Daniele Castagneri - INTREE

Daniele Castagneri obtained his PhD at the University of Turin, Italy, with a thesis on tree growth and mortality patterns in mountain forests. In 2012 he moved to the University of Padua, as a post-doc at the TESAF department. His research interests concern forest ecology and tree ecophysiology, investigated through the application of tree-ring analysis and quantitative wood anatomy. In the last years he has collaborated with different institutes in Italy and abroad to assess short and long-term climate influence on tree growth in mountain, temperate, and Mediterranean ecosystems. In 2017 he won a MSCA Individual Fellowship for the project INTREE (August 2018 – July 2020), to be accomplished at the WSL Institute in Birmensdorf, Zurich, Switzerland. INTREE aims to combine three different methods, xylogenesis observations, tree-ring analyses, and quantitative wood anatomy, to link climate variations to xylem formation processes at different time scales, in order to determine how and when climate influences carbon sink activity in conifers.

  Francesco Cerchiaro – REMix: Christian-Muslim families dealing with religious pluralism in everyday family life: Religious reconstruction in religiously mixed marriages

Francesco Cerchiaro is a post-doc fellow at the University of Padova (Italy) (FISPPA Department), where he obtained his PhD in Social Sciences in 2013. The PhD thesis, focused on mixed families, intersects sociology of family, culture and religion. His research interests include cultural change and multiculturalism in Europe. His approach is characterized by the use of qualitative methods, in particular of “life stories” and ethnographic observation. He was also involved in researches on the second generations of immigrants in Italy and their quest for citizenship’s recognition.

Some of his contributions were published in Italian and International journals as Quaderni di sociologia and Social Compass. Recently he devised a monograph entitled “Amori e confini. Le coppie miste tra islam, educazione dei figli e vita quotidiana”. [Love and borders. Mixed couples amongst Islam, children’s education and everyday life”] (Guida Ed. 2016).

With his “ReMix” project he will be a Marie Curie fellow at the Katholieke Universiteit (Leuven - Belgium). The research will investigate the daily life of Christian-Muslim families in the Flemish region. The study on this type of marriages will be a key to examine the wider social changes related to family, Islam and religious pluralism in Europe.

  Elisa Di Rosa – MOTIVAGEING Motivation-cognition interaction in ageing and Parkinson’s disease

Elisa completed her MA in Neuroscience and Neuropsychological Rehabilitation in 2010 at the University of Padova. In 2014 she obtained her PhD in Psychological Sciences, and then worked as Postdoc at the University of Padova (Department of General Psychology and Department of Neuroscience). She has been visiting PhD student at the Institute of Neuroscience - Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), and visiting post-doc at the Department of Experimental Psychology- Gent University (Belgium) and at the Department of Psychology- Ryerson University (Toronto-Canada).

Her research activity mainly concerns the study of executive functions, with a special focus on healthy ageing and Parkinson's disease, and though using different approaches (behavioural and electrophysiological methods, non-invasive brain stimulation).

In 2017 she has been awarded a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship. The broad aim of this project (MOTIVAGEING) is to study the interaction between motivation and cognitive functions, in both healthy ageing and Parkinson's disease. Thanks to this fellowship she will work at Washington University (St.Louis - Missouri) with Prof. Todd Braver, at the Department of General Psychology of University of Padova, with Prof. Daniela Mapelli, and at Keele University (United Kingdom) with Prof. Nicky Edelstyn. 

  Giulia Tessari - STEADY: SaTEllyte synthetic Aperture radar interferometry to model Dam stabilitY

Giulia completed her MA in Environmental Engineering at the University of Padova and in 2015 she obtained her PhD in Earth Sciences from the Department of Geosciences of the University of Padova. Her research interests concern the use of Remote Sensing Techniques, and particularly space-borne SAR Interferometry, to monitor geological hazards and instability phenomena such as landslides, subsidence, sinkholes and even man-made structures such as buildings and infrastructures affected by possible damages. Furthermore, she is interested on modelling the sources that cause these hazardous events to understand the triggering factors. Her project, STEADY, will lead to apply these techniques focusing on dam stability, in order to define a specific tool of analysis, supported and supervised by Dr. Paolo Pasquali, the president and technical director of Sarmap SA. This Swiss company builds and provides an innovative remote sensing software dedicated to the generation of digital information for a better management and risk assessment of Earth's resources.