C1 Chemistry plays a crucial role in providing energy and chemical supplies while meeting environmental requirements, such as carbon neutrality to mitigate global warming and the gradual shift in the supply chain from crude oil to biomass, and other alternative carbon sources. Zeolites, as one kind of important heterogeneous catalysts, create a perfect environment to selectively and effectively convert C1 molecules to chemicals with high economic value, as for instance the transformation of methanol to olefins (MTO) or the methanol carbonylation process. However, the understanding of the reaction mechanisms of these methanol conversions in zeolites is lacking. Up till now the diffusion process of reactants, intermediates, and products in the confined spaces of zeolites has not been considered in the free energy landscape of the catalytic cycle, which leads to a discrepancy between experiments and calculations. Therefore, the proposed integrated diffusion/reaction kinetics model is an essential keystone to understand the high selectivity of zeolites in C1 chemistry. In this project, ab initio molecular dynamic (AIMD) simulations accelerated with different enhanced sampling methods will be employed to study the complete kinetics of methanol conversion in zeolites, including the processes of reactants adsorption/diffusion, reaction, and product diffusion/desorption. This should result in a complete free energy landscape, by which the parameters of zeolites that influence the selectivity of C1 chemistry will be uncovered. The final affinity of this model is to guide the modification, design, and screening of highly effective zeolite catalysts for C1 chemistry in an efficient and adequate manner.

This project examines a neglected aspect of the social and cultural life in Europe in the modern period: the impact of women editors on public debate. From the 1700s on, European women actively participated in the cultural arena through the journals that they edited. This project advances the hypothesis that periodical editorship enabled these women to take a prominent role in public life, to influence public opinion and to shape transnational processes of change. In order to test this hypothesis, the project will bring together a multilingual and multidisciplinary team of six researchers who will combine methodologies from literary studies, (women’s) history and the social sciences to map the transnational networks of intellectual exchange in which women editors participated, with particular attention to practices of textual transfer (including translation, adaptation, reprinting and reviewing) across language boundaries and historical periods. The project has two parts: 1) a database will take stock of women editors and their periodicals, make available new material and provide a data source for socio-textual network analysis; 2) five thematic subprojects will study the impact of women editors on some of the most significant processes of socio-cultural transformation in modern European history: the beginnings of the periodical press, the rise of the novel, domestic ideology, consumer culture and women’s rights. By examining how these processes unfolded in the press through practices of textual transfer both among women and in the larger publishing landscape, the project will not only initiate a shift in our thinking about the participation of women in society and print culture but also pave the way for pan-European research on the periodical press.

In the history of political thought, Late Antiquity is usually considered the period when the city-state gave way to monarchy and the Bible and Qur’an took the place of Plato. With a focus on kingship and religion, late antique political thinking – so the story goes – represents the antithesis of modern republicanism and secularism. For far too long, this teleological perspective has directed scholars toward a narrow range of topics and inhibited the recognition of different narratives and integration of non-Western traditions. Instead of seeing this period as the end of the paradigmatic ancient polity (namely the polis), New Polities proposes that it was a beginning: an age of new polities. Indeed, it witnessed the spread and consolidation of new religious, ethnic and political communities. Their use of ancient political language to describe themselves sparked a proliferation of political discourse into new contexts. To uncover the innovation and variety thus generated, New Polities expands the scope of research in a three-fold way. 1) It embraces the first millennium from the Roman Empire to the Abbasid, Byzantine and Carolingian empires, when different traditions crystallised from a common pool of late antique material. 2) It shifts the focus away from classical treatises and languages (e.g. Augustine & Al-Farabi) to a wider array of sources in many more languages from a broader range of cultures (e.g. Syriac, Armenian, Hebrew). This enlarged corpus allows to chart a greater breadth of ideas and possible cross-cultural influences. 3) It introduces little-studied topics, such as oikonomia and the relation between human society and nature. Breaking down disciplinary boundaries, New Polities not only recovers the formation, circulation, and adaptation of political ideas in the first millennium, but also foregrounds the importance of late antique and early medieval societies in the wider history of political thought.

Diatoms are a group of highly diverse, globally dominant microalgae which contribute significantly to global carbon fixation and biogeochemical cycling. Understanding how diatoms adapt to changes in their environment is therefore a major research interest. However, whereas the phenotypic outcomes of adaptation have received considerable attention, we understand little about the genomic underpinnings of evolution and adaptation in diatoms. Within DIADAPT, I will investigate the genomic processes that underlie adaptation to climate shifts in diatoms. To this end, I will focus on two evolutionary radiations of non-model diatoms that are characterized by the repeated colonization of different climate zones throughout their evolutionary history, yet that played out in different ecological conditions: the aquatic and terrestrial realm. Comparative analyses of genomes and transcriptomes obtained from taxa that inhabit polar, temperate, or tropical regions will be complemented with experimental evolution. As such, I will investigate the roles of both genome and gene expression evolution in climate-driven adaptation over macro- and microevolutionary timescales, thus capturing different stages of the adaptation process. By implementing DIADAPT within a robust phylogenetic framework and contrasting the two evolutionary radiations, I will (i) formulate general insights into the genomic basis of climate-driven adaptation in diatoms, (ii) reveal the degree of divergence and repeated evolution in adaptive solutions, and (iii) discern if and how adaptation is constrained by evolutionary history, including differences in ecology, population size, and historical patterns of climate zone transitions. Altogether, the integration of macro- and microevolutionary approaches on the scale of genome and gene expression divergence will generate a deep understanding of climate-driven adaptation in a keystone microbial lineage on an unprecedented geographic and taxonomic scale.