Gravity's unique geometric structure is manifest in strong field regions, especially around black holes. The new-born era of gravitational-wave astronomy and of very long baseline interferometry is now providing data from such regions, carrying information about the gravitational interaction in highly dynamical setups. The access to this new and uncharted territory may hold the key to outstanding puzzles, such as the nature of dark matter, or the fate of singularities or horizons within a quantum field theory context. The breakthroughs at the observational and experimental level make strong gravity physics one of this century's most active and exciting fields of research. I propose to explore the discovery potential of black holes, a foundational project which will transform the field into data-driven with solid theoretical foundations. This coordinated program will study and test the strong-field regime of gravity and the matter content of our universe. The project will explore comprehensively the potential of black holes and compact binaries to perform spectroscopy and to strengthen the black hole paradigm. I will ascertain the evidence for black holes, providing new and robust tools to quantify their existence with electromagnetic and gravitational-wave observations. Finally, I will undertake a systematic study of environmental effects, including the ability for new observations to study the host galaxy, and will constrain the existence of new fundamental ultralight fields in our universe to unprecedented levels. The project aims to implement pipelines for its realization in planned and ongoing missions. The proposed program will significantly advance our knowledge of Einstein's field equations and their role in foundational questions, as well as the interplay with high energy, astro and particle physics. This is a multidisciplinary program with an impact on our understanding of gravity at all scales.

Astrophysical shocks are among the most powerful particle accelerators in the Universe. Generated by violent interactions of supersonic, and often relativistic, plasma flows with the ambient medium, shock waves involve a complex and highly nonlinear interplay between the dynamics of flows, magnetic fields, and accelerated particles through mechanisms not yet fully understood. “What is the origin of cosmic rays?”, “What controls particle injection and the acceleration efficiency in collisionless shocks?”, “How is the physics of relativistic shocks modified by electron-positron pair production?”, “Can these mechanisms be studied in the laboratory?” These are long-standing scientific questions, closely tied to extreme plasma physics processes, and where the interplay between micro-instabilities and the global dynamics is critical. Advances in high-power lasers and particle beams are just now opening unique opportunities to probe the microphysics of shocks and particle acceleration in controlled laboratory experiments for the first time. Together with the fast-paced developments in fully-kinetic plasma simulations, computational power, and astronomical observations, the time is ripe to deploy a research program focused on particle acceleration in shocks that can transform our ability to address these questions. In the ERC grant XPACE, we aim to use first-principles massively parallel simulations and laboratory experiments to study the microphysics of non-relativistic and relativistic shocks, and to use data-driven techniques to develop multi-scale models that bridge the gap between the microphysics and the global dynamics. This project will build comprehensive models of the plasma processes that shape magnetic field amplification, particle acceleration, and radiation emission in shocks, with the goal of solving central questions in extreme plasma phenomena, opening new avenues between theory, computation, laboratory experiments, and astrophysical observations.

Cardiovascular diseases are the most common cause of death in EU member countries1. To reduce their burden and improve quality of life, it is critical for healthcare procedures to become more personalized. This requires the integration of information from multiple types of medical data (clinical, imaging, functional, molecular, genomic) and from multiple centers. However, integrating multimodal data raises problems regarding the dimensions and characteristics of the various modalities, as well as situations where one or more of the modalities can be unavailable across sites. This proposal aims to overcome the challenges brought by combining multiple modalities in missing settings, through the development of robust single modality encoding strategies as well as a novel universal multimodality integrator that uses transformers to handle the missing information. Towards these goals we propose to integrate the NextGen consortium, who is already working towards the integration of multiple modalities, bringing new capacity to the NextGen consortium and contributing to improving its tools.

The AntiMatter-OTech project (EIC grant) aims to demonstrate the potential performance of a completely new strategy for non-intrusive nuclear reactor monitoring, exploiting the intrinsic reactors fission antineutrino emanation. This enables a new insight into nuclear facilities with even possible integration into existing installations. Since their discovery using reactors in the 50s, antineutrino detection capabilities have been limited by their signal-to-background ratio despite significant improvement. A groundbreaking potential opens with LiquidOs unique ability to tag the antimatter nature of the antineutrino upon detection. In brief, any strategy capable of boosting the detected light output will directly impact the ultimate performance of its subatomic topological imaging as well as the so far available calorimetry information. After long optimisation with prototypes, the only possible improvements ahead are the optical fibres light collection and todays scintillators light yield per energy deposited. Despite decades of effort, the fundamental light losses remain uncontrolled, historically limiting detection in the MeV range worldwide. The SHINE proposal aims to address this challenge by the definition of a new photonics detection framework to be integrated into the AntiMatter-OTech LiquidO-based detector for a possible technological breakthrough by improving both optical fibres, in tight cooperation with Kuraray (Japan) and a new wave of scintillation technology. This is expected to boost all the original goals with no project re-scoping whatsoever. The project relies on the latest advances in photo-chemistry technology never employed in neutrino detection that may revolutionise the worldwide MeV detection and instrumentation well beyond the AntiMatter-OTech scope, including major opportunities for European industry. SHINE leads to the strengthening of the original consortium by recognised renowned expertise by specialised photo-chemical scientists.

Rapid object identification is crucial for survival of all organisms, but poses daunting challenges if many stimuli compete for attention, and multiple sensory and motor systems are involved in the processing, programming and generating of an eye-head gaze-orienting response to a selected goal. How do normal and sensory-impaired brains decide which signals to integrate (“goal”), or suppress (“distracter”)? Audiovisual (AV) integration only helps for spatially and temporally aligned stimuli. However, sensory inputs differ markedly in their reliability, reference frames, and processing delays, yielding considerable spatial-temporal uncertainty to the brain. Vision and audition utilize coordinates that misalign whenever eyes and head move. Meanwhile, their sensory acuities vary across space and time in essentially different ways. As a result, assessing AV alignment poses major computational problems, which so far have only been studied for the simplest stimulus-response conditions. My groundbreaking approaches will tackle these problems on different levels, by applying dynamic eye-head coordination paradigms in complex environments, while systematically manipulating visual-vestibular-auditory context and uncertainty. I parametrically vary AV goal/distracter statistics, stimulus motion, and active vs. passive-evoked body movements. We perform advanced psychophysics to healthy subjects, and to patients with well-defined sensory disorders. We probe sensorimotor strategies of normal and impaired systems, by quantifying their acquisition of priors about the (changing) environment, and use of feedback about active or passive-induced self-motion of eyes and head. I challenge current eye-head control models by incorporating top-down adaptive processes and eye-head motor feedback in realistic cortical-midbrain networks. Our modeling will be critically tested on an autonomously learning humanoid robot, equipped with binocular foveal vision and human-like audition.