UB participates in three COST Actions conferred in 2014
The University of Barcelona (UB) participates in three COST Actions (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) conferred in 2014. These actions encourage the establishment of cooperation networks that favour collaboration and interaction among European researchers. COST networks, which gather researchers who work on specific aspects in the nine key domains, are a platform to establish research collaboration agreements across Europe and worldwide.
The University of Barcelona (UB) participates in three COST Actions (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) conferred in 2014. These actions encourage the establishment of cooperation networks that favour collaboration and interaction among European researchers. COST networks, which gather researchers who work on specific aspects in the nine key domains, are a platform to establish research collaboration agreements across Europe and worldwide.
To be exact, COST Actions conferred in 2014 in which UB participates are:
The project European Network of Investigators Triggering Exploratory Research on Myeloid Regulatory Cells (Mye-EUNITER), led by the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany). Eighteen European research groups and three UB groups collaborate in this project. UB collaboration is headed by the lecturer Annabel Valledor and Professor Antonio Celda, from the Department of Physiology and Immunology of the Faculty of Biology of UB. The main objective of the action is to establish a gold standard of common protocols and harmonizing guidelines for the analysis and clinical monitoring of myeloid regulatory cells (MRCs) in human diseases and animal models. These cells are a group of specialized white blood cells that, according to recent investigations, contribute to the disruption of the immune systemʼs equilibrium in diseases such as infections, inflammatory processes and cancer.
Cristina Andrés Lacueva, lecturer from the Department of Nutrition and Bromatology and head of the Biomarkers and Nutritional & Food Metabolomics Research Group of UB, leads the UB group that participates in the project Interindividual variation in response to consumption of plant food bioactives and determinants involved (POSITIVe), coordinated by the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) in Clermont/Theix (France). The goal of the project, in which experts from sixteen European countries participate, is to determine inter-individual variation in bioavailability and physiological responses to consumption of plant food bioactives in relation to cardiometabolic endpoints. It will provide scientific knowledge to regulatory authorities for a new generation of nutritional recommendations targeted to large population subgroups and foster the competitiveness of the European food industry by underpinning the development of new functional/customized foods.
Evolution of reading in the age of digitisation E-Read is a COST project coordinated by the University of Stavanger (Norway). A group headed by the lecturer Núria Castells Gómez, from the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology of the Faculty of Psychology of UB, participates in the project. The main objective of the consortium, which gathers researchers from fifteen European countries, is to analyse the implications of reading digitization. Research shows that the amount of time spent reading long-form texts is in decline, and due to digitization, reading is becoming more intermittent and fragmented. Based on a multidimensional, integrative model of reading, and combining paradigms from experimental sciences with perspectives from the humanities, the project will help societies across Europe to understand the impact of digitization on reading and cope optimally with its effects.
It is important to remember that UB also collaborates in projects conferred on previous COST Actions calls, for instance the COST project led by Joan Bosch, lecturer from the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutic Chemistry. Other UB research groups that participate in this type of projects are the ones coordinated by Professor Blanca Gari de Aguilera, from the Department of Medieval History, Paleography and Diplomatics; the lecturer Marc Valls, from the Department of Genetics; Professor Joan Ramon Morante, from the Department of Electronics, and the lecturer Montserrat Marimon, from the Department of General Linguistics.