Results 2022-1 INTER Mobility Call

Microbial communities are ubiquitous and play key roles in every natural or industrial ecosystem as well as in the development and maintenance of health in humans, animals and plants. Because many microbes cannot be isolated in pure culture for laboratory study or do not behave in the same way as when living in microbial communities, several techniques have been developed to study those microorganisms directly in their environment. Notably, metagenomics can assess the entire gene content of a community while metaproteomics allows studying all the proteins expressed by the microorganisms. As proteins are the molecules actually performing almost all biologically relevant functions/tasks in a microbial community, their analysis through metaproteomics has become essential for microbiome studies.

The ability to compare the expression of microbial functions between different conditions such as the human gut microbiome in a healthy and disease state is extremely important in biology in order to fully resolve and understand what exactly changes between conditions and generate proper clinical interpretations. Different quantification and statistical methods are available for microbiome analysis. However, metaproteomics comes with additional challenges and its quantitative analysis still suffers from many issues.

The aim of this INTER Mobility application is to bring together the expertise in absolute quantification and bioinformatic analyses of the applicant and the expertise in mass-spectrometry and production of artificial microbial communities for method development of the host institution to generate high-quality datasets in order to assess and develop accurate quantitative methods for metaproteomics.

By developing samples of known compositions, abundances and variations, we will know exactly what we are supposed to observe. Using that information, we will be able to test multiple quantification and analysis methods and find out which one most accurately capture protein abundance and variations between samples. Additionally, we will also be able to assess alternative recently developed approaches.

Ultimately, we aim at providing the scientific community with a list of quantification and statistical methods that will allow them to fully characterize the functions of their biological samples and accurately compare them between different, biologically relevant conditions.

My sabbatical leave from University of Luxembourg during the academic year 2022/23 is scheduled at three leading research centres for experimental finance: The Brain, Mind and Markets Centre at the University of Melbourne, Department of Banking and Finance at the University of Innsbruck, and the Laboratory for Experimental Economics at the University of Castellon.

For the research stay at Melbourne, I plan to advance two projects with the following working titles: 1- Algorithmic Trading in a Dark Pool Asset Market with Human Subjects 2- On the Randomness of Supply in Multi-Unit Auctions. For my research stay at Innsbruck, the following project is planned: 3- Expectations and Trading Dynamics in Asset Markets. Finally, for my research stay at Castellon, another one project is planned: 4- Learning Algorithms in Complex Hybrid Markets.

As research method we apply experimental design and plan to conduct the experimental sessions at the host universities. This way, the data are collected which will be analysed and described in the proposed research papers

The mobility sector is facing an unprecedented revolution, with new services being introduced thanks to new enabling technologies (connected and automated mobility, electrical vehicles) and emerging trends (sharing culture, environmental concerns). The interaction of so many new disruptive elements makes the planning of our future transportation systems a challenge. In countries like Luxembourg and Australia the challenge is also accompanied with comparable strong economic and demographic growth. This project aims to analyse in detail the structure and the dynamics of the future multimodal transport and mobility services via the use of a mobility paradigm called Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) that centralizes all different services accessible into a single platform tested in both Luxembourg and in Australia.

The study is designed to gain insight into the processes involved in spelling and grammar and learners’ reflections on both. We are focusing on German, the first language of literacy in Luxembourg. The students we are focusing on are bi-/multilinguals with Portuguese as their first language (L1), the major heritage language group in Luxembourg. In Luxembourg, many children with Portuguese as their L1 grow up in families with low socioeconomic status (SES), which makes it difficult to determine whether language and spelling difficulties are due to the children’s language background or their SES. Additionally, all children in Luxembourg are multilingual. Portuguese L1 children indeed encounter not only German as their school language but at least Luxembourgish and French as well from early childhood on.Due to the complex language situation in Luxembourg, the submitted study takes a first look into another context where Portuguese L1 children also acquire German as their school language: the German school in Porto, Portugal, Colégio Alemao. This setting allows insights to be gained into what children are capable of when they grow up in contexts with a rather high SES and acquire the German language and literacy in excellent schools.

Children and adolescents in the alternative care system represent an extremely vulnerable population in the pandemic calamity situation because of the complex combination of high rates of adverse childhood experiences, pre-existing mental health issues, and the stress of living through a pandemic in an out-of-home context. The evidence base on this highly vulnerable population is very limited, which is restricting policy and practice efforts to plan and provide services that support effective recovery. There is a global lack of reliable, complete and disaggregated data on children in alternative care and the population of children living in out-of-home care structures remains under-researched. Although the need for cross-country comparisons is recognized, such studies are extremely scarce. Consequently, there is an urgent need to address this challenge area and fill this knowledge gap. This project will focus on the wellbeing and mental health of highly vulnerable children residing in out-of-home care settings in Luxembourg and in Scotland. A central aim is to improve understanding of the secondary impacts of the pandemic on child wellbeing by taking a cross-country perspective and to explore what influences outcomes and wellbeing of children in care during and beyond COVID-19. The long-term goal is to improve understanding of what constitutes high quality care and sustainable support in the alternative care system and how to effectively decrease the number of children in residential care beyond COVID-19.The presented project will build up urgently needed national expertise in the field of child wellbeing and protection and strengthen research quality by providing opportunity to collaborate and network between the Luxembourg research group and renowned experts from social work and social policy in the UK. The Scottish approach of focusing on the child and putting stable and caring relationships at the centre of the child care system has been recognised as a good exemplar of a child centred, human rights-based practice. By investigating the ways in which Scotland effectively decreased the number of children in residential care through the development of family-support services and the strengthening of other alternative care options, the outcomes of this project will have important implications for the evidence base that informs not only future research but also policymakers and social care professionals in Luxembourg. Ensuring better outcomes for children and young people in out-of-home care is a major and urgent challenge facing Luxembourg during and beyond COVID-19. While focused on Luxembourg and Scotland, the knowledge generated from this project will be internationally relevant and make an invaluable contribution to the global challenge of identifying effective support for children in out-of-home care.