, the inaction and apathy of political leaders across the world has led a new generation of political actors to take it upon themselves to make their fellow citizens aware of the gravity of the crisis and to foster radical change. Put differently, they have become symbolic performers of the climate crisis.
Developing their own crisis narratives to mobilise their fellow citizens and highlight the passivity of the current elite, these political actors have developed new forms of green politics. This interdisciplinary project explores two types of such actors: activists and elected politicians. Through a comparative analysis of five Western countries – including Belgium, France, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States – this project at the crossroads of politics and performance studies seeks to chart the repertoire of the political communication of these actors. It does so through the lens of populism, understood as a political style, to consider the innovative way they combine left-wing radicalism and environmental politics, and feminism to articulate a global people united against an unresponsive elite. EUTOPIA SIF
Lucas Barberis
Presentation
BARBERIS Lucas Barberis is PhD in Physics, professor at Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina and researcher of the Argentinian National Research Council of Science and Technology (CONICET). He made postdoctoral studies at La Plata, Argentina and Nice, France. Is also organizer of the Argentinian School of Mathematical Biology. Former professor at UNRC and UTN, Argentina and member of the Argentinean Physics Society (AFA).
His theoretical research is focused in mathematical modeling of cancer by means of equations on population dynamics and computational simulations of self propelled particles in agent based models. Another research involves time series analysis, neuronal networks, critical phenomena, sociophysics.
He also collaborate in experiments on cancer stem cells research (IBYME, Buenos Aires), self-organization in glioma progression (MU, Ann Arbor,MI,USA) and accelerometer time-series for animal behavior (IIGYT,Córdoba).
Research Project
Emerging symmetries in active systems
Active matter refers to the behavior of self-propelled particles. They are currently regarded as the standard system to study collective behavior out of thermodynamic equilibrium. Active systems are ubiquitous in biology across scales: crawling cells, swimming bacteria, bird flocks, and ungulate herds, to name just a few of the countless existing examples. Also, there are artificial active systems such as phoretic colloids and quincke rollers, among others, that promise novel technological applications.
Most understandings of active matter were based on a classical model in which particles interact via a velocity alignment mechanism which is nothing else than a tendency of the particle to align its velocity with the ones of their neighbors. As a consequence, an ordered pattern with all the particles aligned raises. For the last 25 years, it has been assumed that order in active systems results necessarily from a velocity alignment mechanism.
However, we have recently shown that order can emerge in the absence of any alignment mechanism [Barberis and Peruani, PRL 2016]. We have observed that that the emerging patterns is the result of the dynamical process instead being just given by the microscopic interactions [Barberis and Peruani, J Chem Phys 2019]. Indeed, many natural active
systems displaying order/patterns do not possess a velocity alignment mechanisms, but seem to operate by alternative “forces”.
The goal of this proposal is to investigate how the movement can shape patterns in active systems by means of analytical and computational studies without velocity alignment. Thus, we attempt to go deeper into our understanding of out of equilibrium systems.
Besides the theoretical approaches, we will apply these
concepts to biological systems such as cell streams in glioma tumors, myxobacteria aggregations and E. coli bacteria moving in granular media.
Carrie Benjamin
Presentation
Carrie Ann Benjamin is an ethnographer, urban anthropologist, and educator interested in the role of public space in in reshaping local and national debates on inequality, immigration, and ‘race’ in France. Her previous research project, funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick (2018-2021), explored the relationship between public space, ‘civility’, and whiteness in France through a multisensory lens. Recently, she has worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the ESRC/ORA-funded project Atmospheres of (Counter)terrorism in European Cities in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Studies at the University of Birmingham (2021-2022). She holds a PhD in Anthropology from SOAS, University of London (2017), where she worked as a Research and Administrative Assistant for the SOAS Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies.
Research Project
The project ‘Atmospheres of (in)civility: public space, activism and moral communities’ takes a multi-sensorial, atmospheric approach to understanding the intersections between urban public space, (in)civility and the formation of moral communities. Much of the recent work on incivility and anti-social behaviour has approached it from a legal and criminological standpoint, highlighting how middle- class tastes are imposed on public spaces to the detriment of vulnerable groups. However, there is a need to broaden our definition of ‘incivility’ to account for the incivilities and injustices perpetuated by institutions as well as individuals. Bringing together French and English literature on atmospheres, ambiances, and the senses with work on anti-social behaviour and incivility, the project proposes an interdisciplinary investigation on how a politics of care and solidarity impacts the welfare and inclusion of vulnerable urban populations. Drawing on the anthropological tradition of participant observation and ‘sensory apprenticeship’, the project focuses on refugee outreach and support groups to learn how they navigate city spaces, practice care, and attempt to produce atmospheres that foster welfare and inclusion. In approaching these questions, this project contributes to the politicisation of the notion of atmospheres and ambiance by drawing attention to the relationships between the ‘openness’ of public spaces and ambiances and the wellbeing of urban residents.
