Research / ZENiT Fellows

Responsibilities

Affiliated with the Department of History and Sociology

Project: Urban Imaginaries and Political Change: Modernity, cosmopolitanism and spatial reconfigurations

_{This project interrogates the impact of historical ruptures and political transformation on cities. It investigates cities in three situations - end of empire, the aftermath of war, and transition from dictatorship. It examines how urban imaginaries- the way in which urban actors understand the city's specificity- are reshaped by political change, as well as how this has an impact of spatial reconfigurations of cities and of social practices in the transformed space. It discusses the historical experiences of cities that identify with two particular urban imaginaries, related to understandings of cosmopolitanism and modernity.}

Fellow since 07/2020

Publications on KOPS

Responsibilities

Affiliated with the Department of Biology

Project: Neural basis of sensory integration and decision-making in larval zebrafish

_{It is a long-standing question in neuroscience how nervous systems accumulate sensory evidence and how they use such information to make reliable decisions. Over the last few decades, primates have been the model organism of choice for addressing this problem, providing fundamental insights into the algorithmic nature of the behavior. By adapting a classical random dot motion discrimination paradigm, I have recently discovered that an animal as simple as the larval zebrafish can temporally integrate sensory information as well and use such cues for decision-making. The rich molecular-genetic toolkit and modern imaging technologies available for this model organism now provide me with a unique opportunity to study the neural basis of such behaviors in a level of detail that is currently difficult to achieve elsewhere.
The main objective of this project is to employ and further develop a combination of state-of-the-art techniques to obtain an experimentally well-constrained ground truth of the neuronal circuit architecture underlying sensory evidence integration and decision-making. To achieve this goal, it is planned to work on three main research aims: First, create precise anatomical maps of the identified regions, containing information about neurotransmitter identity, single-cell morphology, as well as synapse distribution. Second, use a modern single-cell transcriptional profiling approach to explore the general relationship between genetics and circuit function and to identify receptor and ion channel types. Third, perform ablation and optogenetic manipulation experiments to test the identified circuits for causality during behavior.}

Research Fellow since 09/2020

Responsibilities

ZENiT Fellowship

Affiliated with the Department of Biology / Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour

Project: GCoo-BreeD: advancing comparative research on cooperative breeding with a peer-reviewed and updatable Global Cooperative Breeding Database

_{Large-scale comparative analyses are powerful tools to investigate the causes and consequences of cooperative breeding. However, recent studies demonstrate that datasets that are frequently used in these analyses include considerable methodological biases (e.g. inconsistent definitions, human errors). To advance comparative research on cooperative breeding, we are working to establish the Global Cooperative Breeding Database (GCoo-BreeD): a growing database covering key biological parameters of cooperative breeding in birds and mammals, including humans (e.g. the prevalence of breeding units with potential alloparents). GCoo-BreeD has a unique structure as it is (i) a sample-based database (i.e. multiple samples per species linked to an exact sampling location and period), (ii) every data entry is peer-reviewed and (iii) it is an updatable resource. These principles enable investigating intra- and inter-species variation, data accuracy and data expansion with the publication of new natural history papers. Furthermore, GCoo-BreeD will facilitate the study of cooperative breeding as a continuous trait, thereby enabling greater explanatory power than the traditional binary classification of species as cooperative versus non-cooperative breeders. GCoo-BreeD is committed to fair acknowledgement to data contributors (who are offered co-authorship) and to increasing gender and ethnic diversity in cooperative breeding research.}

Project webpage: https://www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/collective-behaviour/research/resources/gcoo-breed/

ZENiT Fellow from 03/2024

Responsibilities

Affiliated with the Department of Linguistics

Project: Cross-linguistic influence in multilingual children and adults: evidence from the real-time processing of Romanian wh-questions

