Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees worldwide. According to the Turkish Directorate General for Migration Management (TDGMM), 3.61 million Syrian refugees resided in Turkey as of August 2020. While studies examining the effect of refugees on natives’ outcomes have recently burgeoned both in the Turkish setting and elsewhere, we know very little about the Syrian refugees themselves— despite the massive size of this refugee influx. This is mostly due to the lack of representative datasets. A tremendous new opportunity comes up with the 2018 wave of Turkish Demographic and Health Survey (TDHS), which provides a representative sample of Syrian refugees based on a household screening procedure using the official registry records from the TDGMM. Using the representative and rich data provided by this dataset, the purpose of this project is to understand the key educational, labor market, demographic and health outcomes of Syrian refugees in Turkey. This project will significantly progress the research beyond the current state-of-art first by conducting a rigorous econometric analysis of key outcomes of the biggest refugee group in the world using a representative dataset for the first time, and second by uncovering the channels underlying the observed patterns in these outcomes. Particularly, this project will address four main topics: (i) schooling, (ii) employment and living conditions, (iii) marriage and fertility, (iv) infant and child health.

Neurotech Research and Innovation (NeurotechRI) brings together eight research-intensive universities in Europe to transform cooperation in research and innovation in the European University for Brain and Technology (NeurotechEU). We propose an actionable and sustainable plan to develop a pan European, inter-institutional and inter-sectoral strategy to help Europe realize its full potential in the global knowledge economy. Pushing the boundaries of fundamental research and applied science will mobilize innovation ecosystems, including the NeurotechEU ecosystem we are forming while actively engaging citizens to transform how we innovate, educate and impact the society at large. Our primary objectives for the next three years are: 1. Formation and implementation of a scalable and modular governance organization for multi-institutional, international and intersectoral research collaboration and cooperative innovation. 2. Creation of an integrated, long-term and sustainable RI strategy for systemic impact. 3. Formulating an action plan for sharing resources to foster scientific cooperation and innovation cooperation regardless of borders. 4. Development of joint structures with external stakeholders in order to foster (RI) collaboration with other European Universities Alliances and universities in Europe. 5. Fostering academia business cooperation to facilitate professionalization among researchers and enhance innovation capacity. 6. Supporting a balanced circulation of knowledge and researchers to counteract the brain drain. 7. Fostering diversity, gender equality and inclusiveness in research and innovation for the equitable workforce and sustainable growth. 8. Mainstreaming Open practices in education, research and innovation. 9. Engagement of citizen, civil society and public authorities in research and innovation. 10. Promotion of fair and transparent practices to help the Alliance to achieve all of its goals.

Personalized health is a European priority and one of the strategic research areas for Horizon 2020. This project advances the state-of-the-art of personal health technologies for affective disorders, estimated to be the highest ranking cause of disease by 2020. It marks a significant shift from the current wearable technologies capturing emotional responses whose understanding usually requires physicians’ input, to low-cost self-help technologies for visualizing, exploring and regulating emotions. AFFECTIVA integrates the latest Human-Computer Interaction and Biomedical Engineering findings in designing and developing personal health systems for mental health, with the most influential outcomes and models of emotion regulation from Clinical Psychology. The overall aim is to support self-understanding and successful adoption of adaptive emotion regulation strategies in daily life. AFFECTIVA will contribute towards four significant outcomes: (1) wearable systems for capturing emotion regulation, (2) applications for understanding emotions and their regulatory processes, (3) interactive tools for training adaptive emotion regulation strategies, and (4) theoretical contributions to emotion regulation research in real life. AFFECTIVA builds on exceptional European and North American expertise from both academic and private sector to provide personalized health research with a timely and much needed momentum to address the pressing social challenge of emotional wellbeing and health.