EUTOPIA SIF
Filippo Boeri
Presentation
BOERI Filippo Boeri is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) of the London School of Economics. Formerly, he worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economics of the ESSEC Business School and at the Department of Geography and Environment of the LSE. He obtained his PhD in Economic Geography from the London School of Economics in 2020. He is an applied trade economist, with an expertise in empirical analyses exploiting large individual-, transaction- and firm-level datasets. His main research interests lie at the intersection of international economics and urban economics, with a particular focus on two broad themes: the analysis of place-based policies and the effect of trade and technological shocks on wage inequalities.
Research project
This project aims to investigate how information and communication technologies (ICT) have increased wage inequality, across high- and low-performing firms, as well as across different occupational categories. ICT play an important role in the rise of both between- and within-firm wage disparities by affecting how firms are organized, as well as the structure of labor and product markets. First, ICT can influence the internal organization of firms, their management and sourcing strategies and the spatial distribution of the production process (Bresnahan et al., 2002; Bloom et al., 2014; Caliendo et al., 2015). Second, ICT is likely to broaden the geographic scope of labor markets, reducing screening costs (Autor, 2001; Kuhn and Mansour, 2013). Moreover, ICT can differentially impact the efficiency of all stages of the production process by reducing setup times, run times, and inspection times as well as the demand and returns to ability across different firms (Bartel et al., 2007). Despite recent advances in the literature, there is limited research considering how variation in ICT usage, by firms in different locations and with varying occupational composition, shapes inequality in the wages that firms pay. This project aims to fill this gap. I will analyze the way ICT reshapes competitive dynamics across firms and the way inputs of production are organized within firms across locations. An innovative empirical strategy will be used to structurally estimate properties of the firm-level production function, including the elasticity of substitution between different worker types and technologies. This will provide the foundation for analyzing the role of the different mechanisms through which ICT contributes to the overall evolution of wage inequality, as well as the interaction of these mechanisms. The project will represent the first attempt to analyze the spatial dimensions of technological shocks and their propagation across local labor markets, defined in a continuum of space and task content substitutability.
Raphael Cahen
Presentation
CAHEN Raphaël Cahen is a Post-doctoral Fellow as well as a visiting professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He has studied law, history and political sciences in Aix-en-Provence, Perugia and Munich and holds a Joint PhD in Law and political sciences from Aix-Marseille University and the LMU Munich (2014).
He is doing research on intellectual history, as well as history of institutions and international law.
His major publications include Friedrich Gentz (1764-1832): Penseur post-Lumières et acteur du nouvel ordre européen (Berlin, Boston 2017) as well as two special issues on the history of international law (Clio@Themis vol.18, JHIL vol. 22/1) and two edited books Les Professeurs allemands en Belgique. Circulation des savoirs juridiques et enseignement du droit (1817-1914), ed. R. Cahen, J. de Brouwer, F. Dhondt, M. Jottrand, Bruxelles, ASP, 2022 ; Joseph-Marie Portalis : diplomate, magistrat et législateur, ed. R. Cahen, N. Laurent-Bonne, Aix-en-Provence, PUAM, 2020.
He is currently editing a book with Sean Morris, Pierre Allorant and Walter Badier on Law(s) and international relation(s) : actors, institutions and comparative legislations including 20 contributions from top researchers.
Research Project
International law is said to be a distinct profession with institutions and journals first in the 1870s. Nevertheless, from the French Revolution to the Franco-Prussian Wars (1870-1871), lawyers have initiated professional practices that related to the development of international law. They were involved in foreign offices, scientific academies, and universities, they wrote textbooks and articles and formed networks.
This project aims to investigate the interaction between foreign offices and international lawyers as well as the link between political migration of lawyers and their implication in the making of international law. This research will therefore shed light on the discourses and processes leading to the institutionalization of international law.
For the first time, it will also closely analyse the interactions between foreign offices and international law as well as the juridification of international affairs in the nineteenth century.
To do so, this project will benefit from the use of unpublished primary sources coming for the foreign offices of France, Prussia (Germany), Austria, Belgium, Great-Britain, and Russia.
Koteshwar Devulapally
Presentation
DEVULAPALLY Education
- Bachelors in Science (B.Sc.) ,Kakatiya University, India
- Master in Chemistry ,Kakatiya University, India
- Ph.D. in Chemical Science (2021) CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, Hyderabad, India.
Research Interests:
- Synthesis and photophysical characterization of organic materials, metal organic complexes, conjugated molecules for photovoltaic applications.
- Functional polymer materials synthesis for various applications.
