Field of research:
Medieval History

Research interests:
I am interested in Cultural antropology and Religious studies, with a focus on processes of religious conversion and the dynamics of cultural and religious exchange involved in these.

Planned research project:
This interdisciplinary project proposes to analyse the development of a local and peculiar religious identity in the region of Galicia, north-western Spain. It specifically examines the period of Christianization from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, through a historical, archaeological and anthropological perspective. The main goal of this project is to analyse peoples’ agency in “crafting” their religious beliefs and interpretations based on the process of cultural transfer and religious hybridity. I intend to identify the process that defines the selectiveness and influences the final shape that religious practices take, considering all elements involved in this process of transmission and exchange. This includes: the cultural and historical background, the characteristics of the process of Christianization, the agents promoting the diffusion of the faith and the dynamics of power that somehow influenced the religious evolution. Thus, my project takes into consideration how, during religious conversion, specifically Christianization, the elements involved in the process of hybridization, Christianity and other beliefs and practices, are in and of themselves non-static notions. There were several forms of paganism as well as Christianity and the fusion between them was a fluid process.
The aim of this research is to contribute to the creation of a method of identifying hybridity in sources and practices that can be used in other historical and cultural realities. Furthermore, it aims to shed light on the complex dynamics of cultural interaction and exchange that pervades the history of humanity.

Keywords:
Galicia, Early Medieval Period, Christianization, Popular religion, Religious Hybridity, Cultural studies

German host institutions:
Freie Universität Berlin

Host during the mobility phase:
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain

Field of research:
Prehistoric Archeology

Research interests:
My research interests include human evolution, prehistoric technology and human environmental interactions. I have focused my attention on the recurrent Pleistocene migrations/expansions events of our species (from and back to Africa), the cultural know-how developed over the course of this processes and the subsistence strategies used by human populations to coup with extreme environments, such as the Saharo-Arabian arid belt.

Planned research project:
“How did Human Behaviour change During the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in South Arabia?”
The shift from hunting and gathering to a production-based subsistence practices represents a significant milestone in the development of our species; why chase the food when we can make the food come to us?
The longstanding and fruitful research traditions throughout the Fertile Crescent and much of North Africa have illuminated some aspects of the complex mechanisms driving processes of Neolithization, informing us that allopatric cultural progressions produced different behavioural responses within separate core areas of the Southwest Asia. Yet, little is known of how this process was manifest in the Arabian Peninsula.
The proposed research will explore human response to fluctuating environmental conditions during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene in the southern Arabian Peninsula, between 30.000 and 8.000 years  before present. Did the Neolithic revolution affect the developmental trajectories of archaeological cultures in this region, through either diffusion or migration? Can we identify overlapping cultural features between the Near Eastern archaeological record and that of southern Arabia, which might signify some degree of cultural contact, or perhaps even demographic origins? If so, when did this influx of new cultural features occur?

Keywords:
Prehistoric lithic technology; traceology; taphonomy; site function; landscape exploitation patters; South Arabia

German host institutions:
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Department of Prehistoric Archaeology

Host during the mobility phase:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) Institto Milá y Fontanals,
Research group: Archaeology of Social Dynamics (ASD)
Barcelona, Spain

Field of research:
Economics

Research interests:
Foundations of Economics, i. e. Decision making under uncertainty, Complex Systems, Epistemology, Science History, History of Thought

Planned research project:
People make decisions under uncertainty every day, thus in order to make prudent decisions they turn for guidance to economics. The core of formal economics is the evaluation of uncertain prospects, where there is a paradigm change well underway. The standard line of research applies expected utility theory (EUT) to decision problems under uncertainty, whose axiomatic foundation rendered it theoretically sound, but consistent empirical violations of EUT have spurred further research and propelled the advent of behavioural economics theories (such as prospect theory, regret theory or salience theory) that try to reconcile the behavioural inconsistencies such as probability weighting or loss aversion with EUT. However, despite of immense efforts, there is no commonly accepted rational explanation of observed behaviour in decision making under uncertainty to this day. As a result, the economics community has labelled violations of the prevailing decision theory -- such as probability weighting or loss aversion -- as ‘irrational biases’ and there is a tendency to proceed to accumulate the stamp collection of such biases from the ‘wilderness of bounded rationality’. My project, The Time Resolution of the Probability Weighting Puzzle, counteracts this tendency by using a temporal optimisation scheme to identify optimal behaviour over time in repeated gambles. In my project I expand the capabilities of the newly developed research paradigm of Ergodicity Economics to repeated uncertain gambles, i.e. when there is some ignorance about the true parameters that define the gamble.

