The project focused on the investigation of the landscape of settlements in North Mesopotamia from the late Iron Age (6th-5th c. BC) to the last centuries of the 1st millennium BC. Particularly the Beyond the Rivers of Babylon project investigated the transformation of the Assyrian heartland (10th - 7th c. BC) during the Hellenistic period and the Seleucid political control (4th-2nd c. BC). I employed newly collected data from two survey projects - The Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project (Udine) and the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (Harvard) - to assess patterns of urbanization and ruralization in Northern Iraq.

The photochemical synthesis of non-natural amino acids is a promising approach for drug discovery. This method utilizes visible light to create new amino acids that can be incorporated into proteins or small molecules to create new drug candidates with improved properties such as increased stability or specificity. Mild photochemical synthesis of non-natural amino acids also allows for the precise control of their chemical structure, which can lead to more selective and effective drug candidates. In this project new non-natural amino acids will be made with blue light photocatalysis to ensure a supply of these powerful building blocks for future medicines.

Are there other universes besides our own, some perhaps radically different from ours? This multiverse idea is hotly debated in modern physics. Some physicists strongly advocate it. In their view, not only is the idea motivated by string theory and inflationary cosmology, it also can explain why the constants of nature appear fine-tuned for life. Others, in contrast, are vehemently against it. They fear that the idea threatens the methodological integrity of physics and will impede future progress in that domain. The multiverse hypothesis raises many epistemological questions, many of which arise from the difficulty to empirically test concrete multiverse theories. Thus the eminent cosmologist Paul Steinhardt has recently called on philosophers to contribute to the debate. The present project responds to this call by looking at the multiverse idea from the point of view of epistemology. It explores the hypothesis that both the proponents and the critics of the multiverse are right in important respects: while the fine-tuning argument for the multiverse is formally valid, there are, and will likely remain, principled obstacles to testing concrete multiverse theories. The project intends to be the first systematic and encompassing treatment of the epistemological intricacies surrounding multiverse theories, including some that philosophers themselves have ignored so far. It considers and uses both formal and qualitative epistemological methods, in particular Bayesian epistemology and the method of inference to the best explanation. It builds on earlier work of the applicant, notably on the methodology of the Higgs mechanism (Friederich et al. 2014) and on the problem of how to rationally respond to “self-locating” evidence, i.e. evidence that tells us not only how the world is but also where we are in it (Friederich forthcoming). Beyond academia, the project will contribute to scientific literacy about cosmology in general and the multiverse in particular.

I request NWO sponsoring of €1000 for the 2019-2020 Blaauw-professor, prof.dr. Marta Volonteri, from Paris (and recently also Amsterdam), specialist in the field of Black Holes. This concerns her 3-4 weeks of visit to Groningen (and other NL institutes) during the period May-June 2020. During this visit she will interact intensely with staff and students at the Groningen Kapteyn Institute as well as with other interested members of the Dutch astronomical community.