Experience:
- I have successfully synthesized organic/inorganic compounds by handling of air or moisture sensitive compounds and reagents via condensation, alkylation, arylation and catalytic reactions. Developed major core units such as: macrocyclic precursors of porphyrin, phthalocyanine derivatives and inorganic metal complexes, to achieve the synthesis and subsequent optimisation of targeted hole, electron transport and electrode materials for solar cells applications.
Research Project Molecular materials for perovskite photovoltaics:
In the last five years, the rise of halide perovskite photovoltaics is one of the most impressive evolutions in the history of photovoltaic technologies with greater than 25% of their power conversion efficiency (PCE). Interestingly, these devices can also efficiently operate under low intensity and diffuse light. Thus, it is apparent that perovskite-based solar cells (PSCs), is the future of the next generation PV technologies suitable for both either indoor or outdoor applications, power IoT devices, etc. The triumph of PSCs lies in unlimited possibility to design excellent and selective perovskite light absorption and long charge-carrier diffusion length of organic materials. Importantly, these solar cells are prepared by soft techniques using solution processing. Therefore, the cost-effective large-scale production is realizable. In this context, production cost, device performance and stability, leading to durability and long product’s life, are considered as the key performance parameters. Despite of important progress in term of device performance, the long-term stability of targeted technology needs to be further ameliorated.
EUTOPIA SIF
Frédéric Dumur
Presentation
Frédéric Dumur is associate professor since 2008 at the University of Aix Marseille (France). Formerly at the University of Angers, the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne and the University of Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, he joined in 2008 the Institute of Radical Chemistry in Marseille. His research focuses on photochemistry and all the related applications including radical chemistry, photopolymerization and water-waste treatments. His research interest also includes the polymerization of organic monolayers on various metal substrates for optoelectronic applications. From 2013 to 2015, he was also associate researcher at the (Integration: from Material to Systems) IMS laboratory at the University of Bordeaux where he worked on the elaboration of organic light emitting diodes. He co-authored about 350 publications and 10 book chapters.
Research Project
During last decades, the great population increase worldwide together with the need of people to adopt improved conditions of living led to a dramatically increase of the consumption of polymers. Materials appear interwoven with our consuming society where it would be hard to imagine a modern society today without plastics which have found a myriad of uses in fields as diverse as household appliances, packaging, construction, medicine, electronics, and automotive and aerospace components. A continued increase in the use of plastics has greatly stimulated the development of new polymerization techniques. In this field, photopolymerization that makes use of light (and even sunlight) to convert a liquid monomer as a solid constitute an interesting approach, especially, if energy-saving and low-cost irradiation setups such as LEDs can be used. Additionally, light is a traceless reagent, enabling to develop more environmentally friendly polymerization processes. However, photopolymerization is currently facing a major drawback in industry, namely the use of photoinitiating systems that can only be activated with UV light, at the origin of numerous safety concerns. The present research project aims at addressing this issue by developing new photoinitiating systems activable under visible light and low light intensity. Especially, the careful selection of the chromophore used to interact with light could pave the way towards sunlight polymerization.
Adel Francis
Presentation
Francis is a Senior researcher or Professor of Ceramics at CMRDI with PhD, MSc and BSC chemistry degrees from university of Ain shams (Egypt), and Visiting Scientists at Imperial college London and Connecticut university, USA. In 2003, he was a visiting researcher at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, and in 2011/2014 he conducted research at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU, Germany). He is a member of numerous scientific bodies such as the Royal society of chemistry (UK), the Egyptian syndicate for Professional Scientists and the German Society of Humboldtians. From 2007 to 2009 he did research at Technical University of Darmstadt as a Humboldt research fellow. His research is broad and encompasses a number of the various areas that fall under the heading of Materials Science and engineering. His research interests are centered on the relationships between the processing, microstructure and functional properties of ceramic and composite materials. He investigates functionalization strategies to modify metallic biomaterial surfaces (e.g. magnesium-based alloys) for medical implants and bone regeneration. Another important research area is the biological and functional behavior of organosilicon polymer-derived silicon-based ceramic composites for biomedical and engineering applications. Francis is a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation (AvH), and an alumnus of the FAU and DAAD.
Research Project
Biodegradable Magnesium is a significant and fascinating alternative to permanent metallic implants (e.g. stainless steel, cobalt-chromium, and titanium alloys) for orthopedic and dental applications. However, the vulnerability of magnesium to corrosion under physiological conditions has limited its introduction for therapeutic and clinical applications. Therefore, coating of magnesium seems to be a promising approach as it not only enables improvement in corrosion resistance but also provides a suitable surface for better bone bonding and cell growth. This project explores the surface modification of magnesium substrates by using a corrosion resistant coating made of organosilicon polymers /bioactive glass(BG) composites (in the presence of other additives, e.g. chitosan) via different coating techniques. The interdisciplinary nature of organosilicon polymers and their molecular structures, as well as their diversity of applications have resulted in an unprecedented range of devices and synergies cutting across unrelated fields in biology and engineering. Proper control of the treatment conditions and bioactive glass contents of the coating in combination with other additives (e.g. chitosan,..) is considered as being a proper way to stabilize the composite film, and to relate changes in the composition of the organosilicon matrix to the physical, biological and mechanical properties of the final composite product. In the end, development of new corrosion resistant coatings is expected to open up a new era in the engineering of materials for medicine and especially for orthopedic and dental applications.