_{This project investigates language acquisition and processing of Romanian in a multilingual context in Germany, the UK, and Romania. It addresses the real-time comprehension and production of both the minority (heritage) language and the majority (societal) language in child and adult multilingual speakers with three main aims: The first is to break new ground in our understanding of how the different languages of multilingual speakers interact and shape their language processing mechanisms. The second is to determine the nature of the potential discrepancies between various groups of multilinguals and the extent to which factors like cross-linguistic influence and language dominance affect bilingual processing. The third is to disseminate the empirical findings in accessible terms to parents, language teachers and other stakeholders to help them make informed decisions about multilingual practices in the school and the home.
Romanian is a relatively understudied language in multilingual contexts despite the large Romanian diaspora in Europe. To capture the range of variability characteristic of multilingual development, as well as address effects of language dominance, the target groups will include (i) Romanian heritage speakers living in Germany and in the UK, (ii) German heritage speakers living in Romania, as well as (iii) Romanian monolinguals. The choice of language combinations (Romanian-German, Romanian-English) is motivated by grammatical properties that these languages have or not in common. Such properties allow to examine how linguistic similarities or differences modulate the real-time comprehension and production of complex syntactic structures. The investigation will combine behavioural (picture-selection, production) and psycholinguistic (eye-tracking) methods and will compare not only between multilinguals and monolinguals, but also across various groups of multilinguals. The findings of the project will have implications for theoretical models of language processing, and for theoretical and practical aspects of language learning.}

Research Fellow since 08/2022

Responsibilities

Affiliated with the Department of Biology

Project: Natural variation of autophagy in Arabidopsis thaliana

_{Plants, due to their sessile nature, are unable to avoid the environmental changes they often face and are thus forced to adapt to the new conditions. Autophagy, or self eating, is a catabolic process which is important for nutrient recycling under both normal and adverse conditions and, thus, can be viewed as an adaptation mechanism. While autophagy is conserved throughout the eukaryotes, plants can survive and reproduce successfully under normal conditions even when the process is impaired. In contrast to that, prolonged darkness is often fatal to plants which are deficient in the autophagic pathway. Recent data on chlorophyll acquired by inducing autophagy through prolonged darkness in a number of Arabidopsis thaliana ecotypes, originating from the entire natural range of the species showed strong variations.}

Fellow since 04/2020

Publications on KOPS

Responsibilities

Affiliated with the Department of Politics and Public Administration

Project: Understanding political inequality via electoral promises and their fulfillment

_{Political equality is a fundamental requirement of democracy, yet recent research raises concerns about its actual implementation, suggesting that more powerful and resource-rich segments of society often enjoy unequal representation. My research contributes to the debate on the always-timely topic of political inequality by analyzing political inequality (1) at different stages of the policymaking process (pledge making, pledge fulfillment) while (2) simultaneously focusing on demand (voter-based) and supply-side (party-based) explanations and (3) studying political inequality for the socially given variety of groups, (4 )with particular attention to those who are politically marginalized. My work brings new theoretical insights and empirical approaches to this well-established field in political science. First, I study the question of political inequality not only for groups that differ, e.g., in terms of income or gender, instead, I embrace the complexity of different social groups that will be categorized, in a second step, according to their level of political power and social image. This approach allows me to formulate more generalizable conclusions than this would be the case if only a single group was analyzed. Second, I sequence large-N (experimental) research and small-N (qualitative) case studies to generate and test innovative ideas. My project requires the collection of different kinds of data (survey data, data on electoral pledges, semi-standardized face-to-face interviews, data on the level of electoral participation of various social groups, data on organizational power of groups) and is divided in two main phases. It begins by examining pledges made by governing parties and will later extend to investigate electoral promises made by opposition parties.}

Fellow since 10/2023

Responsibilities

Affiliated with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Project: Time-Dependent Moments

^{In this project I want to investigate time-dependent moments of distributions (functions) from partial differential equations. Recently moment problem implementations showed the usefulness to find solutions of partial differential equations. I extended the moment problem in a systematic and general way to derivatives of moments and proved the existence of solutions of a PDE. Both methods (the moment theoretic and the PDE methods) shall be combined in this project to improve the theoretical foundation of moment problem implementations for PDEs. Hence, the field of the moment problem and the field of partial differential equations will benefit from the results of this project. The University of Konstanz provides the perfect research environment for this project since it has with Prof. S. Kuhlmann and Prof. M. Schweighofer strong active researchers in the field of the moment problem and students are provided with a lecture about the moment problem. As an additional very active researcher in the field of the moment problem the applicant will cooperate with Prof. R. Curto from the University of Iowa, USA, on this project.}

