This project, “The Dynamic Impacts of Child Health and Skills Enhanced by School Interventions across the Life Course” (DYNAMICS), is the first ever to rigorously and comprehensively study complete short- and long-term dynamic effects of health and human capital at school ages. It combines research in the fields of economics and epidemiology to answer the overarching research question: whether and how the dynamics of a child’s health and skills, enhanced by successive nationwide school reforms, translates into various later-life outcomes. Economists have recently shown that public health interventions in early life substantially boost an individual’s earnings in the long term, albeit have not investigated how these effects emerge. Moreover, epidemiologists have found that body size, growth and disease history at school ages are strongly associated with health in adulthood. DYNAMICS investigates how the interplay of school health, nutrition, and education reforms as well as the event of WWII, which uniquely overlapped in Denmark, affected children and how it formed their health and well-being in adulthood. It combines the most recent advances in research through the University of Southern Denmark’s expertise in health dynamics and advanced econometric methods, the University of Copenhagen’s expertise in life course epidemiology, my research experience with individual data and early-life effects, and the richest data on Denmark. This project will not only create societally important cutting-edge knowledge in applied microeconomics but also immensely broaden my international network and provide important transferable skills for future success.

This proposal investigates the nexus between time and the construction of the feminine in Late Antique and Byzantine hagiographical discourses. By looking both at ways time is experienced through the body and construed by society and religion, GenTime engages with a highly debated problem in Byzantine studies: why did female saints progressively disappear over the Byzantine millennium? GenTime argues that this trajectory has to be understood against the eschatological expectations shaping early Christian ideals of female holiness. In the 2nd and 3rd century the impending end of times subsumed any other temporality and led to the subversion of traditionally construed “women’s time”. Once the Roman Empire became Christian, the eschatological horizon was reinforced in Byzantium by the widespread circulation of apocalyptic motives, adopted by the Imperial power for political and moral purposes. Eschatologically-motivated narrative patterns about women saints became entrenched and their ongoing success made it hard to accommodate new experiences of holiness when other models of lay temporality eventually emerged during the Middle Byzantine era. GenTime looks at stories about women saints produced between the 2nd and the 13th century CE by adopting a longue durée perspective and using narratology to analyze how patterns of temporalities are inscribed in the text. It builds on feminist phenomenology to highlight the persistence of strategies used to control women’s time within patriarchal social orders. GenTime works with medieval sources and it reflects on the dialectics between integration/assimilation, minority/majority cultures, gender/societal values, all of them of major concern in modern societies. In doing so, it raises awareness about the ways gendered discourses of time have historically been used to promote lifestyles that, ultimately, have less to do with women’s empowerment and more with power struggles between competing social groups.

Single-photon sources are crucial for many quantum information technologies, including quantum communications, computation, sensing and metrology. Typical stand-alone quantum emitters (QEs), such as quantum dots and defects in diamonds, feature low emission rates, nondirectional emissions, and poorly defined polarization properties, which prevents QEs from being directly used as single-photon sources in practical applications. Various micro/nano structures have been developed in recent years to enhance QE emission rates by making use of the Purcell effect via engineering their immediate dielectric environment, but the control of polarization, direction, and wavefront of the emitted photons has still been rarely addressed. The main objective of the project is to develop a general design approach for high-performance single-photon sources and demonstrate its use by designing and fabricating a series of advanced single-photon nanodevices with different functionalities. First, the underlying physics of QE coupling to surface nanostructures will be thoroughly investigated. We will then develop a novel holography implementation, vectorial scattering (computer-generated) holography, generating directly profiles of hybrid plasmon-QE coupled metasurfaces. Finally, based on the developed design approach, a series of nanodevices will be demonstrated, on-chip realizing photon emission with desirable polarization and phase profiles, including those of vector vortex beams. This project will enable the realization of single-photon sources with radiation channels that have distinct directional and polarization characteristics, extending thereby possibilities for designing complex photonic systems for quantum information processing. Furthermore, this project will facilitate knowledge exchange via dissemination activities along with researcher training in transferable skills, being fully committed to open science principles and chronicling the whole project in an open online logbook.