Keywords:
Ergodicity Economics, Time-Average Growth Rate, Temporal Maximisation, Decision under Uncertainty, Probability Weighting

German host institutions:
Institute of Mathematics, Leipzig University
Mathematics of Complex Economic Systems Group, Max-Planck-Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences

Host during the mobility phase:
London Mathematical Laboratory, UK

Field of research:
social anthropology

Research interests:
ethnography, science and technology studies, health studies, work studies, sociomaterialities of health, food and sleep

Planned research project:
“Matters of Sleep - sleep devices in the everyday life of Norwegian hospital staff”
The study aims to further the understanding of the usage of devices for sleep enhancement under extreme work conditions and seasonal variations of light/dark exposure and its implications for hospital staff and other shift workers applying ethnographic methods.
Hospital staff belongs to a high-risk group suffering from sleep deprivation and sleep disorders while at the same time its work environment demands a high level of concentration, rapid decision-making, and empathy. Nurses and MDs working night shifts above the Arctic Circle are additionally challenged by extreme circadian changes during the polar night and midnight sun periods. These specific work conditions lead to the assumption that Nordic hospital staff is particularly challenged when trying to manage a healthy day-night rhythm.
What is considered optimal sleep? How are sleep devices used by this group to enable or support it?
The study, operating on the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Health Studies, aims to advance the knowledge of how sleep devices support and/or prevent sleep and its possible indications in the development of novel approaches on how to enhance sleep under extreme work conditions and/or seasonal variations. Further knowledge on these ‘matters of sleep’ can serve as an impetus for understanding the conditions of shift workers’ distorted sleep patterns elsewhere as well as for a broader understanding of the subjective meanings of sleep for this group and its related day-to-day practices.

Keywords:
sleep, shift work, sleep devices, Polar nights/midnight sun, hospital staff, ethnography, STS.

German host institutions:
Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Faculty of Social Science, Cultural Psychology and Anthropology of Knowledge

Host during the mobility phase:
University of Oslo, Norway
Faculty of Social Science, TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture

Field of research:
International Relations

Field of research:
Early modern philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology, especially Leibniz and Descartes.

Research interests:
Theories of imagination and conceivability; theory of cognition, especially in mathematics.

Planned research project:
"Conceiving, Imagining and Fingere as Philosophical Method in Early Modern Philosophy: Descartes and Leibniz as Case Studies."
The aim of the project is to enquire into the nature and epistemic role of imagination-based reasoning as a philosophical method during the early modern period. The imagination provides knowledge of possible situations. A possible situation refers to configurations of objects and properties which are not directly experienced by an epistemic subject, but of which she can entertain a mental representation. Imagination-based reasoning is essentially involved both in epistemic and practical reasoning, for the representation of how things could be is a mental process rational subjects naturally appeal to in order to test and revise beliefs; make decisions; and prove theories through counterfactual reasoning. If this is true, the faculty of imagination is involved in a wide range of human practices philosophers consider distinctive of human rationality, and yet this claim seems to stay in tension with early modern rationalist epistemology, according to which knowledge rests on the intellect only.
The nature of imagination-based reasoning is enquired from a particular point of view: a confrontation between two philosophers of the early modern period, Descartes and Leibniz, on issues at the intersection of mathematics, geometry, and metaphysics. The question of the epistemic role of the imagination – and especially of the role played by cognitive states such as conceiving, imagining, and feigning/pretending (fingere) in geometrical and mathematical discoveries – engages both philosophers and profoundly influences their metaphysics and epistemology.

Keywords:
Leibniz; Descartes; Imagination; Conceivability; Mathematics; Geometry.