Fellow since 03/2022

Website of MoPat conference

Responsibilities

ZENiT Fellowship

Affiliated with the Department of Biology

Project: Sociality and Evolution

_{We are lacking an overarching framework that explicitly integrates behavioural ecology with macroevolution to identify the factors and processes that link behavioural traits with genomic evolution and diversification processes. This project will fill this gap by building the links in the explanatory chain that connect behavioural traits to diversification. To accomplish this, it will follow four parallel and complementary lines of research:
I. Which data and analyses are needed to efficiently describe diverse social systems across taxa in a quantitative way?
II. Do these descriptors consistently correlate with measures of genetic structure and diversity across taxa?
III. Is genetic structure and diversity a predictor of diversification and species richness?
IV. Do certain behavioural traits, through their effects on diversity and differentiation, impact diversification patterns on a
macroevolutionary scale?
These questions will be adressed by using approaches from different biological disciplines, including remote and automated colleciton of behavioural data in wild animal populations using novel tracking technologies, social network analysis of animal societies, comparative analysis of georeferenced DNA sequences, non-invasive population genomics, estimation of trait-dependent diversification rates and phylogenetic comparative methods.}

ZENiT Fellow from 06/2024

Fellow since 03/2018

See detailed profile: https://scikon.uni-konstanz.de/en/persons/profile/gisela.kopp/

Publications on KOPS

Responsibilities

ZENiT Fellowship

Affiliated with the Department of Computer and Information Science / Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour

Project: New impulses for open-endedness in embodied collectives

_{The ZENiT research group hopes to contribute to several challenges in open-endedness in embodied collectives through this project and believes that this project can lead to new insights for the domains of evolutionary biology, collective behavior, artificial life, philosophy, machine learning, and robotics.The outcomes of the project include a publication of a position paper as well as a benchmark for open-endedness in embodied collectives, organization of international workshop in Konstanz and initiation of a later collaborative project.}

ZENiT Fellow since 04/2024

Responsibilities

Affiliated with the Department of Biology

Project: Individual Brains, Collective Task: Social Regulation of Stinging Behaviour in Honeybees

_{Honeybees defend their nest against large predators thanks to a collective effort to harass and sting the intruder. The stinger apparatus has evolved to detach upon stinging elastic skin (such as ours) to maximize venom delivery, but the drawback is that the mutilated bee will then die within a few hours. Thus, the honeybee colony under threat has to achieve a delicate balance: enough bees need to respond that the intruder is successfully deterred, but without unnecessarily depleting the colony of its workforce. What are the mechanisms regulating the decision of each individual to engage or not into this collective response, so that this balance is reached? It is proposed that honeybees integrate information about the behaviour of their nestmates (social feedback) to fine tune their own response. The aim of this project is to study both the behavioural and the neurobiological bases of this regulatory mechanism.}

Fellow since 04/2019

See detailed profile: https://scikon.uni-konstanz.de/en/persons/profile/morgane.nouvian/

Publications on KOPS

Responsibilities

Affiliated with the Department of Chemistry

Project: Controlling M-S-H Crystallization for Building a Green Future

_{Cement is the most commonly used building material in the world and one of the most significant technological advances in the history of humanity. Nearly four billion tons of cement are manufactured every year causing major environment impacts such as high CO2-emissions (~7 % of global anthropogenic CO2). Therefore, the development of eco-sustainable cements has been top-priority during the last decades for the scientific community. One of the most promising strategies is the partial replacement of conventional Portland cements by alternative low carbon binders. In that respect, magnesium-silicate-hydrate binders ((MgO)x-SiO2-(H2O)y, M-S-H) have caught strong attention. MgO-based cements are produced by hydration of MgO in the presence of silica to generate M-S-H. Reactive MgO can be manufactured by burning Mg-silicates or Mg-carbonates or by using more environmentally friendly strategies like production from brines or seawater. The use of these alternative sources for obtaining MgO reduces substantially CO2-emissions in contrast to Portland cement manufacturing. Nevertheless, investigations of M-S-H cement paste evidence significant disadvantages comparing with Portland cement (e.g. high water demand, long setting times and low compressive strengths) and these drawbacks need to be solved in order to develop a competitive binding material. The use of polymeric additives (polycarboxylate ethers (PCEs)) to reduce water needed for curing and enhance the floatability of cement paste is common practice in the cement industry. In addition, PCEs bear the advantage of being tuneable by modification of their chemical structure. By using the suitable PCEs, problems such as high water demand of M-S-H binders could be tackled. The overall aim of this project is to gain a fundamental understanding of the crystallization of M-S-H in absence and in presence of polymeric additives. Understanding nucleation and growth of M-S-H will pave the way towards the development of a novel binder that could emulate Portland cements regarding mechanical performance and, at the same time, being less aggressive to the environment.}

