The mammalian cerebral cortex was subject to a dramatic expansion in surface area during evolution. This process is recapitulated during development and is accompanied by folding of the cortical sheet, which allows fitting a large cortical surface within a limited cranial volume. A loss of cortical folds is linked to severe intellectual impairment in humans, so cortical folding is believed to be crucial for brain function. However, developmental mechanisms responsible for cortical folding, and the influence of this on cortical function, remain largely unknown.

Organic electronic devices, such as organic field-effect transistors (OFETs), are raising an increasing interest for their potential in large area coverage and low cost applications. Also, the use of single molecules as active electronic components offers great prospects for the miniaturization of devices and for their compatibility with biological systems. Within this framework, e-GAMES goals are:

The POLIGHT project will focus on the integration of a series of inorganic nanostructured materials possessing photonic or combined photonic and plasmonic properties into polymeric films, providing a significant advance with respect to current state of the art in flexible photonics. These highly adaptable films could act either as passive UV-Vis-NIR selective frequency mirrors or filters, or as matrices for light absorbing or optically active species capable of tailoring their optical response. The goal of this project is two-fold.

Evolved stars are the factories of interstellar dust. This dust is injected into the interstellar medium and plays a key role in the evolution of astronomical objects from galaxies to the embryos of planets. However, the processes involved in dust formation and evolution are still a mystery. The increased angular resolution of new generation telescopes, will provide for the first time a detailed view of the conditions in the dust formation zone of evolved stars, as shown by our first observations with ALMA.

"The goal of this project is to develop new techniques combining tools from dynamical systems, analysis and differential geometry to study the existence and properties of invariant manifolds arising from solutions to differential equations. These structures are relevant in the study of the qualitative properties of ODE and PDE and appear very naturally in important questions of mathematical physics.

Membranes of eukaryotic cells organize signal transduction proteins into microdomains or lipid rafts whose integrity is essential for numerous cellular processes. Lipid rafts has been considered a fundamental step to define the cellular complexity of eukaryotes, assuming that bacteria do not require such a sophisticated organization of their signaling networks. However, I have discovered that bacteria organize many signaling pathways in membrane microdomains similar to the eukaryotic lipid rafts.

Optical, electron and probe microscopes are enabling tools for discoveries and knowledge generation in nanoscale sicence and technology. High resolution –nanoscale or molecular-, noninvasive and label-free imaging of three-dimensional soft matter-liquid interfaces has not been achieved by any microscopy method.

The project addresses the two greatest unresolved problems in quantum field theory and gravity.
The question of UV-completion beyond the Planck length and the mysteries of black holes. It is grounded on a recent program of research where we have put forward a fundamentally different unifying approach to both of these problems.

The cerebral cortex is organized into highly specialized sensory areas. Thus, it is fundamental to understand how these areas acquire and maintain their identity and functional organization. Challenging normal brain development and forcing the brain to the limits of plasticity, offers us the possibility to shed light on these issues. Accordingly, we shall use prenatal sensory deprivation as a model to understand the mechanisms underlying early neuroplasticity, events that could influence the natural organization of sensory cortical areas.

Following promising early breakthroughs, progress in the development of high-performance multicomponent organic energy materials has stalled due to a bottleneck in device optimization. FOREMAT will develop a breakthrough technology to overcome this bottleneck by shifting from fabrication-intense to measurement-intense assessment methods, enabling rapid multi-parameter optimization of novel systems.