Metamaterials (MMs) are man made materials with unusual electromagnetic properties that are not typically found in Nature. They are the key to achieving such extraordinary properties as invisibility cloaks and perfect lenses. At present, they are bulky and confined to laboratories. If they were flexible, they could become much more versatile and practical. Here, I propose a novel concept for flexible MMs that will turn current cloaking devices from suits of armour into true cloaks.The concept of index of refraction underpins the physics of MMs, which can be illustrated with an example. The direction that light takes when it crosses the interface between two media depends on its initial direction with respect to the surface and on the refractive indices of the media. This is the reason why a pencil appears to kink when immersed in water. In nature, all transparent materials have a positive refractive index, like water. As a result, the image of the pencil always kinks in the same direction. Conversely, MM are manufactured with a negative refractive index, thus in a MM the kink of the pencil would appear in the opposite direction. This effect, which may seem to be a mere curiosity, drives the extraordinary behavior of MMs.The technological requirements of currently fabricated optical MMs impose a flat rigid geometry. This impedes the realistic implementations of an optical cloak made of soft fabric, for example. I aim to overcome such limits.The aim of this project is to fabricate MMs in flexible, extremely thin membranes (METAFLEX).Metaflex will retain all the power of material design typical of MMs and their ability to control light, in a more flexible framework. I have already achieved the first milestone of the project and printed MMs on polymer flexible membranes with thickness down to few nanometers.The physics of Metaflex is a rich and unexplored field of research. This ambitious project is structured around their most striking properties:-Metaflex can be wrapped around objects and stacked, a vital step to realistic cloaking applications.-Metaflex stacks can be easily fine tuned after fabrication, e.g. via deformation, hence light can be controlled with additional degrees of freedom. The flexibility of Metaflex permits the design and fabrication of a camouflaging system, as the material response can sense and adapt to the surrounding environment. This offers a remarkable example of smart fabrics and intelligent textiles, currently a thriving area of research in academia and industry.-Metaflex provide a new framework to study the interaction between optical and mechanical forces, as in Optical Trapping or the new field of Optomechanics. Potential applications include very small optical microphones.-Metaflex are very light. They could take advantage of the attractive and repulsive forces triggered by optical beams in order to levitate and behave as nano-flying carpets. This would be a breakthrough in biomedical nano-applications such as drug-delivery and single molecules manipulation.My interest in Metaflex arises from diverse theoretical and experimental projects in photonic structures and nanofabrication and from the knowledge gained throughout these projects, including the physics and applications of MMs. This project contains many exciting scientific challenges, which offer the possibility of developing the extraordinary properties of MMs for every-day life applications that were unimaginable only a few years ago.

ONE-FLOW translates ‘vertical hierarchy’ of chemical multistep synthesis with its complex machinery into self-organising ‘horizontal hierarchy’ of a compartmentalized flow reactor system – a biomimetic digital flow cascade machinery with just one reactor passage. To keep horizontal hierarchy manageable, orthogonality among the consecutive reactions needs to be increased. The winning point of nature is to have invented catalytic cascades. ONE-FLOW will uplift that by enabling the best bio- and chemocatalysts working hand in hand. 4 synthetic flow cascades ('metabolic pathways’) and 1 flow cascade driven by automated intelligence ('signaling pathway') will produce 4 Top-list 2020 drugs. ‘The Compartmentalized Smart Factory’ will develop organic, inorganic, and mechanical compartmentalization. ‘The Green-Solvent Spaciant Factory’ will fluidically allow the use of interim reaction spaces (spaciants). ‘The Systemic Operations Factory’ will aim at full orthogonality using data-base guided ultimate process harmonization. ‘The Digital Machine-to-Machine Factory’ will alter the landscape of chemical synthesis by virtue of the "Internet of Chemical Things". Automated machine-to-machine data transfer enables relegation of process monitoring to central computer systems under the oversight of chemists. ‘The Fully Continuous Integrated Factory’ will develop a commercial platform technology under the auspices of sustainability-driven process-design evaluation, making amenable the new kind of processing to all chemists. ONE-FLOW has massive impact potential: i) 38 billion Euro production cost saving; ii) 300 million EUR cost saving per drug; iii) address diseases with 500 billion Euro medication costs; iv) increase market share of emerging high-tech SME players by 10% in 10 years; v) open new windows of opportunity (personalized medicine) with 200-500 million Euro per disease; and vi) achieve 40% female share on a senior scientist level (ONE-FLOW: 34% senior, 57% junior).

The research program seeks to provide a conceptualization of peace´s vision which provides new understandings for the conceptualization for peace beyond the absence of violence. These visions of peace are produced by people on the move. We did not found research available about this topic. We will fill a gap in the current research both peace-conflict studies and migrations studies about the role of people on move in construction of peace. Moreover, we want to track and analyze violence suffered by people on the move both on the way to their destiny and in societies which are not normally categorized as violent or conflictive. This is to des-sedentarize peace and violence studies in order to understand the way in which peace and violence are also mobilized.

The INTERfaces program will train 14 ESRs within an EID network jointly designed by European academic and industry partners in innovative research projects dedicated to developing clean bioprocesses for the production of chemicals. The assembly of biocatalysts to reaction sequences allows avoiding steps for isolation and purification of intermediates and thus a significant improvement of the environmental footprint of catalytic processes. The main goal of INTERfaces is the extension of this concept towards multi-step biocatalytic reactions in immobilized form. These “Heterogeneous Biocatalytic Reaction Cascades” will greatly facilitate re-use of the catalysts and further simplify downstream-processing. INTERfaces combines material science and protein engineering to design tailored enzymes and (bio-based) materials that will complement each other to obtain optimized heterogeneous biocatalysts. These tools will be applied to solve synthetic challenges in the use of two biobased monomers as starting materials to synthesize products for application fields like antioxidants and biopolymers. Process optimization and up-scale in industry will reveal key factors for synthetic utilization of the biocatalysts. INTERfaces emphasizes particularly the engineering of the designed cascades in solid phase. This includes the design of reactors, use of computational modeling tools, application of the right operational modes, and reaction medium needed for desired space-time-yields and product titers. Commercial relevant processes will be up-scaled together with industry for technical implementation. 13 Non-academic partners ranging from high-tech SMEs to large producing companies and 9 academic institutions offer an intersectoral and interdisciplinary environment to provide 14 Ph.D. candidates with outstanding employability profiles for the European Biotech Sector. Dedicated workshops and well-balanced supervisory team aim at increasing the gender diversity in biotech research.