The 2027 edition of the CROSS program calls upon researchers at EPFL and the University of Lausanne to submit proposals for joint projects that bring the natural sciences and engineering together with the social sciences and humanities.
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\r\nThrough this annual call for projects, CROSS provides competitive grants to support new seed research endeavors that have the potential to grow into full–scale interdisciplinary research projects.
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\r\nThe 2024 CROSS call is open to all topics.
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\r\nPROPOSALS:
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\r\nProposals must come from joint UNIL-EPFL teams, which bring together specialists in the human and social sciences on the one hand, with specialists from life sciences, natural sciences or engineering on the other. Up to six projects will be selected, with a maximum of CHF 60,000 awarded per project.\r\n
Neuropeptides play a critical role in modulating neural circuits and influencing behavior, yet their precise mechanisms of action remain largely unexplored. In this talk, I will present our latest findings on the role of neuropeptides in neural circuit function, uncovered through the use of novel genetically encoded sensors and silencers designed specifically for peptidergic transmission. By applying these innovative tools, we have identified key pathways and mechanisms by which neuropeptides regulate neuronal activity and orchestrate complex behavioral responses. This presentation will highlight the biological insights gained from these studies, offering a deeper understanding of how neuropeptide signaling shapes brain function and behavior.
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Who develops, finances, and commissions architecture—and in whose interest? This lecture series examines the often-invisible forces that shape architectural production—the clients who commission, the contractors who build, and the capital flows that determine what gets realized. While architects are trained to focus on design, the political economy of construction is largely absent from architectural education—sustaining a disciplinary insularity that obscures architecture's deep entanglement with capital, labor, and power. Yet building is fundamentally contingent: dependent on forces beyond the designer's reach, shaped by actors whose decisions constrain and enable architecture far more than design intentions. The series invites scholars and practitioners whose research illuminates these dependencies: the bureaucratization of architectural practice through corporate management systems, the client as a Mephistophelean figure key to the attainment of projects, the contractor as a decisive agent in determining how architecture is produced, and the entanglement of real estate development, finance, building, and urban form. By exposing the structural conditions of construction's political economy, we seek not to lament architecture's lack of autonomy but to work productively within its contingencies—essential groundwork for reimagining how practice might be organized otherwise.
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\r\nDavide Spina (University of Hong Kong, online) Spina's award-winning dissertation examined the Vatican-controlled real estate developer and contractor SGI (Società Generale Immobiliare), which emerged as a major force in postwar Italy's reconstruction. His research on what journalist Antonio Cederna called \"the Leviathan\" reveals how SGI coordinated 10,000 employees, bureaucratized architectural production, exploited planning regulations, and delivered schemes from residential developments to industrial infrastructure. Currently working on real estate development in 1960s-70s Hong Kong, Spina examines how developers and contractors shape architectural culture through corporate management systems.
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We consider regularized versions of the stochastic heat equation (SHE) in high dimensions $d\\geq 3$ and analyze their higher moments in the limit as the regularization is removed, for varying coupling constants that describe the strength of the driving noise. Motivated by recent results on the higher moments of the SHE in two dimensions at $L^{2}$-criticality, a natural question is whether the higher moments of the SHE in high dimensions also converge at the $L^{2}$-critical point. Our main result gives a negative answer: in high dimensions, the higher moments diverge when the coupling constant belongs to a nontrivial right-closed interval whose upper endpoint is the $L^{2}$-critical point. In particular, we obtain a sharp bound for the critical coupling constant at which the corresponding limiting higher moment undergoes a phase transition. As an application to the continuous directed polymer, we derive a sharp estimate for quantity believed to be closely related to the tail probability of the limiting partition function.
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