Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Original application: 'The project's core deliverables are a Compendium, a Database and a Final Report by fourteen internationally distinguished scholars on the legal responses to Covid-19 in 80 countries across all regions of the world. The Compendium comprises 80 national reports written by local legal experts on the relevant country's response to Covid-19, covering: (1) the constitutional/legal framework; (2) the functioning of institutions (e.g. legislatures, courts); (3) the core public health measures adopted; (4) the social and economic measures adopted; and (5) key legal measures in respect of civil liberties and vulnerable groups. The Database collates determinate and quantifiable data on these themes, allowing users to conduct comprehensive cross-national comparisons and correlations with other known socio-economic, political and health data. The Final Report will comprise: 1. an analytical overview of the data, identifying response trends and correlations to major socio-economic and health indicators; and 2. an in-depth critical analysis of various thematic areas (e.g. privacy, civil liberties, migration), proposing best and worst practices in relation to different themes as well as overall state performance. The deliverables provide critical comparative data for the assessment of the UK's response to Covid-19 as well as for future pandemic preparedness, in general and with particular reference to several topics and questions identified as critical by UKRI: economic, gender and race inequalities; security and justice; national recovery and transformation; contact tracing; and national security and foreign policy. The project's dissemination plans include a clear and viable impact pathway into decision-making in the UK Parliament as well as in Whitehall.' From the www.lexatlas-c19.org website, more media friendly: "The Lex-Atlas: Covid-19 (LAC19) project was launched in the fall 2020 and will provide a scholarly analysis of national legal responses to Covid-19 around the world. Updated across 2021, it will be published open-access by Oxford University Press. It is the product of a vast collaboration of legal experts from across the world, led by University College London, King's College London, the Max Planck Institute of Comparative Public Law and generously supported by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project is motivated by the need for a comprehensive overview of national legal responses to Covid-19. The pandemic has many facets, and national responses have varied considerably. Quite apart from epidemiological performance, countries have employed emergency powers differently, have had different kinds of institutional disruption, diverged in public health measures, and have had variable social policy coverage and responses to the human rights needs of vulnerable groups. A scholarly overview of these legal responses is required both to assess past political choices and to prepare for future pandemics. Cataloguing them in detail will also be an important contribution to the history of the pandemic. However, the complexity and fluid nature of the subject-matter essentially requires an unconventional scholarly approach. To make the international comparisons valuable, it requires a high degree of coordination between distinguished national legal experts, a large editorial team applying a consistent methodology, and the capacity to change national portraits as the law and policy shifts in line with the evolution of the pandemic. The project seeks to meet this need through a world-wide collaboration between legal scholars. The project's core deliverables include a Compendium of Country Reports, a Database, and a Final Report covering best and worst practices in the views of the project's Editorial Committee. All deliverables will be open-access and data will be held open-source. The project portal and further details are available at www.lexatlas-c19.org."

The structure-property relation of semiconducting polymers is poorly understood and there is no guidance for the design of new materials. We have noted an important mismatch between the assumption used to model charge transport in polymers (phenomenological theories) and the results of electronic structure calculation of realistic polymers (atomistic theories). The latter show that, as carriers are promoted to higher energy, they access more delocalized states characterized by longer range electron transfer and smaller polaronic effects. No model of transport currently takes this effect into account. This proposal will build new foundations of the phenomenological theories based on a more detailed knowledge of the electronic properties of few selected systems. Existing results on amorphous low mobility polymers (like PPV) and semicrystalline polymers (line P3HT and PBTTT) will be combined with new simulations of amorphous high mobility polymers (of the DPP class) to achieve a detailed description of representatives from each main class of semiconducting polymers. A new, more general and more accurate, expression for the rate of change hopping between sites will be introduced. A model Hamiltonian will be built to reproduce the main features of the electronic structure of realistic polymers. In essence, we will build a connection between detailed models of the chemistry of the system and the more simplified models needed to study charge transport. With the new methodology we will determine the actual number of parameters that affects the mobility in polymeric semiconductors considering the recent experimental observation by Paul Blom's group that the incredible diversity in semiconducting polymers may be actually reducible into a single effective parameter per material. Moreover, the methodology lends itself to making predictions on new chemical structures of high mobility polymers. This proposal benefits from the collaboration of Paul Blom (Eindhoven), David Haddleton (Warwick). A PhD student already in the group will contribute to some of the tasks.

