The Young International Academics postdoctoral programme (YIA) is a career development program proposed by the University of Luxembourg (Uni.lu) to nurture early-career postdoctoral applicants to gain momentum in interdisciplinary/intersectoral research. YIA applicants are international talents willing to propose and realize their own interdisciplinary research projects through a bottoms-up approach. YIA will welcome, in two calls, a total of 10 postdoctoral fellows with 36-month contracts over 5 years. YIA is open to all disciplines and sectors, involving Uni.lu in the drive towards an increased interdisciplinarity and intersectorality, which are strategic for Uni.lu, for the country and for Europe. A unique aspect of YIA is its integration into Uni.lu’s Institute for Advanced Studies-Luxembourg (IAS) created in 2019 to promote interdisciplinarity and outreach towards the society. This integration provides the YIA fellows with (1) a supervision for interdisciplinary and intersectoral research with more than 350 potential (co)-supervisors, and with about 350 potential public-private partners, (2) peer and cross-generational interactions/mentoring through the IAS fellows, invited distinguished senior scientists, early career researchers, and a mandatory academic or industrial secondment, and (3) a truly international flavour in an environment that cherishes diversity and excellence. YIA fellows recruited at Uni.lu are offered competitive contracts with mobility fellowships and access to excellent research infrastructures. A professor of Uni.lu provides supervision for the primary discipline of the applicant’s project and a co-supervisor covers the complementary discipline/sector. The YIA fellows are offered an “à la carte” training including mandatory courses, to suits the fellow’s career aspirations, increase the fellow’s interdisciplinarity and employability. The YIA programme will support a rapid ramp into a long-term Uni.lu funding of postdoctoral IAS fellows.

The CRITICL (Critical Race and Intersectional Theory In (Comparative) Criminal Law) Project proposes to undertake an interdisciplinary European study of hidden biases and veiled discrimination in criminal justice, through the lens of critical race theory and intersectionality. Criminal law, like all legal disciplines, has long assumed a “universality” of function: that the law itself is neutral, capable of equal and indiscriminate application. Lady Justice, blindfolded and impartial, is figurative example, while the work of the European Union assumes neutrality as a key factor to promote integration. Yet, as Critical Race and Intersectional Theories (“CRIT”) show, the law itself may entrench and reinforce structures of subordination, inferiority and discrimination against particular (especially, minority and vulnerable) groups. Likewise, while modern legal systems may recognise different grounds for discrimination, such as race, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, disability and neurodiversity, these are based on the social and historical processes that have shaped the constitutional traditions of each country. To date, however, neither CRIT nor discrimination within the criminal law have received much attention in either European or comparative legal scholarship. Through an analysis of procedural rights, CRITICL intends to fill this lacuna, both in the context of criminal law, and by adapting CRIT to the European (EU) (procedural right) context, through proffering European and national policy recommendations and guidelines by which the law’s current procedural rights inequalities can be eliminated.

Cognitive impairment and dementia have dramatic individual and social consequences, and create high economic costs for societies. In order to delay cognitive aging of future generations as long as possible, we need evidence about which contextual factors are most supportive for individuals to reach highest cognitive levels relative to their potential. At the same time, for current older generations, we need scalable methods to exactly identify individuals at risk of cognitive impairment. The project intends to apply recent methodological and statistical advancements to reach two objectives. Firstly, contextual influences on cognitive aging will be comparatively assessed, with a focus on inequalities related to educational opportunities and gender inequalities. This will be done using longitudinal, population-representative, harmonized cross-national aging surveys, merged with contextual information. Secondly, the project will quantify the ability of singular and clustered individual characteristics, such as indicators of cognitive reserve and behaviour change, to predict cognitive aging and diagnosis of dementia. Project methodology will rely partly on parametric ‘traditional’ multilevel- or fixed-effects modelling, partly on non-parametric statistical learning approaches, to address objectives both hypothesis- and data-driven. Applying statistical learning techniques in the field of cognitive reserve will open new research avenues for efficient handling of large amounts of data, among which most prominently the accurate prediction of health and disease outcomes. Quantifying the role of contextual inequalities related to education and gender will guide policymaking in and beyond the project. Assessing risk profiles of individuals in relation to cognitive aging will support efficient and scalable risk screening of individuals. Identifying the value of behaviour change to delay cognitive impairment will guide treatment plans for individuals affected by dementia.

Product counterfeiting, sometimes related to the theft of the original, has emerged as a significant economic issue, with the market value of pirated products equalling or exceeding the gross domestic product of some European countries. A 2016 report from OECD in cooperation with the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) found that in 2013 counterfeit products sold were worth €375 billion, totalling 2.5% of global trade. Counterfeit products range from high-end consumer luxury goods, to business-to-business products such as machines, chemicals, raw materials or spare parts, and to common consumer products such as toys, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and food. Some counterfeit products, in particular in the latter category but also, e.g., spare parts, are of low quality, thus creating additional health and safety threats. Valuable raw materials can be stolen at the site of production or in transit, sometimes being replaced by a copy that can be difficult to detect as such by the receiver, sometimes reappearing on the market with no means to detect them as stolen. VALIDATE aims to investigate the commercial feasibility of Cholesteric Spherical Reflectors (CSRs) coatings as high-security identification tags, within a work plan that aims to take our innovation from a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 4 to 6/7. This will serve as a key stepping stone towards full commercial exploitation of our CSRs as a game-changing material for authentication. The value proposition of VALIDATE is a physical identifier tag that is effectively unclonable as a result of the manufacturing process, naturally tamper-evident and hard to simulate due to the complexity of the generated patterns. VALIDATE’s end goal is to have a comprehensive description of the commercial feasibility of our technology and, if positive, what commercialization route has the best risk/benefit ratio.

The quantum-mechanical theory of molecular interactions is firmly established, however its applicability to large molecular complexes is hindered by the rather high computational cost of quantum calculations required to achieve high accuracy. We propose a paradigm shift in the modeling and conceptual understanding of electrostatic and electrodynamic molecular interactions in many-particle systems from the perspective of (quantum) field theory. This development is critical to accurately and efficiently model increasingly intricate and functional molecular ensembles with millions of atoms subject to external excitations (static, thermal, and optical fields; variation in the number of particles; and/or arbitrary macroscopic boundary conditions). This molecular size covers a wide range of functional biological systems, including solvated protein/protein and enzyme/DNA complexes. The theoretical developments in this project will concentrate on two main fronts: (WP1) fundamental quantum electrodynamics (QED) theory of molecular interactions based on many-body oscillator Hamiltonians, (WP2) second-quantized field theory (FIT) approach to molecular Hamiltonians for modeling large-scale systems with 10^4-10^6 atoms. The applicability of these challenging developments to realistic molecules will be ensured by: (WP3) implementation of non-local machine learning force fields based on second-quantized matrix Hamiltonians for efficient molecular dynamics simulations of molecular ensembles, (WP4) implementation of QED/FIT methods in an open-source package FITMOL for increasing the accuracy, improving the efficiency, and enhancing the insight that one obtains from quantum-mechanical calculations of large molecules. It is my vision that revealing fundamental mechanisms of functional (bio)molecules with millions of atoms requires a radically new field-theory approach to molecular interactions. Achieving this goal will be the main breakthrough of the FITMOL project.