German host institutions:
University of Münster, Philosophy Department

Host during the mobility phase:
Harvard University, USA
Philosophy Department

Website:

Field of research:
Developmental Psychology, Comparative Psychology

Research interests:
I am interested in how human ways of thinking, learning and decision making develop during childhood and how these differ from the ways our closest relatives - chimpanzees - think, learn and make decisions. This allows us to draw inferences about human-unique strategies, skills and motivations, which may have played an important role in our evolution.

Planned research project:
“Ontogenetic and Phylogenetic Roots of Strategic Help-Seeking”
In this project, I study the development of strategic help-seeking from a comparative and a developmental perspective. By comparing the behavior of children and chimpanzees it may be possible to isolate human unique aspects of strategic help-seeking and to theorize about the evolutionary origins of different help-seeking strategies from the time when humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor. In addition, studying children of different age groups contributes to our understanding of the ontogenetic development of help-seeking strategies.

Keywords:
comparative psychology, developmental psychology, strategic help-seeking, information seeking, decision making

German host institutions:
University of Göttingen

Host during the mobility phase:
University of California, Berkeley, USA

Field of research:
Classics

Research interests:
Classical Receptions, Historiography, Satire, Epigram.

Planned research project:
Combining a literary and a historical perspective, the project focusses on the cultures of knowledge in the early imperial Rome (27 BC–138AD) and analyses literary strategies of memorization through anecdotes in historiographical and biographical texts. With a focus on one of the most productive periods of ancient anecdote writing, it analyzes the literary form and epistemic value of anecdotes. Comparing historiography to ancient medicine (case studies), the project intends to show that anecdotal historiography serves as a paradigmatic form of producing knowledge for it consists in guess work, grouping elements with similarities, and diagnosing signs and symptoms. In the steps of New Historicism, it follows a twofold systematic methodology and works with narratological and epistemological tools of analysis. As a point of departure, the project looks at the tension of immanence and transfer of meaning that either confirms or breaks the larger historical narrative. Thus, the project analyses, in a comparative perspective, how the narrative structure and the epistemic context (especially the framing) contribute to the creation of meaning and transfer of knowledge. To this end, the project (i) describes the emergences of anecdotal writing from Roman education and the sociocultural context (epistemic paradigms), (ii) analyses the narrative (markers of orality) and rhetorical (tropes) tools used in the corpus to create knowledge and transferability, and (iii) determines semiotic elements of a poetics of anecdotal history.

Keywords:
knowledge transfer, anecdotes, historiography, small literary forms

German host institution:
Freie Universität Berlin

Host during the mobility phase:
Princeton University, USA

Field of research:
Animal ecology

Research interests:
Wildlife ecology especially large ungulates, how they select their habitats, what are the drivers of their movement across heterogenous landscape, and what are the implications for their long-term conservation and management; landscape connectivity

Planned research project:
Restoring connectivity for an endangered marsupial in a fragmented, urban Australian landscape Habitat fragmentation negatively impacts biodiversity. Restoring functional connectivity in fragmented landscapes through the establishment of corridors is vital for movement, gene flow and survival of species. Accurate identification of functional corridors usually depends on estimates of landscape resistance to dispersal movement, but collecting sufficient dispersal data is challenging. Although expert knowledge is often used, it is increasingly recognized that empirical data may be more accurate. However, how well different types of data perform to infer connectivity remain unclear, and the functionality of corridors is rarely validated. This study proposes to combine occurrence data with fine-scale movement data to estimate habitat suitability and derive landscape resistance for the squirrel glider in a highly fragmented and urban Australian landscape. The estimated resistance surface will be mapped to identify biological corridors to reconnect disjunct populations of the species across the study area. Subsequently, the corridor will be tested with genetic data.

Keywords:
Spatial ecology, movement ecology, conservation biology, connectivity analysis, habitat suitability.

German host institutions:
University of Göttingen

Host during the mobility phase:
University of Newcastle, Australia

Field of research:
Molecular biology

Research interests:
I am interested in investigating different mechanisms of gene expression regulation in eukaryotic organisms, with focus on mechanisms of transcription and translation control.

