Projects
A study on the loss of small airways and epithelial cell changes in chronic lung diseases KU Leuven
The main function of the lung is to ensure optimal gas exchange of oxygen uptake and removal of carbon dioxide during breathing. Air entering the nose and mouth is travelling through a well-organized airway tree consisting of branches like in trees. This starts at the trachea (termed generation 0), splitting at the first bifurcation (generation 1) into two branches, each dividing many times along the tree into smaller airways and ending up in ...
Plus que ça change, plus que ça reste la même chose? State-formation, post-colonial violence, and the local from a long-term perspective in the eastern Congo (c. 1850-today)' Ghent University
North and South Kivu, provinces in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have been the locus of much violent conflict since the 1990s. This has reiterated colonial imaginations of the Congo as a U+2018heart of darknessU+2019, plagued by irrationality, barbarism, and violence, and in need of U+2018civilisationU+2019. While many authors have plumbed the complexity of this violence, and articulated the need for a thorough understanding of ...
Obuntu bulamu, a peer to peer support school intervention to improve inclusion of children with disabilities in regular primary schools in Uganda. Ghent University
In Uganda children with disabilities are often excluded from school. In our 3 year study we will test if the "Obuntu bulamu" intervention can improve inclusion of children with disabilities in regular primary schools in Uganda. "Obuntu bulamu" is an Ugandan concept, closely related to the South African concept of "ubuntu" and is accepted and consistent behaviour that signifies a shared set of values, which promote well-being, togetherness ...
Skin microbiome and metabolome analysis across human societies Ghent University
Today, the majority of humans spend their lives indoors. About 10,000 years ago all humans spend their lives outdoors and lived in close contact with nature. This radical shift in lifestyle has led to an increase in skin allergies, acne and eczema. By sampling hunter-gatherers in South-America and Africa and comparing with more urbanized areas in Brazil, USA and Europe we aim to identify differences in bacteriome, mycobiome and metabolome. ...
Longest Cycles and Spanning Subgraphs Ghent University
The main themes of this research project, which is situated in Graph Theory, are the study of longest cycles and of spanning subgraphs of abstract and embedded graphs. A subgraph is "spanning" if it contains all vertices of the supergraph. Special emphasis will lie on hamiltonian cycles, i.e. spanning cycles, and their interaction with other important structural properties of the graph such as its genus, crossing number, connectivity, and ...
Italy’s Phantoms: The Italic/Italian identity Between History and Memory. KU Leuven
Italian identity has for a long time confronted itself with the phantom of ‘Italics’, that is to say, those peoples who lived in the peninsula before the rise of Rome, which almost completely destroyed them. Due to the mysterious nature of these peoples (they left little or no trace of themselves) and their being isolated in a remote past as well as in a peripheral space (the Italian South and the countryside), the culture of ancient ...
Remember Africa? The effects of twice-migration on the religious and cultural lives of British ‘East African’ Jains Ghent University
The project "Remember Africa?” uses different types of contemporary memorial projects and narratives of individual Jains in the UK to address the experience of twice-migration and its impact upon religious and cultural praxis. It comprises two distinct levels of inquiry.
First, it will approach memory as a source, and construct a continuous history of Jainism as it moved spatially from India to East-Africa to the UK, and temporally ...
Calibrating the recent evolution of protozoan pathogens using viral evolutionary time-scales KU Leuven
Exploring natural genetic variation has been instrumental to understand the processes that shape organismal diversity on Earth. Phylogenetics, the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among (groups of) individuals, is one of the most influential techniques to reconstruct the tree of life. This technique is especially powerful when external information, such as fossil data, can be included to time evolutionary events. ...
Global circulation and mesoscale modeling of the Martian atmosphere: Applied to the detection of subsurface liquid water KU Leuven
The search for life in our solar system has been one of the most interesting topics in natural sciences. Based on the observations for Earth, the keystone of life is liquid water. On Mars, water ice exists under the surface. Moreover, a recent discovery has proven the existence of a liquid water lake beneath the south polar cap. Considering the possibility that Early Mars was covered with an ocean, if Mars had harboured life, the life on ...