Fellow since 06/2020

Publications on KOPS

Responsibilities

Affiliated with the Department of Biology

Project: The neural basis of insect pattern vision: from flowers to behaviour

_{Vision is one of our major access ports to the physical world. Because of its central importance to human and animal behaviour, understanding how neural processing gives rise to the visual percept is one of the key questions in neuroscience research. To extract meaning from the text in this application, you are currently using a central feature of your visual system: pattern vision. With essential functions in object recognition, navigation and communication, it constitutes a fundamental pillar of animal vision. In its most generalised form it provides a size-, position- and orientation-invariant representation of a pattern. Given that our brain dedicates several hundred million neurons to this task, it is all the more astonishing that insects, with brains smaller than a grain of rice, recognise and memorise visual patterns as well. Some insect pollinators even possess the ability to generalise pattern features. They thus provide a model to study the neural implementation of invariant pattern recognition with limited computational resources. While insect pattern discrimination behaviour has been studied extensively, very little is known about its neuronal implementation. I plan to close this gap, using a hawkmoth as a tractable model to dissect the invariant pattern vision circuits of insects from photons to behaviour.
The hummingbird hawkmoth (Macroglossum stellatarum) combines a physiologically accessible nervous system and a biologically relevant behavioural paradigm with which to study invariant pattern recognition. I plan to dissect the neural mechanisms underlying this behaviour with multiple methods: (1) a quantitative behavioural assessment will determine the parameter space for hawkmoth pattern vision, and (2) intracellular recordings will provide the first characterisation of pattern-responsive neurons in the insect brain. To bridge from behaviour to physiology, (3) tetrode recordings in hawkmoths that actively scan patterns in virtual reality will reveal how patterns are encoded in behaving insects and how active vision contributes to pattern encoding.
The outcomes of this research programme will be highly instructive for vision research, neuroscience, and sensory ecology. The neural mechanisms described in hawkmoths will lay the basis for comparative investigations across insect species. Together with a quantitative assessment of natural flower patterns, this work will enrich our understanding of the most-diverse of animal groups, which crucially impact global ecosystems as pollinators. Comparing the pattern processing strategies of hawkmoths to that in vertebrates will reveal converging neural strategies, as well as diverging solutions that insects use to cope with their distinctly lower processing power. Together, this project will deliver key contributions to the fields of animal vision, neuroscience, sensory ecology, computer vision and robotics.}

Research Fellow since 06/2022

Responsibilities

Affiliated with the Department of Computer and Information Science

Project: Foundations on reinforcement learning

_{The importance of reinforcement learning problems in science and society is considerable, which mainly is due to its generality offering a wide range of applications - an incomplete list includes the energy efficient temperature control of buildings, self-driving cars, dynamic pricing models or patient allocation in hospitals. The approximation quality of a corresponding solution often is of fundamental importance as it directly relates to energy savings, safety guarantees, profits or patient health for these examples.
In general, solving reinforcement learning problems is notoriously hard and the state of the current art is that "there are no methods that are guaranteed to work for all or even most problems, but there are enough methods to try on a given
challenging problem with a reasonable chance that one or more of them will be successful in the end" .
The goal of this project is to explain and understand this observation, by deriving theoretical foundations which aim to characterize systems regarding their difficulty in learning them and will eventually allow us to derive tailored efficient algorithms with provable guarantees.}