Planned research project:
“RNA binding proteins differentially expressed during Trypanosoma cruzi and Trypanosoma brucei life cycle as potential regulators of parasite differentiation”.
I am going to characterize the function and mechanisms of control of evolutionarily conserved RNA binding proteins from Trypanosoma parasites that have different levels of expression when comparing their life cycle stages present in mammalian or insect hosts.

Keywords:
RNA binding proteins, Trypanosoma, parasite differentiation, neglected diseases.

German host institutions:
University of Heidelberg

Host during the mobility phase:
University of Maryland, USA

Field of research:
Ecosystem ecology / Biogeochemistry

Research interests:
Carbon sequestration, Plant-soil interactions, Microbial ecology, Wetland biogeochemistry

Planned research project:
Tidal wetlands (i.e. marshes and mangroves) and other vegetated coastal ecosystems have recently been increasingly recognized as powerful carbon (C) sinks, mitigating climate change through the long-term removal of atmospheric CO2. Climatic warming can reduce the capacity of ecosystems to sequester C by stimulating microbial decomposition processes. The objective of my PRIME project is to conduct the first evaluation of the temperature sensitivity of tidal-wetland C stocks in situ by studying the effects of rising temperature on microbial activity and community structure in relation to soil depth.

Keywords:
Blue Carbon, Climate change, Salt marsh, Warming experiments

German host institutions:
Universität Hamburg

Host during the mobility phase:
Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, USA
University of Maryland, USA

Field of research:
Biogeochemistry

Research interests:
Ecosystem disturbances; carbon and nutrient cycling in coniferous and deciduous forest ecosystems including the soil; interaction between carbon and nutrients; fate of particulate and dissolved organic carbon; ecosystem monitoring

Planned research project:
"Tracking the impact of abiotic and biotic stressors on the biogeochemistry of trees with morbidity: a greenhouse experiment."
Ecosystem disturbances such as drought and insect infestation are natural processes in forest ecosystems, but will intensify due to climate change. Weakened trees attract other stress agents such as bark-borers. Such a sequence of stressors can lead to morbidity and eventual death of trees with significant alterations in biogeochemical processes.

Keywords:
cortisphere; ecosystem disturbances; mass infestation; drought; nutrient concentration and fluxes; tree hydrology

German host institutions:
Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Host during the mobility phase:
University of Delaware, USA

Field of research:
Ecology

Research interests:
Conservation science, human-widlife conflict, population ecology, widlife monitoring

Planned research project:
"Understanding the root causes of human-wildlife conflicts for improving biodiversity conservation in protected areas."
Biodiversity conservation is receiving increasing attention, e.g. in the form of an increase in numbers and coverage of protected areas (PAs). Furthermore, many countries have signed the Convention on Biological Diversity to promote sustainable community conservation, recognizing the rights of people and addressing poverty alleviation. Despite these efforts, habitat fragmentation, overexploitation (e.g. poaching), invasive species and climate change continue to accelerate species extinctions. PA’s objectives are increasingly in conflict with local people’s activities, and thus create a negative attitude towards conservation in general and certain species. These ‘conflicts’ often appear in the form of human-human (armed conflict between rangers vs. poachers) or human-wildlife conflicts (herders vs. large carnivores). Many conservation projects follow a top-down approach, seeking to change human behavior by enforcement of laws to reduce poaching or by adopting schemes to offset damage on people’s property, but these rules are often ineffective and rather escalate conflicts. Unfortunately, there has only been scant empirical evidence for underlying assumptions of conflicts, especially in regard to socioeconomic-ecological contexts. It is important to understand the key factors changing decision-makers’ compliance on rules within social constructs (attitude, subjective norms and perceptions). In this project, we apply the theory of planned behavior offered by social-psychological science by integration with individual-based modelling (a bottom-up approach) from the ecological sciences which provides an opportunity to the understanding of individual behavior in conservation. This work has been developed to identify the root causes and mechanisms of conservation conflicts which is essential to find better mitigation pathways for conflicts and transform biodiversity conflict outcomes in PA systems.
This project will also apply meta-population models (e.g. Bayesian N-mixture model) to measure population stability (population trajectories) of large terrestrial ungulates in relation to overexploitation (i.e. poaching) over time. Ultimately, we will assess the role of protected areas in protecting megafauna in South-West Asia.

