The WE-GEMINA project is twofold and to be developed at different scales: a macro-transnational scale and a micro-local scale. The first part of the project is focused on the transnational narratives circulating on the social networks. Crossing sexism and xenophobia, they increase the gender inequalities and the discrimination based on real or supposed ethnic origin. A second and complementary component intends to identify, through a multi-situated approach, counter-narratives which could contribute to renewing the debate on gender in migration. In the global context of the rise of populism, and especially since 2011 and the wave of migration related to the Syrian civil war, the most extreme and anti-migrant discourses put pressure on all European debates on migration. Stated by politicians, circulating on social networks or available on websites or blogs, populist narratives on gender and migration activate distressing representations as well as biased perceptions of reality, which threaten the cohesion of societies, diminish their resilience and increase risks of violence against migrant women. In globalized populist rhetoric, xenophobic and sexist narratives are intertwined, so that offensives against migrant women seem specific: according to national contexts, they are suspected of taking undue advantage of social protection systems through their multiple pregnancies, of threatening secularism, challenging a family model based on a supposed gender equality, of transgressing gender norms, fueling prostitution and clandestine labor, or - in the most conspiratorial theses- to be the matrix of a "great replacement". However, the unequal gender, class and race relationships largely invisibilize the structural violence and multiple discrimination faced by migrant women. In fact, the diffusion of such distorted representations increases their physical, sexual, social or professional vulnerability. In order to counter the influence of the xenophobic and sexist discourses against migrant women, the proposal aims firstly to deconstruct, based on different national contexts, the rhetorical and technological forces of their effectiveness, secondly to identify alternative narratives that are likely to inflect them. It will not focus exclusively on female migrants outside the European Union, but on all women perceived as foreign and mobile people: European Roma women, Muslim or perceived Muslim migrants, racist sub-Saharan migrants, LBTQIA + migrants. Based on two major social networks providing narratives, Facebook and Twitter, and mobilizing specific software, the analysis of sexist and xenophobic narratives focus on their substance, but also on the tools and strategies of their dissemination. The question of the "past" will be investigated by the uses of a supposed past in populist narratives. Against the narratives grounded in an ethnocultural conception of the political community and seeking to create collective fear, the counter-narratives value the concrete experience of migration carried by mixed migrant and non-migrant communities. The identification of such counter-narratives should provide guidelines to enlighten different actors, including the press, associations and politicians, in resisting xenophobic themes and populist strategies. The project involves a consortium of research teams, complementary to each other and strongly sensitized to issues of gender and discrimination, from seven countries differently exposed to populist rhetoric.

The interdisciplinary programme of research and software development I propose lies at the interface of physics, chemistry, and biology. Key target areas of this proposals, which my software will address, are coarse-grained modelling of DNA and RNA, the study of living systems and active matter far away from equilibrium, new soft energy and functional materials, enhanced encapsulation technologies and algorithms for new heterogeneous computing architectures. The proposed software development programme aligns with a number of key areas of research that have been identified as Physics Grand Challenges. One of them is the understanding the physics of life. This has the goal to develop an integrating understanding of life from single molecules to whole biological systems. DNA and RNA are the two biopolymers that are involved in various biological roles, most notably in the encoding of the genetic instructions needed in the development and functioning of living organisms and gene transcription. Coarse-grained models of DNA or RNA can provide significant computational and conceptual advantages over atomistic models, leading often to three or more orders of magnitude greater efficiency. But they are not only an efficient alternative to atomistic models of DNA as they are indispensable for the modelling of DNA on timescales in the millisecond range and beyond, or when long DNA strands of tens of thousands of base pairs or more have to be considered. This is for instance important to study the dynamics of DNA supercoiling, the local over- or under-twisting of the double helix, which is important for gene expression. Another Grand Challenge is the nanoscale design of functional material, which aims at engineering desired properties into the materials by using new principles rather than proceeding by trial and error. In the proposed programme I address different classes of functional and energy materials. One example are particle suspensions, which are fundamental in encapsulation technologies used in consumer products like foods, beverages, cleaning agents, personal care products, paints and inks or in the petrochemical industry or the micro-technological sector with lab-on-a-chip devices. Nanostructured charged soft materials are a new and highly promising avenue to more efficient, safer energy producing or storing devices and have great potential to fill technological gaps in the design of batteries and electrodes or the storage of renewable energy. A third Grand Challenge is the emergence and physics far from thermodynamic equilibrium. As life itself is a process far away from equilibrium, the context of this research is also closely related to aspects of living matter and often challenges the classical theories of statistical physics. The software that I will produce during this Fellowship will be open source and freely available for download from public repositories. Parts of it are likely to form later a key contribution to a highly optimised and standardised library of micro-, meso- and macroscale algorithms and a European infrastructure for the simulation of complex fluids. The software and research programme will be undertaken at the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with project partners at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, University College London, the University of Barcelona, Spain and Sandia National Laboratories, USA.