Fellow since 06/2023

Responsibilities

ZENiT Fellowship

Affiliated with the Department of Politics and Public Administration / Cluster "The Politics of Inequality"

Project: Rage against the Machine? The Distributional and Political Implications of Artificial Intelligence

_{The project attempts to adopt a political science and sociology point of view that examines how AI may affect individuals across different societal groups with respect to the perceived distribution of the related benefits and burdens. The outcome of the project will be a paper, public and academic outreach tool, as well as a workshop with experts and policymakers.}

ZENiT Fellow from 03/2024

Responsibilities

Affiliated with the Departments of Law & Literature

Project: Confronting state crimes and dealing with the aftermath. Towards a victim-driven approach in transitional justice processes

_{Dictatorships, civil conflicts, and wars are periods of systematic human rights violations. In these circumstances, states might enhance existing political inequality deliberately, e.g. via the persecution of certain groups, or omission, i.e. not intervening in a civil conflict between factions. The question is which actor shall confront the ongoing crimes and enforce human rights. Until now, states and international organizations have been regarded as entities to be relied upon to address state crimes. This widespread norm responds to the fact that these processes are framed by international law, which regulates states and international institutions. However, is it not utopian to expect the state - the same structure that allows inequality to occur either by commission or omission - to lead a transformative, comprehensive, and sustainable process to overturn it? On the other hand, international organizations (e.g. UN, international tribunals) typically have a role to play in transitional justice processes, but they are bureaucratic and technocratic bodies constrained by institutional regulations that are not aligned with the goal of realizing fundamental societal transformation.
The key hypothesis in the present outline is that the degree of transitional justice achievements toward political equality (dependent variable) is directly related to the degree of victims' involvement (independent variable). To develop this proposal and test these categories, the research investigates three case studies where transitions after state crimes took place: Germany, Argentina, and Kenya.}

Research Fellow since 07/2021

https://www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskolleg/community/fellow-homepages/valeria-vegh-weis/

Responsibilities

ZENiT Fellowship

Affiliated with the Department of Law / Centre for Human | Data | Society

Project: Must I? A dogmatic, comparative law and philosophical analysis of punishable omission

_{The project deals with a question that ultimately concerns us all: when, why and to what extent do we actually have to help and stand up for each other and under what conditions can omissions be punished with a criminal penalty - the sharpest sword of a state?
This requires a fundamental understanding of the legal and philosophical dimensions of the category of action "omission", which is to be developed in this project. A philosophical deepening is at the same time the basis for a comparative legal expansion. In this context, the criminal law solutions in cases of omission depend heavily on the theory of crime in discourse with the concepts of legal philosophy used in a state. This requires a comparative analysis within and outside Europe. The comparative work will deal with different concepts of the state and, from this perspective, analyze the state of interdependencies between legal theory and philosophical concepts. The aim is not to map the dogmatic lines in different countries; the aim is to facilitate an international dialog between experts from law and philosophy in order to recognize the interdisciplinary and comparative dimensions of the conditions of imputation for omissions in order to draw conclusions for basic dogmatic structures in criminal law.}

Responsibilities

ZENiT Fellowship

Affiliated with the Departments of Literature & Politics and Public Administration

Project: “Abuse and humiliation” in the delivery room: The horror of obstetric violence in Ghana

_{Obstetric violence in a major health problem in both developed and developing countries (World Health Organisation (2015). However, the reality in those countries outside Europe, US, Canada and Australia is understudied. This research project examines the correlation between women's experiences of obstetric violence and the low facility-based deliveries and the high maternal mortality rate in Ghana. The quantitative (cross-sectional) research methodology will be used to collect and analyse data. The research findings will enable the Ghana government and other international organisations, such us the World Health Organisation (WHO) to understand the magnitude of the abuse and humiliation women face during delivery and its implications on women's health. This will assist stakeholders in developing policies and frameworks to curb the problem of obstetric violence in Ghana.}

ZENiT Fellow since 06/2024

Postdoctoral Fellow from 09/2020 until 05/2024

ZUKOnnect Fellow from 08 until 10/2019