The outdoor environment has a significant impact on our health and wellbeing. The European Green Deal has introduced the ambitious commitment to a ‘Zero-Pollution Action Plan for air, water, and soil’ to protect humans and the environment. Evidence-based policy making on environmental stressors is however hampered by the methodological challenges to quantify their socio-economic costs. The overall objective of BEST-COST is to improve methodologies for the socio-economic cost assessment of environmental stressors to i) enhance regular usage of economic and health modelling in policy impact assessments and policy evaluation; and ii) promote harmonised and consensus metrics for integrative socio-economic assessments of environmental stressors in Europe. BEST-COST will develop an improved and consensual burden of disease (BOD) framework for estimating the health impact of environmental stressors, with a focus on air pollution and noise and their interactions; an improved and consensual methodology for monetization of BOD estimates of environmental stressors; and a coherent methodological framework for assessing social inequalities in the socio-economic cost of environmental stressors. The methods will be co-developed with key stakeholders, made available as open access tools, and trialled in different EU countries. To ensure sustainability, transferability of the knowledge and methods developed by BEST-COST to other countries and stressors will be established. BEST-COST is conducted by a strong and unique consortium, gathering world-class expertise on environmental BOD assessment. The BEST-COST consortium consists of 17 organisations from 10 EU countries and the USA, and will be supported by an Advisory Board including representatives from JRC, EEA, and WHO. The consortium bridges the expertise from the Global Burden of Disease study, via the inclusion of IHME and key GBD collaborators, with that of national BOD studies, and will translate this expertise to EU agencies

Blue-Action will provide fundamental and empirically-grounded, executable science that quantifies and explains the role of a changing Arctic in increasing predictive capability of weather and climate of the Northern Hemisphere.To achieve this Blue-Action will take a transdisciplinary approach, bridging scientific understanding within Arctic climate, weather and risk management research, with key stakeholder knowledge of the impacts of climatic weather extremes and hazardous events; leading to the co-design of better services.This bridge will build on innovative statistical and dynamical approaches to predict weather and climate extremes. In dialogue with users, Blue-Arctic will take stock in existing knowledge about cross-sectoral impacts and vulnerabilities with respect to the occurrence of these events when associated to weather and climate predictions. Modeling and prediction capabilities will be enhanced by targeting firstly, lower latitude oceanic and atmospheric drivers of regional Arctic changes and secondly, Arctic impacts on Northern Hemisphere climate and weather extremes. Coordinated multi-model experiments will be key to test new higher resolution model configurations, innovative methods to reduce forecast error, and advanced methods to improve uptake of new Earth observations assets are planned. Blue-Action thereby demonstrates how such an uptake may assist in creating better optimized observation system for various modelling applications. The improved robust and reliable forecasting can help meteorological and climate services to better deliver tailored predictions and advice, including sub-seasonal to seasonal time scales, will take Arctic climate prediction beyond seasons and to teleconnections over the Northern Hemisphere. Blue-Action will through its concerted efforts therefore contribute to the improvement of climate models to represent Arctic warming realistically and address its impact on regional and global atmospheric and oceanic circulation.

Emergent particles with nonabelian exchange statistics are a key element in the understanding of topological condensed matter system. However, the nonabelian nature has never been demonstrated experimentally, nor has the intimately connected nonlocality of quantum states been observed in any physical system. With this proposal, we outline a research program whose goal is to design and carry out experiments, with close theoretical coupling, that can – for the first time – verify or falsify the existence of these fascinating novel degrees of freedom and then, if observed, quantify the spatial and temporal limits for the nonabelian and nonlocal properties. The platform for the research is based on topological superconductivity in hybrid materials, a field in which the applicants have played a leading role. We put together a team of experimental and theoretical physicists in a strongly collaborative setup. The focus of the proposal is Majorana bound states, which exist at the boundaries of topological superconductors. Experiments have over the past five years shown observations consistent with their existence. All these experiments are based on local probes which cannot reveal the inner nature of their nonlocal and nonabelian properties. To address the fundamental aspects of nonlocality, we will design quantum devices that combine topological superconductors with known condensed matter quantum technologies, including quantum dots, two-dimensional electron gases, and fast measurement techniques. The nonabelian nature will be explored by design of multi-Majorana devices and of protocols that can reveal the nonabelian nature of braids in the space of topologically-protected groundstate manifolds. The gained knowledge will provide a breakthrough in the fundamentals of emergent degrees of freedom and quantum states encoded in topological macroscopic systems. Their possibly profound character might have future applications in quantum technologies.

For over 50 years, the tools for diagnosing, preventing, and treating syphilis have seen minimal progress, partly due to limitations in bacterial cultivation. Existing tools were primarily drawn from research on early-stage syphilis and evidence extrapolated to severe forms of the infection, leaving important unmet needs like the lack of predictive markers for neurosyphilis and mother-to-child-transmission, limited evidence on treatments for these conditions, and challenges in monitoring treatment failure. This project aims to shift the paradigm by demonstrating that the diverse manifestations of syphilis are not merely random infections in different bodily compartments but are intricately linked to unique bacterial traits and host responses that necessitate specific tools. Our goal is to discover manifestation-specific biomarkers, repurpose antibiotics for tailored treatments, and pioneering TPA isolation methods for treatment monitoring. Taking advantage of a unique network of collaborators in areas with a high incidence of severe syphilis, I will examine how severe clinical manifestations relate to genomic variations in TPA strains and with host humoral responses. A groundbreaking pan-proteomic array will allow identifying markers linked to clinical phenotypes and it will open avenues for discovery of new antigens as vaccine candidates. Furthermore, I will exploit the established expertise of my team on drug repurposing and conducting randomized clinical trials to evaluate the efficacy of alternative antibiotics to cure patients with neurosyphilis and syphilis in pregnancy. Finally, I aim to pioneer methods for the first-time isolation of TPA from patient samples and conduct antimicrobial resistance testing in treatment failures. The resulting tools will be a tremendous resource for preventing adverse outcomes like neurological sequelae, stillbirth, congenital syphilis and treatment failure, especially in low-middle-income countries where most complications occur