Keywords:
Conservation conflicts, Iran, ungulates, theory of planned behavior, poaching, socioeconomic and ecological system, law enforcement, Hyrcanian forest

German host institutions:
University of Göttingen

Host during the mobility phase:
University of Aberdeen, UK

Field of research:
Chemistry

Research interests:
My research involves the use of solid-state NMR techniques to study local structure-property relationships in functional materials, as electroceramics and fluoride ion batteries.

Planned research project:
„ DEVELOPMENT OF ¹⁹F NMR AS AN IN SITU CHARACTERIZATION TOOL FOR ALL-SOLID-STATE BATTERIES BASED ON FLUORIDE ION SHUTTLE CONCEPT“
Fluoride ion batteries (FIB) are studied as an alternative to Li-ion batteries. It is a more sustainable and safer battery concept, as it uses globally available fluoride ions (Fˉ) and does not require a liquid electrolyte.
In this project I will do pioneer work to establish ¹⁹F solid-state NMR as a key structural characterization method for FIB. The structural origin for low specific capacities, the reasons behind their poor cyclability and the mechanisms underlying the reversible attachment of F- during cell operation will be addressed.
The outcome of this study will be the benchmark for in situ characterization in the expanding field of FIB and will contribute considerably to the understanding of this battery technology and the development of all-solid-state batteries.

Keywords:
Fluoride Ion Batteries (FIB), solid-state NMR, all solid-state batteries

German host university:
University of Bayreuth, Germany

Host during the mobility phase:
University of Cambridge, UK

Field of research:
Seismo-tectonics

Research interests:
My research aims mainly at better understanding subduction megathrust earthquakes and their relationship with geodynamics. I use mainly analog and numerical models for identifying controlling factors and integrating multi-disciplinary studies.

Planned research project:
My DAAD PRIME project is titled “Interseismic deformation TRAnsients: DIagnostic POtential as precursors to great subduction earthquakes?” (TRADIPO) and its objective is to clarify whether transients (i.e., unusual seismic and crustal deformation patterns) are diagnostic of a precise stage of the interseismic period and, potentially, can serve as an earthquake forecasting tool. 

Keywords:
Megathrust-earthquakes; Analog modelling; Machine learning; seismic and geodetic transients

German host university:
Freie Universitat Berlin

Host during the mobility phase:
Università Roma Tre, Italy

Poster:

 

Field of research:
Theoretical nonlinear physics

Research interests:
Theory of complex systems, self-organization and pattern formation, bifurcation theory, computational methods, laser dynamics, soft matter physics

Planned research project:
"Modeling and Bifurcation Analysis of Spatio-Temporal Dynamics in Mode-locked Vertical Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser"

Keywords:
bifurcation analysis, delay differential equations, localized states, laser dynamics, mode-locked lasers

German host university:
University of Münster

Host during the mobility phase:
University of Balearic Islands, Spain

Website:

Field of research:
Insurance Mathematics

Research interests:
Actuarial Science, Pricing and Valuation, Risk Management in Finance and Insurance, (Actuarial) Data Science.

Planned research project:
"Retirement Products: Innovative Contract Design and Risk Management"
Demographic change and the current long-lasting low interest rate environment pose a severe threat to retirement systems around the world. In most developed countries, the question of how to still provide satisfactory retirement income for current and future generations will be one of the central challenges in the 21st century. Germany's life insurance and pension fund sector is especially struggling as contracts with high and long-term return guarantees remain in the company's balance sheets. The aim of this project is to better understand and manage the risks of insurance contract portfolios. We suggest on how to reduce the portfolio risk by appropriate hedging strategies and/or an innovative life and pension contract design.

Keywords:
retirement product design, risk management, risk diversification, portfolio management.

