Grants

Why do only certain memberships have a moral standing? Why is it, for example, that we think indigenous groups or women might deserve protection and rights, but not, say, groups of urban dwellers? This project considers whether a Cultural Copying (CC) account of group membership can also explain why a certain group has a moral standing (i.e. are the targets of group rights, protections) etc. In the CC account, membership is achieved by chain of cultural reproduction. The hypothesis is that many of acts of cultural copying will also involve features of membership that political theorists have suggested might underlie group rights (e.g. reciprocity, historical continuity). Membership in a gender, for example, is passed on within a chain of social learning within a particular cultural niche and these engagements with past (role) models may lead to a sense of belonging and solidarity within the chain. The project combines research from philosophy of social science with political theory

This research project makes the representation of Syria in war and peace the object of an ethnographic inquiry of image construction. It examines how images and memories reconfigure what Syria was and is and what it is in a process of becoming for Syrians themselves by focusing on the active establishment of archives and the processes of archiving. The project is a critical contribution to rethinking unstable temporal orderings of past, present, and future as it engages the question of how to theorize futurity. Hence, the research questions are: How do archives come into being, and how do they shape, regulate, and change perceptions, memories, and potential futures? How is the image of Syria re-assembled, re-made, and re-mediated by Syrian actors across personal, collective, and institutional contexts? And how do political changes in the present impact on the reading and use of the past in the creation of viable futures?

This project will investigate past populations of three Arctic marine mammal species: polar bear, narwhal and beluga. Using a combination of state of the art ancient DNA methodologies and stable isotope analysis, we will analyze an exceptional collection of hundreds of subfossil faunal remains spanning 50,000 years of evolutionary history. By opening a window directly into the past, we will elucidate how past changes in the environment impacted each of these Arctic endemics. The power of this proposal lies in the interdisciplinary study of several co-distributed species; each is a critical component of the Arctic ecosystem and an indicator species of the response of Arctic mammalian fauna to climatic perturbations. By understanding past evolutionary and ecological responses across species, we will provide crucial information on their resilience, and thereby that of Arctic marine ecosystems, to near-future predictions of climate change.

This project deals specifically with the borderlands between what is possible and impossible in the grammatical systems of language, while examining the borders between clauses, more specifically their left edge. Theoretical and experimental syntax will be combined in pursuit of the overall goal which is to investigate how a fundamental property of human language interacts with a unique characteristic of Danish. The focus is on one of the defining characteristics of human language, namely the possibility of extracting elements long-distance from embedded clauses to the left edge of main clauses. Danish is a particularly interesting object of inquiry in connection with long-distance extractions because the syntax of Danish displays an exceptionally wide range of possibilities for moving constituents to the left edge of clauses, including extractions from types of embedded clauses which previously in the international scientific literature have been thought to be impossible.

B cells not only contribute to but also drive a broad range of autoimmune diseases. I developed a novel mouse model of prototypic autoimmune disease development, with extrafollicular foci and spontaneous, autoreactive germinal centers composed of B cell clones derived from the normal repertoire. The model recapitulates a prominent type I interferon signature as well as rampant epitope spreading, reminiscent of that observed in human lupus patients. Strikingly, in this model a single autoreactive B cell clone is sufficient to break tolerance, raising important questions of autoimmune disease development: 1) Which cellular pathways does this clone and potential related clones rely on during the process of breaking tolerance; 2) Is this a unique phenomenon and does the initiating clone or its target antigen harbour particular qualities that allow this; and 3) Can similar properties be observed in B cell clones in patients? This will shed light on targetable pathways in autoimmune disease.

There is an unmet medical need for managing hypertension. Angiotensin II (ANG II) is the most potent regulator of blood pressure and sodium balance. It exerts a major hypertensive effect through interactions with its receptor (AT1R) present in the vasculature and the kidney epithelium, including the proximal tubule. My findings show that the endocytic receptor megalin captures filtered ANG II at the apical side of the proximal tubule cells causing AT1R stimulation and increased renal sodium reabsorption and blood pressure. The megalin-ANG II-AT1R axis may thus be of significance in the pathogenesis of hypertension and associated kidney injury. Using kidney cell cultures, transgenic animal models, and human kidney and urine samples, we will uncover the molecular mechanisms of the megalin-ANG II-AT1R axis in physiological conditions as well as in hypertension and proteinuric kidney disease. Our findings may reveal new targets for the modulation of renal sodium excretion and hypertension.

An important determinant for successful public sector purchasing is the contract skills of the administering personnel. However, academic research on the impact of public contract skills on contract performance is very limited. This project examines whether training public officials in transactional and relational contract management skills improves the outcomes of contracts between governments and businesses. The project carries out a randomized national field experiment that offers training to the entire population of public purchasing officials in Danish local and regional governments. Subjects will be split into relational training, transactional training, and control groups, with the two training groups receiving intensive programs in contract management. The research assesses whether training improves managers’ skills in contracting, changes their contract management practices, and, ultimately, leads to better contract performance.

Cells are physically separate from their surroundings, yet remain coherent with their neighbors and able to exchange specific sets of molecules. Previous research has shown that the junctions which facilitate transport between cells exhibit remarkable flow control features, a process which is currently believed to be energized and tightly regulated. However, passive physical flow control increasingly appears to be a fundamental mechanism for cell-cell transport. Consistent with this concept, transport has been shown to exhibit a strong mechanical stress dependence, a hallmark of soft matter interactions. The key hypothesis of this proposal is that complex fluid flow control patterns can be encoded in material properties of soft matter systems. We will combine experiments on microfluidic devicess and plant model systems with low- Reynolds-number flow and elasticity theory to elucidate the behavior of cell networks linked by soft junctions.

Denmark has announced the ambition to be the world’s first country to reach 100% renewable energy in all sectors by 2050. Such a major transition, however, requires a number of critical and precious materials in emerging technologies (e.g., neodymium intensive permanent magnets for offshore wind turbines and platinum based catalysts for fuel cells) and consequently raises concerns on potential resource bottlenecks from both geotechnical and geopolitical perspectives. In this project, we will develop a dynamic, whole chain, trade linked, stock driven, and technology specific model to explore critical materials bottlenecks and mitigation strategies of Denmark’s transition towards 100% renewable energy. Our results can help industry and policy makers identify resource constraint-aware pathways of renewable energy technologies and ensure an even stronger and more competitive Danish renewable energy industry in a global market.

Data structures is a central field in computer science that studies how efficiently data can be stored and searched on a computer. The field is very mature and many strong techniques have been developed for both designing new data structures, but also for proving mathematically that the current data structures are optimal, i.e. they cannot possible be improved. A recent line of work has successfully, and quite surprisingly, used data structure techniques to settle long-standing open problems in cryptography and machine learning. This project will push that line of work much further by designing provably optimal algorithms in cryptography and machine learning via applications of data structure techniques.