UiT

Mitochondria play a vital role in the cellular machinery, hence it is little surprising that their dysfunction has been linked to many diseases, from diabetes to neurodegeneration. However, as many studies on the interplay of organelles and molecular dynamics often employ fluorescence microscopy, a continued worry overshadowing findings and deductions is the possibility that the transfection-induced overexpression of fluorescent proteins skews the obtained results. A recent approach, the gene editor CRISPR-CAS9, which modifies rather than adds DNA sequences, circumvents this issue, but in turn often reduces the available signal levels. To counter low signals and yet offer highest resolution and specificity, MitoQuant aims to image contextual mitochondrial information with label-free superresolution, while simultaneously enhance image quality of specific but sparse fluorescently labelled proteins of interest through recently presented de-noising routines based on machine learning. Therefore, the development of a novel instrument to provide adequate resolution and contrast, matching label-based live-cell superresolution techniques like structured illumination microscopy, is the first main goal of this project. The proposed microscope will work in the deep UV range and employ dedicated optics originally developed for material science to provide high numerical apertures at short wavelengths, thus enabling live-cell imaging in the 100nm range. Concurrently, a neural network will be compiled and trained to enhance signals under low-light conditions and to extract and classify cellular organelles based on their quantitative phase and autofluorescence information. Building on an excellent track record of developing application-tailored microscopes as well as advanced image reconstruction and processing algorithms particularly suited for live-cell superresolution, the researcher strives to start with first live-cell experiments in good time after establishing the technique.

Investigating Proxies for Understanding Trajectories: Heritage Language Maintenance and Child Second Language Acquisition in Refugee Contexts (INPUT) will examine heritage language and child second language development in the European refugee context. INPUT will significantly add to a sub-field of bilingualism studies, Heritage Language Bilingualism (HLB), by studying refugee heritage speakers in Europe, an understudied subset of HLB. This empirical study will investigate linguistic and extra-linguistic variables affecting the development of both the societal majority language and the heritage language with the goal of impacting education policy development. Heritage language Syrian Arabic in Germany and second language German will be investigated with a focus on 6- to 12-year-old children to examine developmental trajectories. The overall research objective is to understand the extent to which increased or reduced heritage language exposure affects heritage language and child second language trajectories and outcomes. For Europe, supporting refugee youth can have significant impact towards the publicly stated goal of integrating this population into their newly adopted countries. One major impediment to this integration is their successful acquisition of the societal majority language while maintaining and developing the first language. Our hypothesis is that support for continued development in the heritage language will improve second language development with knock-on effects for the academic achievement of refugees. At present, heritage language support and training varies tremendously all over Europe. Project findings will be relevant especially for policy makers, teachers, school principals and HLB communities in European countries that have seen a notable increase of Syrian Arabic heritage speakers. To date, most heritage language studies have focused exclusively on the minority language, INPUT helps to fill an important gap by focusing on both languages.

Grammatical gender represents an important area of research given the difficulty gender assignment and agreement poses to bilinguals at all levels of proficiency. As such, the objective of GenBiLex is to develop a comprehensive proposal of grammatical gender in the bilingual lexicon that includes psycholinguistic, language acquisition and theoretical linguistic approaches. Little previous research has examined the consequences of differences between the L1 and L2 gender systems, either in terms of the number of gender values (e.g. 2 vs 3 values) or the values themselves (e.g. common/neuter vs masculine/feminine). GenBiLex addresses this crucial gap by examining bilinguals with different types of gender systems in order to offer insight into the representation of and interactions between the L1 and L2 gender features in the lexicon and how this is borne out in the use of gender in the L2. In this research 140 adult native speakers (L1) of Norwegian, German, Dutch and French learning Spanish (L2) perform an L2 gender decision task (indicate the gender value of L2 nouns) and an eye-tracking reading acceptability judgment task (rate sentences with code-switched Determiner Phrases, e.g. die mesa, ‘theGER tableSPA’). The stimuli are manipulated in terms of the gender congruency between the L1 and L2 nouns, allowing for the representation and use of gender in the L2 to be examined and bilinguals’ use of gender agreement in code-switching to be investigated with respect to theoretical syntactic proposals. GenBiLex complements previous work on grammatical gender by the Language Acquisition, Variation and Attrition group at the University of Tromsø, extending their research to include L2 acquisition and more language pairings. The outcome of this research will be a significantly deeper understanding of the representation and processing of grammatical gender in the bilingual lexicon that contributes to psycholinguistics, language acquisition and theoretical linguistics.

Understanding how languages leak into each other in the bilingual brain is a central testing ground for theories of language in the brain (which will inform all future educational policy), and also for theories of language change under contact. However, the crucial detailed information is strikingly difficult to obtain because of the massive variability in human experience. If one attempts to find generalizations in this area, one is faced with the uncertainty that the effects are not due to principled cognitive factors but to some combination of external factors of the environment and/or specific details of the particular language pairing involved, including the precise dialects in question. In addition, any changes in the development of a HL must be compared directly to the natural changes going on in that language in its native context, so that normal language change can be factored out. The exciting and unique feature of this project is that in this study we control for these factors by closely examining a particular community of residents with a Turkish background in Drunen, a small town in the North Brabant province of the Netherlands. The members of this community migrated from small towns in Rize, a province on the eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey, where a unique dialect of Turkish is spoken. Influenced from Greek and Armenian (Indo-European) as well as Laz (Kartvelian), this regional variety demonstrates substantial differences from other varieties of Turkish in Turkey and is classified a separate dialect group on its own. PATH will examine a sub-dialect of this unique variety as it has been spoken by three generations of ±350 residents in Drunen to investigate how different components of grammar (phonology, lexicon, syntax) show variation and change in a bilingual setting.

MD GIG examines the transition to digital service provision in the public services by exploring the rise of the "online doctor" that provide consultations between doctor-patient via app-based mobile phone technology. The aim is to explore digitalization of healthcare from a worker perspective to highlight the preconditions that give rise to gig work in the healthcare sector and explore the potential consequences at different scales. Whereas before all patients had go to a primary care center on appointment during office hours, today patients can have a consult with a doctor on-demand at any time and from anywhere. Medical work's entry into the platform economy, where work is reshaped into "gigs" that workers perform where and when they want, is developing parallel to organizational and economic restructuring of the healthcare system towards more marketization and private-public partnerships. The project sets out to understand the individual motivations for doctors to take up work in digital doctor platforms through in-depth interviews to produce narratives based in the MDs own experiences, to explore the approach of the trade unions and medical associations to digital doctor platforms through expert-interviews with high level union employees to document their hopes, fears and strategies regarding changing labour markets and working conditions, and to analyse the role of digital doctor platforms in public healthcare restructuring to produce a political economy of digital healthcare in Europe.