Exposure to inhaled mineral or metallic dust may induce interstitial lung diseases (ILDs) such as sarcoidosis or pulmonary fibrosis. These diseases are frequently considered idiopathic; however, some of them are of occupational or environmental origin. Pathologists do not investigate the nature and the origin of mineral dust exposure by lack of available and convenient technology. Since 2014, Benoit Busser is working with collaborators to develop the medical applications of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), aiming at characterizing the nature of (nano)-particles in different tissue specimens. LIBS technology allows visualizing and quantifying metals and mineral dust in biological organs, and especially in the lungs. LIBS is considered as a major tool to help medical doctors in their investigations for finding origins to idiopathic lung diseases. In the context of the recent funding of our national multidisciplinary project MEDI-LIBS (ANR-17-CE18-0028), very encouraging preliminary results and the enthusiasm of our clinical partners encourage Benoit Busser (coordinator) and his collaborators to push forward and to submit a proposal for an ambitious (but realistic) European project connected to their field of expertise. They aim at creating a high-performance LIBS equipment fully dedicated to biomedical analyses. The EURO-LIBS project is innovative and relies on an international consortium of i) physicists for the construction of the LIBS instrument and training of the users), ii) clinicians for the clinical trials (expertise in pulmonology and/or occupational medicine), iii) and a “business-partner” from the Health insurance field for the economic health studies. The EURO-LIBS project, its objectives and consortium, are perfectly aligned with the scope of the next EIT Health BP 2021 call, in March 2020. The European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT) is an integral part of Horizon 2020, the EU’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.

Anthropogenic changes are accelerating the rate at which our environment is changing. In particular, temperature and rainfall patterns are being altered at an alarming pace. Such rapid change threatens biodiversity as organisms struggle to cope with stressful environments, for example, increased temperature. There are limited options for how an organism can respond to a changing environment, but of particular importance will be evolutionary solutions, such as adaptation. Adaptations occur at the genetic level but the nature of the genetic alterations in response to climate change is unclear. Moreover, much understanding about genetic changes is based on laboratory studies, and recent research has suggested that laboratory results do not always translate to how wild populations respond. Thus, to understand how biodiversity will be impacted by changing environments, we critically need information about how natural populations may adapt to environmental changes and the genetic causes of such adaptation. Here we aim to identify adaptive genetic responses to natural temperature changes in wild populations of the fruit fly, Drosophila subobscura. We will establish outdoor enclosures of flies along a temperature gradient at six sites from Valencia, Spain to Uppsala, Sweden. At two stressful temperatures, hot and cold, we will sample males from these captive populations and measure what genes are 'turned up' or 'turned down' in response to these temperatures. We can then compare populations for differences in these genes. We predict that populations in the north will be more cold adapted than those in the south and that therefore the genes that are changed in response to hot and cold stress will be different. Because we will measure these genes using technology that identifies their written code, we can also test whether the code itself differs between populations. Natural selection is thought to result in such coding changes so we will test that prediction here. Finally, we will look for the locations on the genome where these genes are changed. There are areas of the genome which are resistant to random alterations of where a gene is located on a chromosome. Such areas are thought to be important in sheltering genes that provide adaptation to environmental conditions. We will also test that prediction. This triad of genetic responses has neither been examined in one system before, nor in wild populations. Thus, this work will give us unprecedented information on the genetic changes that occur in response to temperature in natural populations. Since the work asks about such changes across a landscape, the research will provide valuable background to a large number of conservation groups and NGOs that have particular interests in land development and species management strategies. Moreover, our work will provide a link between two divisive public issues - climate change and evolution - that can be used to address the nature of science and scientific evidence.