The University of Bucharest, steps to attract foreign researchers: UB receives PNRR funding for 6 projects from Axis I8

On Tuesday, May 23, 2023, they were signed, in the presence of prof. Marian Preda, PhD, Rector of the University of Bucharest, and Mr. Sebastian Burduja, Minister of Research, Innovation and Digitization, the funding for 6 research projects with international participation, submitted by the University of Bucharest in axis I8 of component 9 of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania.

The international coordinators of the research projects also took part in the project funding signing ceremony.

Axis I8 aims to develop a program to attract highly specialized human resources from abroad in research, development and innovation activities and is part of Component C9: support for the private sector, research, development and innovation.

Thus, the purpose of this axis is “attracting highly specialized human resources from outside Romania in order to recover the gaps that Romania registers with the EU average and with the countries in the region”, and one of the objectives aimed at the implementation of the projects financed in axis I8 is “the adoption of the European Charter of researchers and the Code of Conduct for the recruitment of researchers by the entities that carry out research – development and innovation activities, components of the national system of research, development and innovation”.

In addition, axis I8 also aims to support researchers of excellence to stimulate participation in the competitions of the European Union’s Horizon Europe framework program, but also to develop Romanian fundamental research, by attracting and involving researchers from abroad in projects with an impact on increasing the international visibility of the national CDI system reflected by the increase in the number of publications with high international impact, as well as by the increase in the number of applications for EPO, USPTO, JPO patents or obtained in other EU and OECD countries.

About the projects won by UB through PNRR I8Climate- and tectonics-related surface processes in the Southern Carpathians and Northern Balkan Mountains project.

A geochronological approach at different timescales – ChronoCaRP aims to analyze the influence of climatic oscillations on the long-term evolution of the relief in South-Eastern Europe (the last 25,000 years) by creating geochronological and paleo-climatic datasets of high scientific quality, using a quantitative multi-disciplinary study of the sensitivity of the alpine environments of the Southern Carpathians and the mountains of the Northern Balkan Peninsula (Rila and Pirin). Along with the detailed reconstruction of the extent of the last glaciation and the dynamics of relief forms after the deglaciation, the project proposes the use of modern techniques for analyzing sedimentary archives in order to identify paleoclimate and environmental changes, as well as the establishment of a chronology of the Danube terraces based on modern mapping techniques and absolute ages, to quantify the role of tectonics in the evolution of the region.

This project is coordinated by Zsófia Ruszkiczay-Rüdiger.

The New Molecules to Investigate the Role of Lipids in Cells (ProLip) project proposes to develop and validate innovative methods for visualizing various classes of lipids in cells and tissues by combining organic synthesis with biochemistry and molecular biology. We anticipate that the proposed new methods will have a major impact in deciphering the biological role of lipids, in the diagnosis of lipid disorders, and in the discovery of new therapies targeting this important class of biological molecules. Lipids are chemically diverse biological molecules with essential roles in cell structure, biological energy production and storage, metabolic regulation, and intercellular communication. Although lipid metabolism is relatively well understood, we currently lack methods for high-resolution microscopic visualization of lipids in vivo.

This project is coordinated by Adrian Șalic.

The Life of the Heart: Phenomenology of Body and Emotions project proposes a new approach to the problem of emotions and their bodily seat, mobilizing the conceptual resources of phenomenological philosophy, phenomenological psychopathology and phenomenological theology, which gives a central role to first-person experience. By articulating these three ways of describing emotions in their bodily dimension – in opposition to the traditional cognitivist view, which claims that only the brain materially governs the body and which promotes a purely formal and functional understanding of cognition – our project argues that the heart, in its quality of bodily and emotional complexity that is not reduced to the physiological core, makes possible a vast and fundamental experience of the self, understood as an embodied and self-aware subject.

This project is coordinated by  Natalie Depraz.

The Blue Justice and Just Transformation project: far-fetched concepts for Romania’s marine protected sites? – JUST4MPA aims to identify how the main conservation strategies of Romania and the European Union have or have not overlooked social justice, with consequences that may hinder beneficial socio-ecological effects. The project starts from the premise that the process of searching for new exploitable natural resources resulted in the transformation of the oceans into new frontiers, giving rise to concepts such as Blue Economy and Blue Growth, which often eliminate ecological and social requirements. Thus, there is a growing risk that unchecked adoption of these concepts will emphasize injustices in the way the environment is accessed, and its benefits are shared.

This project is coordinated by Priscila Fabiana Macedo Lopes.

The Complex modeling of multiple land degradation processes in Europe project. Towards an integrative scientific framework for sustainable land management across the continent proposes an integrative scientific analysis of multiple processes in European agricultural environments, by simultaneously considering 12 major degradation processes: water erosion, wind erosion, loss of soil organic carbon, soil salinization, soil acidification, soil compaction, soil nutrient imbalances, pesticide soil pollution, heavy metal soil pollution, vegetation degradation, groundwater decline and aridity.The project is of particular importance due to the originality of the multi-degradation analyzes (which will be carried out for the first time at the continental level), by modeling a large number of degradation processes, but also by the spatial scale analyzed, which stretches along the agricultural lands from 40 European countries. At the same time, the project is also relevant through its practical importance for current European policies, which are linked to land degradation, and which aim to control this major environmental problem and ensure food security on the continent.In a wider context, multi-degradation of land is a problem of global dimensions, being studied on a global level by Prăvălie Remus, in a valuable work published in collaboration with the director of this research project. More details on this topical issue can be consulted  here.

This project is coordinated by Borrelli Pasquale.

The Ambient and Resolution-Enhanced Miniature Atomic Sensing for exploration of lab-on-a-chip magnetism and magnetic resonance imaging – AREMAS project will produce short-to-source on-chip magnetometers operating close to the “energy resolution” limit for a mm-scale spin-based sensor. The project will create a new paradigm for the study of microfluidic processes with NMR and magnetometers and stimulate new applications of NMR in sciences. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI, NMR) is an interdisciplinary subject with widespread applications in health, physics, chemistry and engineering. Microfluidic/lab-on-chip-(LoC-) scale implementations of these techniques are driven by the need to correlate the behavior of micro- and macro-systems.

This project is coordinated by Michael Tayler.