Giuseppe Grasso
Presentation
GRASSO Giuseppe Grasso is professor of General and Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Catania and is responsible for a signed agreement between the Chemical Sciences Department of University of Catania and the IRCSS Bietti in Rome. He obtained his PhD at the University of Nottingham and has won the Fulbright Scholarship as a visiting Professor in 2015 to stay 9 months at the University of Pennsylvania. He has participated to many funded national and international projects and has been the National coordinator of the PRIN project “Role of metal dyshomeostasis and ubiquitin-proteasome system derangement in brain pathologies: risk factors and neuroprotective strategies”. His research focuses on the study of molecular interactions between biomolecules involved in certain neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. In particular, some metalloproteases involved with these diseases are studied and the possibility of modulating the enzymatic activity of these biomolecules for therapeutic purposes is investigated. The influence that metal ions such as copper or zinc and oxidative stress have on the biomolecular mechanisms involved in neurodegeneration is also studied using various analytical techniques such as mass spectrometry, surface plasmon resonance, NMR as well as biochemical methods.
Research Project
Proteasome is considered a crucial target for therapies in many diseases, such as neurodegenerative disorders and cancers. FDA-approved drugs specifically inhibiting the proteasome, revolutionized the therapy of hematological cancers. Beside the inhibitors, new classes of molecules, acting as modulators of the proteasome activity, are emerging. In this scenario a promising direction in the design of proteasome modulators could be peptide structures. Therefore, during the project I will focus my effort to develop chimera peptides as a new family of proteasome activators able to lead to the degradation of misfolded protein aggregates. The peptides will contain also a carnosine moiety as data just published from my group have showed that carnosine is an activator of insulin-degrading enzyme (IDE), a metalloprotease which is also able to degrade amyloid beta peptides. As the latter seem to be responsible for accumulation of misfolded protein and consequent neurodegeneration, chimera peptides, which contain a peptidic part able to activate the proteasome as well as a carnosine moiety able to activate IDE will be synthesized in this project and tested towards IDE and proteasome activity, in an effort to develop a new drug which could have a high impact in the battle against neurodegenerative diseases.
Maria Herrero Herrero
Presentation
HERRERO Maria Herrero Herrero is a Chemical Engineer from the Polytechnical University of Valencia (Spain). She graduated in 2016 doing a research work on electrospun membranes as drug delivery systems, in the Center for Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering (CBIT).
After that, she started her PhD also at CBIT with Professor Ana Vallés Lluch. Her research was focused on the study of a three-dimensional system for indirect cell co-culture, by combining different polymeric structures. As a result of her research, she has published several articles in scientific journals.
During her doctorate she continued her training in her field, taking courses in spectrophotometric techniques (CFP-UPV), TEM microscopy (CFP-UPV) and nanoscience (UNED). Moreover, she co-supervised three Final Degree Projects, which obtained an excellent.
Her passion for teaching led her to collaborate with the Department of Thermodynamics of the same university, in the subjects of Thermodynamics, Heat Transfer, Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering.
Finally, she is currently finishing her studies in pedagogy at the University of Valencia.
Research Project
The skin is a crucial organ in the human body as it acts as a barrier against external physical, chemical and biological agents.
When a damage occurs in the skin, which occurs frequently, this function is temporarily lost and that can lead to highly dramatic situations. The most common injuries in skin are wounds, burns and different types of cancer.
This ambitious project involves an innovative and versatile hydrogel as a delivery platform for photothermal and wound healing active ingredients based on a multiscale system composed of nanostructured lipid carriers (NLC) containing natural bioactive compounds (NBC) – such as curcumin –, and gold nanoparticles.
Curcumin requires encapsulation because of its low biodisponibility, high degradation and hydrophobicity. We will use NLC as the main delivery system, however other encapsulation strategies will be explored to obtain different release profiles.
In addition, gold nanoparticles with different shapes (e.g. nanorods, nanospheres) will be integrated in the system to elucidate the best performing geometry for light triggered drug release.
Finally, the biocompatibility, but also biological performance and clinical potential of our formulations will be evaluated and validated, both in vitro then on skin explants from patients and healthy donors, in order to push this project from bench to bedside and pave the way to a true translational research.
