The UAB receives five MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship projects

The selected projects are as follows:

Vivianite-Driven Phosphorus Recovery from Wastewater for Sustainable Circular Systems (VivaPhores): Argyro Plevri will help develop and optimize an innovative solution to recover phosphorus from wastewater treatment plants and transform it into a useful resource. The project aims to reduce pollution and promote the circular economy by taking advantage of a limited resource. It will also work to apply this technology on a real scale within the industrial sector. It will be supervised by researcher Joan Antoni Baeza of the Department of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering.

Mapping the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion of people with non-normative gender identities, expressions, and sex characteristics in sports and physical exercise (HERAIA): Ana Lucía Santos will analyse how people with diverse gender identities access and participate in sports. It will be carried out at the Sports Research Institute under the supervision of Emilio Fernández Peña. The project will study the sports policies and experiences of trans and intersex people to detect barriers and needs. It will also prepare recommendations to promote sports that are more inclusive and accessible for everyone.

Rethink Indigenous heritage and the rights of Nature in conflicting cultural landscapes (TRAILS): Francesco Orlandi, under the supervision of Montserrat Ventura Oller of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, will study the relationship between indigenous heritage, the environment, and social conflicts in cultural landscapes. The project will analyze how conservation and development policies affect the rights of local communities and nature, especially in the Andes. It will also promote new forms of dialogue and knowledge to move towards a fairer and more sustainable management of heritage.

Boundary Phenomena: Harmonic Measure, Unique Continuation and Area Minimizing Currents (BP-HM-UC-AMC): researcher Ian Manuel Fleschler will delve into the behavior of mathematical functions at borders, key to understanding many physical and geometric phenomena. The project will address advanced problems of harmonic measurements, unique continuation and regularity in geometry. The results could open new avenues of research in mathematical analysis, differential equations and geometry. It will be under the supervision of Xavier Tolsa Domènech, ICREA researcher at the Department of Mathematics.

Fado between Tradition and Market: Rethinking Heritage Music in Iberia's Cultural Economy (FADO-ME): Olga Kakosimou will delve into the role of the fado in the cultural economy, between the preservation of heritage and its commercialization. The project, which will be carried out in the Department of Art and Musicology under the supervision of researcher Sílvia Martínez, will explore how artists, institutions and the market negotiate authenticity and innovation, also in comparison with flamenco. It will provide new prospects for sustainable management of musical traditions in the current European context.

In total, the European Commission has granted €404.3 million to 1,610 researchers in the MSCA call for 2025, to which 17,066 applications were submitted. The selected projects, which represent about 80 nationalities and will be conducted in 45 countries, show the international character of the program. Of the total beneficiaries, 164 are to carry out research outside the EU or Horizon Europe countries and then return to Europe. The main disciplines belong to the fields of social sciences and humanities (23.4%), and to life sciences (20.8%).