The researcher will design computational models of brain structure and function by incorporating realistic developmental processes. These models will be used to study how brain structure and function evolve together over time. The goal is to create more accurate simulations that can predict individual cognitive development trajectories in children, providing insights into neurodevelopmental difficulties.

What happens when DNA testing meets the intricate tapestry of indigenous/peasant peoples kinship? This project delves into Peru’s Genetic Data Bank (GDB), exploring its implications for historical reparations. Designed to match genetic profiles of human remains with living relatives, the GDB operates on the assumption that family ties reflect biogenetic inheritance; however, indigenous/peasant people’s kinship challenges this notion. This project seeks to explore the following questions from an anthropological perspective: How do indigenous/peasant rights intersect with the control of genetic information? What roles does kinship play in the quest for reparative justice?

This project aims to inform strategies to increase democratic resilience by studying the mechanisms “exclusionary populists” use to increase their power by undermining the Rule of Law in the areas of law, the economy, and the media. The project also seeks to identify the “coping strategies” societal actors use when faced with exclusionary populism. This topic is highly relevant to the call themes by investigating the politics and economics of threat (Theme 2 – work packages 1 and 2); the democratisation of information (Theme 3 – WP3); and the changing authority of and trust in institutions (Theme 5 – all WPs). Adopting an interdisciplinary approach spanning political economy, legal-, management-, and media studies, we compare Austria, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, all of which have experienced populist success. Besides high-impact publications, the findings of the project will inform concrete solutions for challenges to democratic governance. We collaborate with the Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy, which will create five International Policy Fellowships for key stakeholders from the countries studied. These will constitute channels for evidence-based input from world-leading academics to inform coping strategies and stimulate cross-country knowledge exchange. Furthermore, we seek to reach a broader non-academic audience by collaborating with performing artists to stage a participatory performance in four cities to engage a dialogue with citizens from the countries we study. This project will be organised into four WPs, focussing on legal changes (WP1), business and economics (WP2), media and communications (WP3), and impact (WP4).

In their first year of life, babies develop trust in their caregivers. This trust enables them to explore their environment and learn. However, caregivers exhibit different levels of sensitive responsiveness, leading to various types of attachment relationships. The exact mechanisms and timing of these differences remain unknown. To measure attachment development, research conducted in the everyday home environment is essential. We employ novel techniques for objective and long-term measurement. Based on this, we construct a testable model that interactively illuminates attachment development and explains variations in attachment relationships

This project focuses on reproductive identities associated with infertility in the decades before infertility began to be commercialised through assisted reproductive technologies (ART). The invention of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) in 1978 is often seen as a watershed facilitating the public visibility of a range of reproductive identities: from cross-border reproductive tourists and surrogate mothers, to same-sex parents and desperate single-childless women. However, little is known about how seemingly different reproductive identities of previous generations, such as adoptive parents, birth mothers, impotent husbands and childless wives, have shaped contemporary views both on infertility, reproduction and parenthood, and on the emergence of adoption and voluntary childlessness as global trends. This project aims to investigate reproductive identities associated with infertility and how they were constructed though intimate struggles, professional practices and public discourses of seeking and providing infertility treatments in the era when medical infertility treatments had just started to emerge and when the pronatalist norm on heterosexual parenting was the strongest. The project takes Britain, a leader in medical research on reproductive medicine and the birthplace of IVF, as a social laboratory to trace these continuities from c.1945 to 1980.