EUTOPIA SIF
Arkadisz Jędrzejewski
Presentation
JĘDRZEJEWSKI Arkadiusz Jędrzejewski is an assistant professor at Wrocław University of Science and Technology (Poland). In 2020, he obtained a PhD in Physical Sciences from the same university. During his doctoral studies, he completed two longer internships at Warsaw University of Technology (Poland) and KU Leuven (Belgium). He was also a recipient of Jan Mozrzymas scholarship for Interdisciplinary Research awarded by Wrocław Academic Hub. His PhD thesis received the first prize (ex aequo) for the best dissertation in the field of Econophysics and Sociophysics from the Polish Physical Society, Section of Physics in Economy and Social Science. He has been a principal investigator of two national scientific projects and has worked as an investigator in a few others. Since 2018, he has been a member of technical program committee of the International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications.
Arkadiusz is passionate about statistical physics and its interdisciplinary applications. He combines methods and theories from non-linear dynamics, non-equilibrium processes, and phase transitions to study various complex systems. His work in this area includes mostly modelling and analysing socio-economic phenomena, like opinion dynamics, diffusion of innovation, or group formations.
Research Project
Social norms are rules or beliefs that guide and shape social behaviors. Rather than stated explicitly and enforced by laws, they are self-enforcing and derived by conformity at the group level. Very often people follow norms unconsciously without awareness how impactful they are in their daily lives. Thus, the emergence of social norms is a subject of broad and current interest, especially in sociology, social psychology, and economics.
Commonly, the formation of social norms is modelled as arising from social influence and homophily without consideration of the interactions with the background. However, the society is clearly coupled with the physical environment where it develops. The change of social norm is frequently connected with some economical or behavioral cost, which may vary in time or may depend on the numbers of adopters. Thus, in the project, we are going to study agent-based models of social norms with feedback loops between the social world and the physical world that imposes such varying costs and barriers. Our aim is to understand under what conditions the norm adaptation can be achieved smoothly or through a discontinuous crisis.
EUTOPIA SIF
Paul Hardin Kapp
Presentation
KAPP Paul Hardin Kapp is an author, architect, teacher, and a historic preservationist. He is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He researches and writes on how heritage is made and understood in historic places. He is the author of Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) and The Architecture of William Nichols: Building the Antebellum South in North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi (University Press of Mississippi, 2015). His co-edited book (with Paul J. Armstrong), SynergyCity: Reinventing the Postindustrial City (University of Illinois Press, 2012), won the 2013 Historic Preservation Book Prize. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Birmingham, 2014; a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, 2019; and a Franklin Fellow, 2020.
Born in Durham, North Carolina in 1966, he studied architecture at Cornell University and earned his Master of Science degree in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania.
Research Project
The United States has never undergone a period of premediated destruction of national symbols from the public square—iconoclasm; it is experiencing one now. Reacting to the death of George Floyd in May 2020, Americans took matters in their own hands and demolished white supremacist monuments in urban settings. Soon after, state and local governments mandated removal of other racist civic monuments. Since the French Revolution, France has grappled with the legacy of iconoclasm. As a Fulbright Scholar at CY Cergy Paris University, La Fondation des Sciences du Patrimoine, I intend to research how iconoclasm is understood throughout France and how it was used to contextualize and mitigate negative heritage.
Sonja Lakić
Presentation
Sonja Lakić is an internationally trained architect, urban designer and planner, and a researcher with a PhD in Urban Studies. Her work evolves around the everydayness of contemporary cities and architecture, with a particular interest in anthropological and sociological aspects of architectural design and built environment and, most of all, lived forms of buildings. Topics of Sonja’s curiosity include (but are not limited to) open architecture, dialectical urbanism, buildings as living archives, emotional geographies, ethics of care, architecture and happiness, notion of home and practices of homemaking, housing and informality, homeownership and cultural heritage in the post-conflict societies. Sonja operates across different disciplines and scales, works visually and collects oral histories, practicing unconventional ethnography and storytelling mainly through photography and filmmaking, curating architecture, exhibitions, and her own life. In 2020, Sonja’s project “Apartment Biographies”, which was based on her PhD research on the post-socialist urban transformation of medium-sized ex Yugoslav cities, assigned her with the badge of Future Architecture 2020 Fellow. Sonja was appointed visiting researcher and a guest lecturer at ISCTE Lisbon and Universidad NOVA de Lisboa. She is a member of the international ETNO.URB network and has been collaborating with different institutions and organisations worldwide, such as Future Architecture Platform, Lisbon Architecture Triennale, MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Copenhagen Architecture Festival, MAO – Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Estonian Museum of Architecture etc.