The soil that makes up the earth's substrate is an ever-changing assemblage of organic matter, minerals, organisms, gases, and liquids. Plants, animals, and humans in a host of ways mine this substrate to make life possible and use it as a container for things both precious and toxic. In this central function of earthly survival, soil's composition is both an archive of past life as well as the planet's largest carbon sink, capturing within it emissions from centuries ago. It is, in its very essence, a historical record that shapes our collective future. "Stories from the Substrate" reflects on the historical composition of soil by using it as a medium for engaging with and narrating East African history and as a point of view for considering the epoch of the Anthropocene. This project begins with both archival and fieldwork in East Africa (Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya) that will form the basis of a collaborative, interactive soil map website and scholarly monograph that highlights how East Africans have relied on and shaped soil with the help of plants and animals. Previous scholarship on soil in East Africa has focused almost exclusively on colonial development projects and campaigns against erosion, this project takes a multispecies approach and centres East African epistemologies of soil to view it as not just a medium of agriculture, but as a building material, a source for mining mineral salts, the haven of "good" and "bad" microbial life, a sink for pollutants, a metaphor of home and belonging, and a valuable commodity of both local and global trade. Chronicling a history of the region from the soil seeks to set aside the prevailing themes of extant regional histories that narrate from political events and the ethnic and colonial logics of the archive. By considering the region through its substrate, this project hews close to the everyday and the often unseen or overlooked ways that people, animals, and their environments make one another and shape history. While each case study takes a particular place as its starting point, several themes will run throughout, assembling a picture of landscape, ecology, human health and labor in the region. In bringing together a variety of attachments to the soil in East Africa, this project aims to contribute to Black Ecologies, an interdisciplinary field seeking to examine the relationship between Black people and their environments. This work highlights the harm and toxicity that comprise many of these environments due to centuries of oppression and dispossession, but it also examines modes of knowing and being with nature that have gone under-explored. From this initial research, the project then shifts to collaborate with a wider research community to "Think with the Substrate". Bringing together scholars who work on histories of substrate materials, we will consider how humans have variably remade and relied on this middle layer between the subterranean and terrestrial. This inter-disciplinary project, in the spirit of other work on the Anthropocene such as the recent Plantationocene project, aims to engage with an unwieldy chunk of human history through a unifying object of inquiry. While the Anthropocene has been defined as the epoch when human impact has been the most consequential force shaping the earth, many scholars have critiqued the totalizing concept for eliding the fact that all societies have not had equal impact. To think about the Anthropocene "with the substrate" is not to assemble a list of different uses and interventions into the ground. It is a project of using historical engagements with substrate matter to reveal variable social relations, conceptions of nature, and engagements with nonhuman animals. These stories will no doubt chronicle the rise of global capitalism, but it will also capture the many alternative ontological and epistemological worlds that are sometimes forgotten and overshadowed in blunt narratives of capitalism and the Anthropocene.

Three-dimensional printing is a groundbreaking technology, which already plays a major role in some branches of research, science and technology, for example, in medical technology, or mechanical engineering.The present project aimed to allow students, in a motivating context, to get an insight into this technology, to approach it step by step and thus to get to know a series of innovative tools by carrying out different application examples, for example the CAD modeling of typical national buildings.Three partners are working together within this project. The applicant organisation, the Max-Planck-Gymnasium in Böblingen, Germany, is a general-education gymnasium that leads to the abitur. It has a keen interest in scientific and technological topics, already gained experiences with the school's own 3D printer and offers a bilingual profile. The partner organisations are the IES DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ and the Jacques Cartier College. The IES DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ in Torrelodones, Spain, is a public secondary school, which offers, among other things, an excellence program, which is very demanding and requires students to produce a research project at the end of the stage. The Jacques Cartier College in Chauny, France, is a school, which also offers a bilingual profile and has gathered some expericences in 3D printing, using the school's own 3D printer.An important goal for our schools was to collaborate on construction and design work using 3D printing. As part of the project, students made designs for various objects, produced some of these objects using the 3D printer, tested their suitability for use, and finally documented their results. This involved collaboration not only between different subject areas - for example, science, technology and art - but also between schools from different regions of Europe. As a student-motivating context, the construction of a marble run was chosen, which led through corresponding countries in Europe. The marble run is embedded in buildings typical for the country (e.g. Brandenburg Gate, Eiffel Tower, Alcazar). Certain elements of the marble run as well as the country-specific buildings were modeled with the help of CAD programs (Tinkercad, Openscad) and manufactured with the help of 3D printers.Considering the fact that the construction plans are provided digitally, the long-term benefit of the project is garantueed. Not only will our own schools be able to use the teaching material from this project, but any school that is interested in similar projects and wishes to do so.