Modern cryptography has successfully followed an "all-or-nothing" design paradigm over the years. For example, the most fundamental task of data encryption requires that encrypted data be fully recoverable using the encryption key, but be completely useless without it. Nowadays, however, this paradigm is insufficient for a wide variety of evolving applications, and a more subtle approach is urgently needed. This has recently motivated the cryptography community to put forward a vision of "functional cryptography'': Designing cryptographic primitives that allow fine-grained access to sensitive data. This proposal aims at making substantial progress towards realizing the premise of functional cryptography. By tackling challenging key problems in both the foundations and the applications of functional cryptography, I plan to direct the majority of our effort towards addressing the following three fundamental objectives, which span a broad and interdisciplinary flavor of research directions: (1) Obtain a better understanding of functional cryptography's building blocks, (2) develop functional cryptographic tools and schemes based on well-studied assumptions, and (3) increase the usability of functional cryptographic systems via algorithmic techniques. Realizing the premise of functional cryptography is of utmost importance not only to the development of modern cryptography, but in fact to our entire technological development, where fine-grained access to sensitive data plays an instrumental role. Moreover, our objectives are tightly related to two of the most fundamental open problems in cryptography: Basing cryptography on widely-believed worst-case complexity assumptions, and basing public-key cryptography on private-key primitives. I strongly believe that meaningful progress towards achieving our objectives will shed new light on these key problems, and thus have a significant impact on our understanding of modern cryptography.

The last century has been characterized by the growth of grassroots social movements and large-scale collective action aimed at advancing equality, some of which has involved historically advantaged and disadvantaged groups acting together. Such alliances, e.g., those between White and Black Americans and Israelis and Palestinians, are unique because they involve members of groups that vary in power. Nonetheless members from each group have joined forces to promote social change toward equality. While there are reasons to believe that such ally-ship may be especially influential in creating actual change and motivating others to support social change, there is little research aimed at understanding whether joint action is more effective than action taken by the disadvantaged alone, and if so why. These questions are pivotal because it helps to answer the broader question of whether joint action, as a rare situation of inherently unequal group members cooperating despite the larger scale conflict between them , is actually worth the effort. While past work has focused on understanding the psychological antecedents of joint action, this proposal shifts the focus to understanding whether and how joint action is effective, that is, whether it affects social change towards intergroup equality. To these ends, a cutting-edge research programme is proposed consisting of 8 studies combining different methodologies (archival research; lab experiments, intervention) and focusing on three intergroup contexts: Whites-Blacks in the U.S.; men and women; and Jews and Palestinians in Israel. The proposed project will enhance knowledge about the psychological processes through which collective action can generate social change and succeed in shaping attitudes and motivating multitudes to challenge the status quo.

Rates of depression and anxiety are constantly surging, resulting in a growing global mental health crisis. These two disorders have a remarkably high prevalence of comorbidity, with anxiety generally preceding depression. However, the biological basis of these disorders and their comorbidity is poorly understood, leaving millions of patients with inadequate treatments and thus an urgent need for improved medications. Accumulating evidence suggests that both disorders involve GABAergic deficits, but the nature of these deficits is undefined and may be the holy grail for cracking the mysteries of depression and anxiety comorbidity. Here, I will apply cutting-edge technologies to focus on hippocampal GABAergic interneurons (INs) and propose a data-driven hypothesis for the cellular and molecular basis of anxiety and depression comorbidity. I suggest that INs selectively recruit microglia to reshape inhibition in the depressed brain. This hypothesis may provide the missing link between major hallmarks of depression: GABAergic deficits, synaptic loss, and neuroinflammation. I seek to unravel the molecular adaptations of INs to stress that lead to microglia recruitment and connect them with anxiety preceding depression. Finally, I will elucidate a novel model for innate anxiolysis mediated by local dendritic translation in INs. I will combine, for the first time, the robustness of two analytical methods: translating ribosome sequencing and spatial transcriptomics to identify the involved genes, the INs subtypes expressing them, and their hippocampal location. These data will be complemented by calcium imaging, behavioral tests, imaging, connectomics, and electrophysiology. ZoomINs targets an urgent public health concern by providing a novel hypothesis for a long-standing question: what causes anxiety and depression comorbidity? The results of this ambitious project will set the ground for the development of INs-targeting medications, giving hope to millions worldwide.

The scholarly texts of ancient Mesopotamia in the first millennium BCE, specifically commentaries written in Akkadian on cuneiform tablets, were the work of priests who also performed cultic activities in the temple. The proposed project seeks to demonstrate how these scholarly and cultic activities were interrelated and how they shaped the self-identity of the priestly-scholarly community that was in charge of both. The project thus aims to bridge the gap between the study of intellectual history and the study of priesthood in ancient Mesopotamia, which are treated as two separate fields in Assyriology. The project innovatively treats Mesopotamian scholarship and Mesopotamian priesthood as complementary aspects of one phenomenon: “scholasticism.” This concept, which originally referred to the scholarly activities of Catholic priests in the Middle Ages, has recently been applied to the study of non-European communities of priestly scholars with great success. Using the scholastic model to study the priestly-scholarly community of ancient Mesopotamia will reveal the intricate connections between the ritual and textual activities of this community and illuminate the holistic and systematic worldview of its members. Combining traditional philology and the comparative approach, the project investigates how, like other scholastic communities, the scholar-priests of ancient Mesopotamia “internalized” the liturgical texts they studied and performed, how they attributed authority to these texts, and how their study of the liturgical corpus generated new exegetical texts. Key points of comparison between the scholar-priests of ancient Mesopotamia and various ancient and contemporary scholastic communities include their interest in language, textual authority, commentaries, and rituals. By applying the comparative method to the study of cuneiform tablets, the project aims to reconstruct the social, religious, and intellectual reality in which they were written.