Research Project
«Tales from the Peripheral: Melancholy and the Other. Curating Cities and Placemaking in the post-Yugoslav urban space » brings to light the ‘how’ of places across the former Yugoslav urban space, making an original scientific contribution on socio-cultural practice of curating cities and shaping places through the perspective of “melancholy and the other” (Akcan, 2005). The research approaches the aforementioned cities as the non-western subjects that swing between the fascination and resistance towards the modern “West” while (re)constructing and (re)establishing the post-Yugoslav identity of their own. Working across different disciplines, such as architecture, urban anthropology and ethnography, sociology and urban geography, and altering between different scales, the tales from the peripheral track lived forms of cities, narrating the everydayness of rather controversial practices of appropriation and production of space and, finally, dominant cultural politics, juxtaposing these with grand narratives and macro histories in the making. Understanding melancholy as “a mode of collective production” that constitutes the human state of mind and emotions (Akcan, 2005), the research focuses on authorities-initiated practices that evoke ethnically clean national histories, while simultaneously collecting voices of residents through series of micro-narratives in the form of storytelling, photographs and films. This is a journey through landscapes of anarchy and a portrayal of the everyday subversive practices; a chronicle of day-to-day political manoeuvres and attempts to be validated as contemporary enough; an investigation of life unfolding in the peripheral places across the country that is long gone and is no more; a chronicle of what takes place in the outskirts of Europe; an atlas and a visual testimonial of a new spatial phenomenon, new morals and ethics, freedom, social upheaval and demographic change.
David Philippy
Presentation
PHILIPPY David Philippy is an historian of economics and an associate member at the University of Lausanne (Walras-Pareto Centre). He holds a PhD in economics from HEC Lausanne (title: “The World Behind the Demand Curve: A History of the Economics of Consumption in the US, 1885-1934”). His research mainly focuses on the history of the field called “the economics of consumption” in the early 20th century US, with a particular emphasis on the crucial role played by the American home economics movement and female economists. He is interested in the epistemological and gender issues at play in the history of economics to understand how subjects of study emerge in the history of science and how researchers shape their identities. His latest publication “Ellen Richards’s Home Economics Movement and the Birth of the Economics of Consumption” has been published in 2021 in the Journal of the History of Economic Thought (JHET, Cambridge University Press, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1053837220000115).
Research Project
Research project: “Economists in the Household: A study of American Consumption after 1923”
While today consumption is considered a central object of economic analysis, the history of its study by economists reveals a puzzling neglect: For much of the discipline’s history, consumption was considered “too commonplace to excite curiosity” (Hoyt 1928, v). Yet, by the early 20th century, there emerged in the US a field called “the economics of consumption” with the declared objective of building a “proper” theory of consumption, in opposition to the marginalists’ framework. One of the key features of this cohort was that it was essentially composed by female economists and home economists, whose aim was to “fill the gap” left by male economists.
By the 1920s, Chicago economist Hazel Kyrk’s Theory of Consumption (1923) had formed a theoretical epicenter that structured the field through a twofold heritage of home economics and institutionalism, claiming both a strong normative stance and epistemological realism. From the 1930s onwards, a substantial analysis of consumer behavior that built on the work of these women economists would be carried on in the US in the fields of marketing and economic sociology. In this research project, I wish to focus my attention on the development of consumer analysis from the 1920s until the 1940s, at which point Keynesian theorizations of consumption became dominant in the US. More specifically, my aim is to study the entwinement of epistemological, gender, and disciplinary issues in the history of theories of consumption. An investigation of consumption through this prism will contribute to a better understanding of how subjects of study emerge in the history of science and highlight the crucial contribution of women economists at the frontiers of the economics discipline.
Dorothée Rusque
Presentation
RUSQUE Dorothée Rusque is a EUTOPIA-SIF post-doctoral fellow at the Heritage research group of the University of CY Cergy Paris since October 2022. She previously held a post-doctoral position at the Department of Literature and Knowledge of the University of Neuchâtel (2020-2022), where she contributed to the Sinergia project “Botanical Legacies from the Enlightenment”. She received a PhD in history from the University of Strasbourg (2018), with her thesis “The Dialogue of Objects. Production and Circulation of Naturalist Knowledge: the case of Jean Hermann’s Collections (1738-1800)”. She was assistant Lecturer (ATER) in modern history at the University of Strasbourg for three years (2015-2017, 2018-2019). Her research deals with practices and cultures of natural history in the eighteenth century, with a strong focus on collections of natural history, material culture, patrimonialisation of nature, production and circulation of scientific knowledge, colonial botany, scientific explorations in America and Australia. She is currently working at the publication of her thesis and is co-editing a book on the herbaria of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She is expanding her research focus towards the rise of the globalized market of natural history in the eighteenth-century Europe.
Research Project
The trading of natural specimens took on a new dimension in the 18th century thanks to the success of natural history collections, books and the rise of scientific explorations. The family business founded by the famous dealer Jacob Forster (1739-1806) is particularly representative of the desire to expand the naturalist market boundaries. He opened shops in the main cities of the European market (London, Paris and St-Petersburg) which he entrusted to his family during his trips to collect specimens. In London, the shop of his brother-in-law George Humphrey (1739-1826) highlights the role of explorations in the geographical expansion of trade as it contains natural specimens collected in the Pacific by sailors who participated in James Cook’s expeditions and by his son who was sent as ‘his Majesty Mineralogist’ to Australia.
