Financial literacy is necessary to spend our money wisely and understand how financial instruments work. In an increasingly complex financial landscape, today only half of the EU adult population has an adequate understanding of basic financial concepts. EduMoney tackles this issue from a historical perspective to offer the first systematic, comprehensive, and digital analysis of the skills and knowledge underpinning financial literacy during another period of increasing financial complexity: the medieval ‘Commercial Revolution’. The focus is on money ‘itself’, and how this was deployed and represented in Tuscan abacus manuals and merchants’ notebooks, the pedagogical tools of the time. The project analyses the period between 1202, when Fibonacci completed his Liber Abaci, and 1478, when the first printed abacus manual known as Aritmetica di Treviso was published. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines methods from economic history, medieval literature, and the history of economic thought, with the support of the latest digital platforms for text analysis, I will digitise, transcribe, and translate a selected corpus of abacus manuals and merchants’ notebooks. This will allow a comparative and digital study of these sources to identify (cross-)references to money that will be grouped into ‘typological families’. The resulting categorisation will form the basis for an in-depth analysis leading to an innovative treatment of money as a heuristic and pedagogical instrument, and to a more holistic understanding of how people lived, learnt, and conceptualised their lives as economic actors. The enhancement of financial literacy among different age groups through a series of didactic and outreach activities will empower people by endowing them with the right tools to make informed decisions to improve their economic wellbeing, thus tackling social and gender inequalities for the development of a more inclusive Europe.

Innovative heat transport devices are needed to break-though the increasing need for smaller, faster and lighter microelectronic apparatus. A Pulsating Heat Pipe (PHP) is a promising two-phase passive loop device that has many advantages such as high heat transfer capacity, construction simplicity, lightweight, and low-cost. However, the practical use of PHP has been limited due to insufficiency of design tools, i.e. predictive models for hydrodynamic and heat transfer phenomena. The aim of this proposal is to establish a universal model to predict operating limit of PHP and provide an optimal design solution that maximize PHP heat transport capability. An innovative approach using advanced measurements with high-resolution and high-speed infrared cameras and Inverse Heat Conduction Problem (IHCP) techniques will be taken to reveal the local thermal phenomena of the liquid-vapor interaction and obtain important physical parameters to implement the model. Both an experimental and a modelling approach will be used to reach the project goal. The project will bring together two complementary set of skills, with the researcher’s expertise in PHPs and the supervisor’s expertise in thermal tomography. In addition, a secondment in a leading company of two-phase thermal devices is foreseen, to increase the researcher’s competence in manufacturing and testing. The fellowship will support the researcher’s professional development to be a leader in the thermal fluid dynamics field. The impact of the action will be maximized with scientific publications as well as a broad range of outreach activities such as video pills and public talks to non-technical audiences, with a special target to young females to booster research careers in technology and engineering. Results of this MSCA have the potential to strengthen the European research and industrial leadership, promoting the use of PHP in several industrial applications, including aerospace, automotive and energy sectors.

The increased burden of cardiometabolic diseases is a major societal challenge worldwide. Plant-based diets, rich in bioactive compounds such as (poly)phenols, may promote cardiometabolic health. However, the preventive effects of these bioactives depend on the individual capacity to produce, and respond to, (poly)phenol metabolites. This heterogeneity in the individual response to the consumption of (poly)phenols is the main hindrance to exploit their potential for the prevention of cardiometabolic diseases through effective dietary strategies. I aim to implement integrative tools for the prediction, at individual level, of the cardiometabolic response to the consumption of dietary (poly)phenols, taking into account inter-individual differences in both metabolism and health effects of these plant food bioactives. My vision is understanding the determinants leading to individual variability in the production of phenolic metabolites and driving cardiometabolic responsiveness to (poly)phenol consumption. I will be identifying comprehensive metabolic phenotypes (metabotypes) for main dietary (poly)phenols and the factors associated with their formation. Then, I will demonstrate the association between phenolic metabotypes and cardiometabolic health. Last, I will develop an integrative, high-throughput platform to identify phenolic metabotypes and to predict cardiometabolic responses to the consumption of dietary (poly)phenols considering individual’s makeup. PREDICT-CARE will develop new concepts, new methodologies and a new analytical platform. It relies on the integration of factors determining inter-individual variability, the deployment of translatable nutrition interventions, and the application of predictive modelling. PREDICT-CARE will lead to long-lasting breakthroughs and will build a new scenario in preventive, evidence-based, personalised nutrition strategies with these major dietary plant bioactives.

The project aims to investigate the tradition of the Oxford Calculators and the influence their works had on early-modern logic and natural philosophy. The Calculators were a group of scholars active in 1325-1350, connected to the tradition of sophismata. An element of novelty in their works is that logical techniques were usually applied to the discussion of mathematical and physical issues. Moreover, their sophismata often involved the use of thought experiments, aimed at challenging and revising parts of the Aristotelian physics, in which many sorts of intricate non-naturalistic cases and impossible scenarios were posited as imaginable. The project firstly aims at reviewing our knowledge of the Calculators’ tradition, along with their academic and cultural context. This will be done mainly through a historical methodology, combining paleographical techniques and archival research. The second objective is to assess whether the Calculators developed a consistent theory of modalities, and how this would be connected to other theories available in the 13th and 14th century. This will require cataloguing and analysing the use of imaginable cases, and individuating the various senses of possibility that are at play in them. A third aim is to evaluate the impact that the Calculators’ works had on early-modern philosophy, and to determine to what extent the Calculators’ achievements in the areas of mathematics and physics (together with their thought-experiment methodology) contributed to the shift from medieval scientific paradigms to a modern view of science. The project combines many disciplines into investigating authors that have played an important - albeit overlooked - role in the history of philosophy and science. Besides its historical interest, the project is related to many significant philosophical issues, such as the ones concerning the nature and varieties of modalities, or the role that thought experiments play in philosophical and scientific methodology.

Carbonylative C-H activations can lead to an unprecedented degree of molecular sophistication by combining the atom-economical insertion of CO with the green activation of unreactive C-H bonds. In striking contrast to ortho C-H acylation of arenes and heteroarenes (directing-group strategy) and para C-H ones (Friedel-Crafts chemistry), meta C-H acylations are almost completely unexplored. This proposal aims at the development of the first example of meta C-H acylation via mild carbonylation of arenes. Pivoting on this breakthrough, it will be possible to accomplish synthetic methods 1) for the efficient synthesis of hardly accessible organic compounds, 2) for the activation and carbonylation of meta C(sp2)-H bonds, 3) by employing transient directing group and 4) demonstrating the application of these protocols under continuous flow conditions.