The overall goal of MobileWorlds is to explore pathways to better integrate socio-cultural diversity into today's institutions, so they may better deal with contemporary challenges of sustainable mobility and societal inequalities. Such pathways are sought by engaging explicitly with third culture experiences to identify concrete diverse imaginaries and allowing these to feed into equally diverse solutions that can realistically be implemented. Third cultures are unique cultures that emerge from contact with different home and contextual cultures during the formative years of an individual. These third cultures are increasingly common in a globalising world, and may have important repercussions for imaginaries for sustainable and just mobility futures. As such, they provide promising sources for pathways that integrate socio-cultural diversity into today's institutions. Bergen, Norway and Porto, Portugal are known for cultural diversity and advancement in sustainable mobility. Combined, they provide both a Northern and a Southern European perspective and a particularly interesting context within which to research this subject. MobileWorlds delineates four key objectives: (1) To solidify and expand the concept of third cultures, (2) To develop methods and methodologies that encourage artistic engagement of all ages and socio-cultural groups in mobility planning, (3) To engage communities in mobility planning through arts-based events and activities, and (4) To support my future career development through arts-based research and engagement training and expanding academic and artistic networks and experience. The hands-on experience and training will help to accomplish my career goals securing an Assistant Professor position in the field of Mobility Planning or working in public engagement for an NGO promoting sustainable mobility. With such a position I hope to contribute to improve the sustainability and justice of the world through diverse and inclusive approaches.

Around 57 million people in Europe are foreign-born. Developing strategies for inclusive growth and devising actions to promote immigrant integration through non-discrimination are among Europe’s current priorities. This project will evaluate if the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), which is used to standardize host country language requirements for different professions throughout Europe, can serve as an effective tool to reduce hiring discrimination against immigrants. Employers have been shown to discriminate against immigrant applicants based on language-related bias, which can be reduced when language requirements are specified in CEFR terms. Based on a novel design that combines real-world variation in the inclusion of CEFR requirements in job ads with a factorial survey experiment and in-depth interviews among employers, the project will address three objectives: 1) Examining if the inclusion of CEFR requirements reduces differential treatment of immigrant applicants on aggregate; 2) Identifying labor market areas and ethnic groups that benefit most from the introduction of CEFR requirements; 3) Assessing the current implementation of CEFR requirements in relation to uninformed or inadequate use. Results and the collected data set will be distributed among the scientific community (open access), among the general public (science fairs) and among employers and county governors (webinars, roundtable discussions) and can serve as a stepping-stone for developing comprehensive and adequate language requirements for different professions at the (inter)national level. The projects unites expert researchers in sociolinguistics and language test development with an early career researcher (ecr), specializing in immigrant integration and language-based discrimination into an interdisciplinary team. This will provide impactful training to the ecr, who will benefit from methodological training, project management experience, and network ties.

As part of its Green Deal, the EU aims to decarbonize energy production by 55% compared to 1990 levels and must turn to renewable energy sources. While the northern European countries have some access to these sources, they do not have consistent amounts of sunlight for photothermal energy (PE) generation. Novel approaches are under development to allow these regions to benefit from solar resources. Solar radiation-induced boiling in nanofluids can be used for PE steam generation as it facilitates more efficient solar collector technology. However, knowledge of the mechanisms behind this boiling is severely lacking because the methods to measure these systems are inaccurate at scale and cannot be used for practical, opaque nanofluids, limiting the focus to macroscopic properties. Understanding these mechanisms is the key to advancing PE technologies. Therefore, this project endeavours to develop and use new methods to qualify and quantify the photothermal boiling process in nanofluids at the microscale. I will move from Canada to Europe to complete this ambitious project with three specific aims. First, I will characterize two novel candidate nanofluids: plasma-functionalized graphene and carbon nanofibers (mass-produced by the project exploitation partner). Second, I will develop new, distinct measurement techniques that separate this study from existing ones which only measure temperature and steam flow rate. One method will use bubble bursting acoustics to quantity the number and size of bubbles. The other will use a medical X-ray technique, computed tomography, to image photothermal boiling for the first time. Finally, I will perform boiling tests to determine potential mechanisms and extend the existing models. With these objectives fulfilled, new information and methodologies will be developed for future research, I will gain new skills and competencies to prepare me for a future in industrial research, and Europe will be ONESTEP closer to a greener future.

The majority of databases are unfit for deploying advanced analytical tools by humans and machines, causing forgone opportunities arising from advanced ICT solutions. It adds to the problem that the transition towards low carbon and sustainable energy systems requires the integration of interdisciplinary and complex data. It means that it is not sufficient to only account for physical and technical attributes, but also socio-economic and environmental ones. Otherwise, society is misinformed about the consequences of upcoming fundamental systemic changes, affecting acceptance building and the creation of ownership for the energy transition. Transparent and integrated management of energy data with useful metadata information and quality assurance provides the basis for society to choose, monitor, and implement sustainable transition pathways; and for the industry to be innovative. Therefore, databases need to adhere to the principles of open and FAIR data (findability, accessibility, interoperability, re-usability). However, the concepts and infrastructures for FAIR and open data management are currently not existing in low carbon energy research. The overall objective of EERAdata is to develop, explore, and test a FAIR and open data ecosystem. This new data infrastructure is established through the broad involvement of the energy research community in a series of workshops and is applied in four selected use cases, covering essential aspects of data-driven low carbon energy research. EERAdata also implements an open platform for uniform and seamless access to energy data and establishes a pool of experts and data stewards to facilitate a mental shift in the community towards FAIR and open data practices. A key element is the active linking of EERAdata to national initiatives, the European Open Science Cloud, the Research Data Alliance, and others. In this way, the project builds a critical mass to explore the prospects of large-scale FAIR and open energy data.

The NOVO project will address a fundamental issue in proton radiotherapy (PT) of cancer, namely the lack of real-time dose verification (RDV) that significantly limits the potential of PT due to uncertainties in the precise delivery of the prescribed dose. In the NOVO project, we will develop the first proof-of-concept of an RDV technology adaptable to any PT treatment and bring the concept to TRL 4 by also considering integration into the PT clinical workflow. The RDV technology will be pivotal for enabling the next generation of adaptive PT therapy, i.e., dose-guided real-time adaptive therapy. Real-time measurement of the dose to targeted and non-targeted tissues will be the key to truly empower patient-centered, personalized cancer treatment, important to improve curation and quality-of-life post-treatment. As a high-risk/high-gain project, NOVO aims at a first-of-its-kind RDV technology through the unique synergy between (1) cutting-edge, inexpensive organic scintillator technology that can detect secondary radiation during treatment for non-invasive measurements, (2) novel and fast image reconstruction, artificial intelligence (AI)-accelerated models and AI-enhanced image reconstruction to allow simultaneous detection of multiple radiation species and tissue compositional analysis, (3) tumor-tracking and imaging of tissue radio-sensitivity based on oxygen levels, (4) intelligent automation of decision-making schemes for real-time dose-guided adaptive therapy. The project will essentially open a new era in PT that enables curing more cancer patients and reducing toxicity from treatment. The NOVO consortium covers the entire value chain of RDV development (technology providers, theory and modelling, technology integration and PT clinics) and optimally engages nuclear, medical, and high-energy physicists, chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists, oncologists, biologists, as well as European PT centers.