The project aims to advance theoretical and practical knowledge in psycholinguistics and developmental neuroscience, focusing on symptoms of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Specifically, I will investigate underlying cognitive factors of syntactic difficulties manifested by children with DLD. I will test the project's hypotheses regarding the inflexibility of statistical learning of syntactic structures in DLD. To this end, I will examine the production and comprehension of relative clauses (RCs) in Italian- and Polish-speaking children with DLD. The RC is a subordinate clause that exhibits different syntactic structures in Italian and Polish. Therefore, the cross-linguistic study will provide a quantitative analysis of local linguistic elements that signify thematic role assignments in RCs and distinguish between Italian (IT) and Polish (PL). Additionally, I will analyze the global RC sentence structure, including length, complexity, and the distance related to syntactic movement. This linguistic analysis will further allow testing of the hypothesis that basic cognitive components and their interactions contribute to the errors typical for children with DLD. Specifically, based on linguistic analysis, I will test neuropsychological hypotheses that the following cognitive elements contribute to DLD deficits: i) executive control, triggered by the probabilistic properties of word/morpheme flow within the sentence; ii) performance in encoding rare linguistic elements, as reflected in inflectional suffixes; iii) working memory load, related to sentence length and syntactic movement. The achievement of the project's aims will impact the international research community by providing new insights into the cognitive aspects of language skills, particularly the development of specific grammatical-syntactic constructions. Finally, the results of the project will be relevant to clinicians in designing targeted, more effective therapeutic programs for children with DLD.

The main objective of NEUROSOME is to develop an integrative biology-based framework starting from human biomonitoring data to unravel causal associations among the genetic predisposition, cumulative exposure to multiple environmental chemicals and neurological disorders. The project brings together beyond- the-state-of-the-art advances in human biomonitoring and systems biology, exposure monitoring and toxicological testing technologies and advanced tools for computational analyses of the exposure-to-health effect continuum following an exposome paradigm. The NEUROSOME methodology will be applied in population studies across different exposure settings to neurotoxicants (metals and persistent organics) in Europe. This will improve scientific knowledge on cause and-effect relations between environmental stressors and neurodevelopmental disorders taking into account exposure and health effect modification due to intrinsic (e.g. genetic susceptibility) and extrinsic (e.g. diet and socioeconomic status) factors. New standards for human biomonitoring data interpretation in conjunction with environmental and exposure information will be developed for ready use in chemical mixture risk assessment. The training goal is to produce a new generation of exposome researchers, trained in academia, applied research and industry, with transdisciplinary skills (environmental end exposure modelling, human biomonitoring, -omics technologies, high dimensional bioinformatics and environmental epidemiology,) and understanding of fundamental science and its direct application to environmental health challenges. To this aim NEUROSOME will focus on the provision of trans-disciplinary research training to young researchers through a combination of network-wide training programs and individual personalised training-through-research projects to deliver to the EU and the world a new cohort of researchers trained in cutting edge transdisciplinary environmental health sciences

ERIES responds to the call INFRA-2021-SERV-01-07: Research infrastructure services advancing frontier knowledge with the overall objective of providing transnational access to advanced research infrastructures in the fields of structural, seismic, wind and geotechnical engineering. This project, together with the research infrastructure team assembled, provides access to leading experimental facilities that permit users to advance frontier knowledge and conduct curiosity-driven research towards: the reduction of losses and disruption due to these hazards; the management of their associated risk; and the development of innovative solutions to address them that will contribute to a greener and more sustainable society. To this end, ERIES will offer transnational access to the best European experimental facilities in each field, with new and unique infrastructures available for the first time in this programme, along with the provision of a key laboratory in North America. It also foresees a key contribution from the European Commission?s Joint Research Centre, as anticipated by the call. It integrates the successful results and implementation of the past infrastructure projects, such as SERIES and SERA, and expands access capabilities to new communities and disciplines which were not yet focused on in past projects. Its anticipated outcome is to provide authoritative input for diverse stakeholders, from Civil Protection agencies to the European seismic building code; develop future standards for experimental techniques in earthquake, wind and geotechnical engineering; and provide a platform from which European researchers can develop innovative solutions and testbed applications of next-generation technologies. With 12 beneficiaries from 8 countries, ERIES builds an important element toward the reduction of losses, management of risk, and overall a greener and more sustainable engineering future in Europe.

This project will develop a decision-support system (DSS) for disaster risk management by considering multiple interacting natural hazards and cascading impacts using a novel resilient-informed and service-oriented approach that accounts for forecasted modifications in the hazard (e.g., climate change), vulnerability/resilience (e.g., aging structures and populations) and exposure (e.g., population decrease/increase). The primary deliverable from MEDiate will be a decision support framework in the form of service-orientated web tool and accompanying disaster risk management framework providing end users (local authorities, businesses etc) with the ability to build accurate scenarios to model the potential impact of their mitigation and adaptation risk management actions. The scenarios, which can be customised to reflect local conditions and needs (e.g., demographics, deprivation, natural resources etc), will be based on a combination of the historical record and future climate change projections to forecast the location and intensity of climate related disaster events and to predict their impacts, including cascading impacts, on the vulnerability of the local physical, economic and social systems. The scenarios will allow end users to evaluate the potential impact of different risk management strategies to reduce vulnerability and enhance community resilience. The project will consist of analysis of relevant data and co-development with testbed decision-makers of a DSS to enable more reliable resilience assessments, accounting for risk mitigation and adaptive capabilities, to be made, therefore reducing losses (human, financial, environmental etc) from future climate-related and geophysical disasters. The project will involve a multi-disciplinary team of geophysical and meteorological scientists, risk engineers, social scientists, information technologists and end-users, working together to ensure that the system is user-led and supported by appropriate technology.