This family business offers the opportunity to investigate the modalities of the naturalist market’s globalization by using several scales of observation, from the interconnected shops scattered in Europe to the international exchange networks between scientists, dealers and collectors. The modernisation of commercial practices through different tools like auction catalogues, the circulation and commoditization of objects, as well as the role of merchants as intermediaries in the construction of knowledge reveal little known aspects of this trade. More broadly, this work shows the interest of a perspective that crosses sciences, economy, global history and material culture in the study of natural history in the 18th century.
EUTOPIA SIF
Alberto Santini
Presentation
Alberto Santini is tenure-track Assistant Professor (on leave) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), in Barcelona, Spain. He is also affiliate professor at the Barcelona Graduate School of Mathematics, and the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (BGSE). He is a lecturer at the Barcelona School of Management and at RWTH Business School in Aachen, Germany. Before joining UPF, he was a post-doctoral fellow at RWTH Aachen University, a Visiting Scientist at Amazon in Seattle, US. He received his PhD in Automation and Operational Research (OR) in 2017 from the University of Bologna, Italy. He has been awarded with a BGSE Seed Grant, a Planetary Wellbeing Research Grant, a Juan de la Cierva scholarship, among others. He is the founder of AIROYoung (the youth chapter of AIRO, the Italian OR society), and of EUROYoung (a forum within EURO, the European Association of OR societies). He sits in the board of directors of AIRO.
Research Project
The boom of e-commerce in the last decade raises new challenges as retailers and couriers innovate their supply chains to keep up with demand. Last-mile delivery (LMD), the segment of the supply chain which starts at the last distribution centre and ends at the customer’s doorstep, is particularly affected. Its nature changed when retailers stopped delivering to stores and started delivering directly to consumers: couriers now handle a large number of small parcels, instead of fewer, larger shipments; they deliver during tight time windows, when customers are at home; they deal in real time with newly incoming orders while their fleet is already busy shipping other parcels.
A timely issue is the sustainability of current LMD operations with ever higher demands. There is only a limited number of delivery vans which our cities can absorb before the externalities (traffic, emissions) become too large to bear. Retailers have proposed creative solutions, including delivery-by-drone or using autonomous land robots. Whether this technology is feasible and will be deployed to scale is hard to predict. There are other experiments, however, which employ readily available technology: for example, bike deliveries and crowdsourcing.
With this project, I will develop optimisation tools for logistic operators, which explicitly mitigate the negative externalities outlined above, while guaranteeing high service quality levels and economic sustainability. I will propose innovative processes, such as deliveries by public transport, to make LMD greener and more efficient.
Erica Steckler
Presentation STECKLER Erica Steckler is Associate Professor of Management and Co-Director of the Donahue Center for Business Ethics and Social Responsibility in the Manning School of Business at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her scholarship includes conceptual and empirical work on sustainability, corporate responsibility, organizational authenticity, social entrepreneurship, business ethics, and humanistic management. Her work advances an understanding of key dynamics and timely opportunities for positive transformation among organizations, organizational leadership, and stakeholders in global social issue contexts. Published in influential management journals and edited volumes, her research has been recognized with awards and honors. She is currently Division Chair Elect of the Social Issues in Management (SIM) Division of the Academy of Management, Associate Editor at Business and Society Review, and has contributed in founding leadership roles to the International Humanistic Management Association (IHMA). Prior to joining UMass Lowell, she held research and teaching roles at Northeastern University and Bentley University. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. from the Department of Management and Organization at Boston College, her MBA from Simmons University, and her B.A. in Russian and East European Studies from Middlebury College. She strives to steward sustainable development in honor of humanity and nature and in celebration of future generations, including her three children.
Research Project
Klajdi Toska
Presentation
TOSKA Klajdi Toska graduated in Civil and Architectural Engineering in 2017 at the University of Padua. After graduation he worked as a research fellow until he started his PhD course in 2018 at the same University. His thesis examined innovative techniques for monitoring and strengthening existing structures, focusing on the confinement technique for reinforced concrete structures through fiber/textile reinforced cementitious composites. After receiving his PhD he obtained a post-doctoral position with a research topic on structural reliability of existing roadway bridges. During his experience he has been involved in several research projects dealing with structural materials behavior, sustainability, seismic risk and reliability of bridges and in-situ structural health monitoring of structures and has co-supervised more than 15 master thesis . His main research interests include Concrete Material and Structures, Composites Materials, Cementitious Composites and Seismic Assessment and Retrofitting Techniques.