German host institutions:
University of Ulm

Host during the mobility phase:
Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium

Field of research:
Urban Geography, Urban Studies

Research interests:
housing, financialization, urban policy and planning, urban temporalities and infrastructures

Planned research project:
"Global markets / local shifts: Urban restructuring through municipal debt in Mexico City and Johannesburg"

Keywords:
Globalization of Finance, Mexico City, Municipal Debt, Standards

German host university:
HafenCity University Hamburg

Host during the mobility phase:
El Colegio de México

Field of research:
Solid state physics

Research interests:
I am interested in Quantum phase transitions - transformation of matter induced by non-temperature external parameters like pressure or magnetic field. For example, quantum phase transitions are responsible for the formation of such fascinating phenomena like high temperature superconductivity.

Planned research project:
"High-pressure Electron Spin Resonance study of Quantum Phase Transitions in Triangular Antiferromagnets"
In this project I am going to study the influence of the applied pressure on the phase diagram of frustrated magnets. The magnetic structure of these compounds is formed such, that small perturbation may drastically affect their properties. Very often, the exact mechanism responsible for the ground state formation remains unclear. Here, I am going to use unique experimental capabilities of my host university to explore the ground state modification of frustrated magnets under applied pressure and study the driving force of these modifications.

Keywords:
Magnetism, exchange interaction, quantum phase transition, frustration.

German host university:
Universität Augsburg

Host during the mobility phase:
Kobe University, Japan

Field of research:
Theoretical Physics

Research interests:
Quantum geometry/gravity, quantum/statistical field theory, cosmology

Planned research project:
"Tensor Model for 3d CDT and its FRG analysis"

Keywords:
Tensor Models, dynamical triangulations, functional renormalization group

German host university:
Universität Heidelberg, Institut für Physik

Host during the mobility phase:
Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA), Trieste, Italy

Field of research:
Computer Science, Medical Imaging

Research interests:
Uncertainty, Semi-Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Learning, Few-Shot Learning

Planned research project:
“Modelling Uncertainty in Deep Learning for Medical Applications”
Deep Learning has emerged as a leading technology for accomplishing many challenging tasks showing outstanding performance in a broad range of applications in computer vision and medical applications. Despite its success and merit in recent state-of-the-art methods, DL tools still lack in robustness hindering its adoption in medical applications. Modeling uncertainty, through Bayesian Inference and Monte-Carlo dropout, has been successfully introduced to computer vision for better understanding the underlying deep learning models. In this proposal, we investigate modeling the uncertainty for medical applications given the well-known challenges in medical image analysis, namely severe class-imbalance, few amounts of labeled data, domain shift, and noisy annotations.

Keywords:
Uncertainty, Deep Learning, Medical Applications.

German host institutions:
Technische Universität München

Hosts during the mobility phase:
ETH Zürich, Switzerland
Imperial College London, UK

Field of research:
Mechanical Engineering

Research interests:
Dynamical systems, data-driven modeling, unsteady aerodynamics, mixing enhancement

Planned research project:
"Data-driven feedback control of a turbulent flow around a D-shaped body for drag reduction"
Turbulent flows over bluff bodies are inherent to numerous engineering applications where aerodynamic forces and mixing play an important role, spanning industries such as ground and marine transportation, aeronautic, energy, chemical and pharmaceutical. I am investigating the turbulent flow over a generic bluff body (a D-shaped body) to elucidate the physical mechanisms that allow drag reduction via direct wake manipulation using unsteady Coanda blowing. Experimental data is being used to build an interpretable model that captures the dominating spatio-temporal features of the flow and at the same time is simple enough to allow online control. Subsequently, a model-based feedback controller will be developed using only body-mounted sensors and actuators and will be implemented in wind tunnel experiments. Besides the direct step toward active drag reduction of cars, trucks, trains and ships, the advances in closed-loop turbulence control will have profound implications as an eventual enabler of lift increase of airplanes and wind turbines, mixing enhancement in heat exchangers, optimization of chemical processes, and cleaner combustion.

Keywords:
Data-driven dynamics, feedback control, bluff body flow, turbulence.

German host institutions:
Technische Universität Braunschweig

Hosts during the mobility phase:
University of Washington, USA