OCEAN:ICE will assess the impacts of key Antarctic Ice Sheet and Southern Ocean processes on Planet Earth, via their influence on sea level rise, deep water formation, ocean circulation and climate. An innovative and ambitious combination of observations and numerical models, including coupled ice sheet-climate model development, will be used to improve predictions of how changes in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets impact global climate. It will make new circumpolar and Atlantic observations in observational gaps. It will assimilate these and existing data into improved ice sheet boundary conditions and forcing, producing new estimates of ice sheet melt and impacts on ocean circulation, including the Atlantic Meridional Overturning circulation. It will develop, calibrate and assess models used to predict the future evolution of the giant ice sheets. It will reduce the deep uncertainty in the impact of their melt on societally relevant environmental changes on decadal to multi-centennial time scales. OCEAN:ICE will assess the potential for passing ice sheet 'tipping points' and their consequences for ocean circulation and climate. OCEAN:ICE will raise the profile of European research through its extensive network of international collaborators, who provide scientific and logistical support. It will directly contribute to the All-Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance through observations, logistical collaboration and analysis. It will significantly advance the state-of-the-art in coupled ice sheet-climate modelling and directly contribute to international climate assessments such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and World Ocean Assessment. It will link organically to European data centres to disseminate its data, following FAIR and INSPIRE principles. It will deliver improved assessments of European climate impacts from the melting ice sheets, with actionable risk and timescales, to policymakers and the public.

The Enlightenment has long been associated with the rise of modern Europe, and more generally with the concept of a typically European Modernity that took root in its wake. What it means to be ‘modern’ is indelibly bound up with our understanding of the Enlightenment’s core concepts: reason, religious toleration, civic virtue, political liberty, and scientific progress, to name but a few. For some, the Enlightenment is an essentially philosophical matter; for others it was and remains deeply political. Whatever the case may be, one thing is certain: for better or worse, it is widely accepted that the Enlightenment ushered in a new, modern era in both politics and philosophy, beginning in the 1790s and continuing today. The role of 18th-century ideas in this modernising process, and by proxy, the books that came to embody them, has long been the subject of intense scholarly debate, primarily concerned with the social and intellectual causes of the French Revolution. As a result, the field of Enlightenment studies today continues to privilege a relatively small canon of writers—primarily those that participated in the more ‘radical’ strains of Enlightenment thought in France. This is only one version, or vision, of the Enlightenment, however, albeit one that tends to dominate contemporary discourse. This project aims to fundamentally re-evaluate this interpretation of the Enlightenment and its actors by expanding the knowledge base on which these previous claims have been made; not only in terms of the diversity of authors and texts included, but also in the development of new digital techniques for identifying and analysing 18th-century information networks and their subsequent reception. In so doing, ModERN will move Enlightenment studies in a decidedly new direction; one that is both more comprehensive and more systematic in terms of its relationship to the existing digital cultural record, and one that likely challenges subsequent narratives of European Modernity.

Mind-wandering research in the cognitive sciences shows that a significant portion of novel ideas and breakthrough “aha!” moments happen when attention is shifted internally, away from tasks in the external environment. However, research has not explored how to encourage these creative mental wanders. Inspired by how exposure to art leads to generating innovative ideas, this project investigates the hypothesis that a digital arts intervention can enhance creative thoughts when mind-wandering. This use of digital technology is antithetical to its common aim of guiding attention externally. Accordingly, this project challenges how we use digital technology and opens opportunities for interdisciplinary research across the arts and sciences. Expected impacts are: 1) paving a new direction in mind-wandering research by investigating the possibility of inspiring creative thoughts, 2) Uncovering how digital arts can be an empirical tool to investigate cognitive processes, and 3) Conceptually extending the discourse of how technology affects cognition. This project will produce high-impact research publications, presentations, and an interdisciplinary symposium to disseminate findings across relevant disciplines. Communication with the public will be facilitated with a project dedicated website and targeted outreach efforts both at the TC and return host institutions.

Navigating a new city's dining scene often confronts us with unavailable options, e.g., 'fully booked,' shaping our behavioral variability such as random exploratory choices and learning errors. Existing theories of reward-guided learning typically overlook option unavailability. Hypothesized strategies may vary, from adjusting action stochasticity—over-exploration to broadly check alternatives, or under-exploration to quickly latch onto available favorites—to adjusting learning process, e.g., weighing past choices for maximal future rewards, or heuristically inflating the value of busy venues while devaluating others ('busier = better'). A nuanced understanding of these tactics requires a deep dive into information sampling, encompassing not just overt evidence-seeking actions but also covert attentional sampling during value updates in the internal model of the world. These complex sampling patterns, unfolding rapidly over hundreds of milliseconds, have been chiefly studied through eye-tracking that captures overt oculomotor variables, leaving the subtleties of covert sampling unexplored and detailed mechanistic insights elusive. I aim to address this issue across multiple scales—from neurotransmitter and neural dynamics to biophysically-grounded modeling of behavior. Using pharmaco-magnetoencephalography (MEG), I will track covert attentional focus across the entire timespan of every single reward-guided decision during learning, in detailed source-localized brain regions, while also perturbing neurochemical systems to establish causal links. This research promises to illuminate longstanding questions, such as why behavioral variability persists despite evolutionary pressures favoring reward-maximizing decisions. The training through this MSCA in circuit-level mechanistic models, imparted by world-leading experts, will complement my existing expertise, and establish me as an independent researcher in the burgeoning field of cognitive computational neuroscience.

In this project we are embarking on the ambitious and exciting journey to advance our understanding of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) in 4d, a fundamental theory that describes interactions among quarks and gluons. Our primary focus will be on studying QCD in two different regimes: in the physical regime with two flavours of quarks and in the conformal window. In the physical regime QCD is the theory of Strong interactions responsible for the existence of mesons, baryons and nuclei. QCD in the conformal window holds significant relevance from the purely theoretical prospective and might describe physics beyond the standard model. Although significant progress has been made in studying QCD, its complete understanding remains a challenge. In the last decade there has been an incredible development of bootstrap tools which we will use in this project to obtain a series of groundbreaking results about QCD which are difficult or impossible to obtain by other means. We will use the S-matrix bootstrap to study QCD in the physical regime. Our main goal is to find numerically crossing symmetric, analytic and unitary expressions for scattering amplitudes of pions, protons and neutrons, and perform spectral analysis of resonances described by complex energies. As a secondary goal we will compute non-perturbatively the scattering amplitude in the 3d phi4 model. We will use the conformal bootstrap to study QCD in the left part of the conformal window and perturbation theory to study QCD in the right part of the conformal window in the Veneziano limit. We will attempt to determine the spectrum of Caswell-Banks-Zaks fixed points on both sides. As a secondary goal we will also obtain rigorous bounds on the trace anomalies in generic 4d conformal field theories. Since the bootstrap tools are model independent, in order to study QCD we will augment them with QCD model dependent data which comes from experiments, numerical simulations and ('t Hooft and trace) anomalies.