Research Project
Composites are part of the innovative materials that are increasingly being used in the construction industry. Among these, cementitious composites have found a wide use by combining the properties of traditional cementitious material with that of more innovative ones such as carbon and glass fibers, UHSS, nylon, etc. Their combinations are various and the use of discontinuous or sorted fibers into nets or textiles has given rise to products such as FRC, FRCC, TRC, TRM, SRG, FRCM etc. The goal of this project is to investigate the behavior of cementitious composite materials and their effectiveness in retrofitting techniques when under severe thermal stress. The project will include an extensive experimental campaign that will firstly investigate the behavior of the composite material exposed to high temperatures. The variation of the main mechanical characteristics as strength, deformation capacity and stiffness will be monitored. Later the experimental campaign will investigate the effectiveness of the composite materials applied as reinforcement in reinforced concrete structures when under high thermal stress. The collected experimental data will be used to develop analytical models that describe the behavior of cementitious composite materials when subjected to severe thermal stress.
Frédéric Dumur is associate professor since 2008 at the University of Aix Marseille (France). Formerly at the University of Angers, the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne and the University of Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, he joined in 2008 the Institute of Radical Chemistry in Marseille. His research focuses on photochemistry and all the related applications including radical chemistry, photopolymerization and water-waste treatments. His research interest also includes the polymerization of organic monolayers on various metal substrates for optoelectronic applications. From 2013 to 2015, he was also associate researcher at the (Integration: from Material to Systems) IMS laboratory at the University of Bordeaux where he worked on the elaboration of organic light emitting diodes. He co-authored about 350 publications and 10 book chapters.
Francis is a Senior researcher or Professor of Ceramics at CMRDI with PhD, MSc and BSC chemistry degrees from university of Ain shams (Egypt), and Visiting Scientists at Imperial college London and Connecticut university, USA. In 2003, he was a visiting researcher at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, and in 2011/2014 he conducted research at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU, Germany). He is a member of numerous scientific bodies such as the Royal society of chemistry (UK), the Egyptian syndicate for Professional Scientists and the German Society of Humboldtians. From 2007 to 2009 he did research at Technical University of Darmstadt as a Humboldt research fellow. His research is broad and encompasses a number of the various areas that fall under the heading of Materials Science and engineering. His research interests are centered on the relationships between the processing, microstructure and functional properties of ceramic and composite materials. He investigates functionalization strategies to modify metallic biomaterial surfaces (e.g. magnesium-based alloys) for medical implants and bone regeneration. Another important research area is the biological and functional behavior of organosilicon polymer-derived silicon-based ceramic composites for biomedical and engineering applications. Francis is a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation (AvH), and an alumnus of the FAU and DAAD.
Sonja Lakić is an internationally trained architect, urban designer and planner, and a researcher with a PhD in Urban Studies. Her work evolves around the everydayness of contemporary cities and architecture, with a particular interest in anthropological and sociological aspects of architectural design and built environment and, most of all, lived forms of buildings. Topics of Sonja’s curiosity include (but are not limited to) open architecture, dialectical urbanism, buildings as living archives, emotional geographies, ethics of care, architecture and happiness, notion of home and practices of homemaking, housing and informality, homeownership and cultural heritage in the post-conflict societies. Sonja operates across different disciplines and scales, works visually and collects oral histories, practicing unconventional ethnography and storytelling mainly through photography and filmmaking, curating architecture, exhibitions, and her own life. In 2020, Sonja’s project “Apartment Biographies”, which was based on her PhD research on the post-socialist urban transformation of medium-sized ex Yugoslav cities, assigned her with the badge of Future Architecture 2020 Fellow. Sonja was appointed visiting researcher and a guest lecturer at ISCTE Lisbon and Universidad NOVA de Lisboa. She is a member of the international ETNO.URB network and has been collaborating with different institutions and organisations worldwide, such as Future Architecture Platform, Lisbon Architecture Triennale, MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Copenhagen Architecture Festival, MAO – Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Estonian Museum of Architecture etc.
Alberto Santini is tenure-track Assistant Professor (on leave) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), in Barcelona, Spain. He is also affiliate professor at the Barcelona Graduate School of Mathematics, and the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (BGSE). He is a lecturer at the Barcelona School of Management and at RWTH Business School in Aachen, Germany. Before joining UPF, he was a post-doctoral fellow at RWTH Aachen University, a Visiting Scientist at Amazon in Seattle, US. He received his PhD in Automation and Operational Research (OR) in 2017 from the University of Bologna, Italy. He has been awarded with a BGSE Seed Grant, a Planetary Wellbeing Research Grant, a Juan de la Cierva scholarship, among others. He is the founder of AIROYoung (the youth chapter of AIRO, the Italian OR society), and of EUROYoung (a forum within EURO, the European Association of OR societies). He sits in the board of directors of AIRO.
