The B-learning Uzbekistan Veterinary Network / BUzNet project will be implemented by a consortium of 4 European HEIs and 4 Uzbek HEIs. The general objective of the project is to increase the life standards of common Uzbek people through better veterinary and zootechnical teaching, which will ultimately result in better technical support for local herds’ owners and safer animal products reaching the general society. And this will be accomplished taking into account the local ecological limitations and using advance teaching techniques of practical subjects in veterinary/animal sciences. To do this we must first be sure about what we are dealing with, and so, a series of inquiries and local visits of European experts will be done in order to have a clear idea of the exact Uzbek situation in veterinary farm animal clinic and surgery and milk quality control. Then, a group of Uzbek teachers will be trained in European HEIs in new ways of teaching practical subjects and using B learning strategies to help doing so. Meanwhile, an updating of the present Uzbek curricula and local facilities present in Uzbek HEIs will be done. This way it will be possible to fully implement the new teaching strategies by the third and last year of the project. The core of the project will be the use of a B-learning interface (BLUzVet) that will create a learning community consisting of all members of the project consortium, teachers, students and veterinarians. The information is created by the students during practical classes under teachers supervision, commented by all consortium members and will be used in students’ examinations. In the future this system will be extended to members from other countries and regions. The network formed within this project agglutinates Veterinary HEIs from different backgrounds and will improve the setting of new veterinary, animal production management and milk quality control teaching standards in Uzbekistan and beyond.

The importance of European cultural heritage has been generally acknowledged. A significant part of this heritage, however, modern and contemporary art, runs a great risk of getting lost for future generations, because it is particularly difficult to preserve. Proper care requires resolving fundamental questions concerning the identity and authenticity of modern and contemporary artworks and the consequences for their conservation, rethinking historically grown professional distinctions as those between the curator and the conservator, re-organizing the institutional ecosystem, and establishing frameworks for international, interdisciplinary and intersectoral research and training collaboration. The aim of this Marie Curie Innovative Training Network is to educate a new generation of professional curators, conservators and academic researchers who are properly equipped to face these challenges. The key notion guiding the research and training programmes will be the notion of reflective practice. Starting from the theoretical framework of practice theory, the research programme will investigate conservation practices through the comparative analysis of their impact on modern and contemporary artworks’ biographies. The training programme will focus on the development of a reflective professional attitude, which is a pre-requisite in this increasingly complex and collaborative field.

PHERECLOS builds upon the theory of science capital and the experience that Children’s Universities (CUs) have made in the Third Mission of universities. With their engagement with children and young people, they became intermediaries between various actors in the educational and social landscape. As translators of the concerns, messages and knowledge of other parties (incl. business and industry, the state, civic society organizations etc.) they help to dismantle institutional boundaries of universities towards a wider society. The project will establish 6 "Local Education Clusters" (LECs), which bring together schools and further relevant actors in the education ecosystem of a particular pilot region, supported by a peer mentoring programme. The LECs will be incubators for enabling a dialogue between various parties and help to set up joint activities in (formal and non-formal) education, which help to develop collaborative learning environments as experimental testbeds for schools. At the same time they impact on the quality of science engagement opportunities in these areas. PHERECLOS will implement a digital “OpenBadge” ecosystem which labels institutions as reliable and responsive actors and showcases all LEC parties to become real change agents in education. At the same time, this ecosystem will testify individual achievements with respect to STEAM engagement in formal or non-formal settings or even unintended learning outcomes. The regional effectiveness and impact will be monitored by academic transfer and implementation research and lead to the development of implementation guidelines and policy briefs to enhance the sustainability of the overall approach. PHERECLOS promotes the territorial dimension of local education clusters in all their manifold facets and their catalyzing role relating to access to STEAM and higher education, critical thinking and informed decision making in a wider societal context – including competitiveness and sustainable growth.

Smart Shrinkage Solutions - Fostering Resilient Cities in Inner Peripheries of Europe is a project that offers the best practice and most feasible solutions to the problem of urban shrinkage - a continuous population decline affecting more than 1,500 cities all over Europe. By learning from the experience of the cities that once were on the edge of an abyss but have bounced back to life, by sharing the key ingredients of their success across Europe and beyond, this project enables as many shrinking cities as possible to adapt, transform, and thrive in the face of continuously and often dramatically changing circumstances.

FIERCE aims at providing the long-needed step forward to tackle the challenges of stellar activity on the search for Exoearths. The detection and characterisation of other Earths, planets with the physical conditions to hold liquid water and thus potential life-sustaining environments, is a bold objective of present day astrophysics. This goal continuously pushes the development of new ground- and space-based instrumentation. However, the quest for other Earths is severely limited by astrophysical ``noise'' from the host stars, whose signatures distort the spectra that are used to detect and characterise them. Existing methods usually circumvent the problem without a detailed understanding of the individual sources of variability. This is insufficient to reach the required precision levels. To enable the full scientific success of major exoplanet research facilities a new approach is clearly needed. With FIERCE, the PI will employ his competitive team, together with the strong participation in cutting-edge ESO and ESA projects and missions, to break through in this obstacle. The ultimate goal is to i) develop novel approaches to identify, model, and correct stellar spurious signals in radial velocity measurements down to 10 cm/s, and ii) obtain a comprehensive understanding of the impact of stellar granulation and activity on the detection of exoplanet atmospheres. To this end, FIERCE will approach the problem of stellar ``noise'' from a whole new angle, building a dedicated facility, the Paranal solar Espresso Telescope (PoET). PoET will connect to the recently commissioned ESPRESSO spectrograph and, using the Sun as a proxy, allow to unambiguously identify and understand the sources of relevant variability in solar-type stars. Ambitious, timely, and feasible, this project will provide crucial information for the success of present and future major efforts aiming at detecting and characterising other Earths.