There are six new research projects funded through the MIT-UNIPI Project, the agreement between the University of Pisa and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), created to encourage common research projects and the exchange of students and researchers between the two institutions. To date, 49 partnerships have been funded thanks to the joint programme. “We are proud of the fact that our university is able to conceive and lead innovative research projects in the most diverse disciplinary fields,” declares professor Lisandro Benedetti-Cecchi, Vice Rector for European and International Research, “as is evident from the six promising projects chosen in this seventh call from the MIT-UNIPI project, which includes seven of our twenty departments, some in multi-disciplinary groups. Thanks to the MIT-UNIPI Project seed funds, our Principal Investigators, to whom I offer my congratulations, will have the opportunity to initiate research with some of the most outstanding colleagues at international level.”
The projects which received funding through this seventh call are: “INTENSE: Particle Physics Experiments at the Fermilab High Intensity Frontier” by Simone Donati from the Department of Physics; “Using Graph Compression for Shortest Path Computation in Urban On-Demand Mobility” by Paolo Ferragina from the Department of Computer Science; “Event Extraction for Fake News Detection” by Alessandro Lenci and Francesco Marcelloni, from the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics and the Department of Information Engineering respectively; “Waves of Globalization, Between Tradition and Innovation” by Valeria Pinchera from the Department of Economics and Management; “Microfluidic Fabrication of Bioengineered Microspheres for Tissue Repair” by Elisabetta Rosellini and Maria Grazia Cascone from the Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering; “An In Vitro Model of Pyelonephritis” by Giovanni Vozzi and Emilia Ghelardi, from the Department of Information Engineering and the Department of Translational Research and of New Surgical and Medical Technologies.
Work on the projects which were awarded funding, coordinated jointly by a Principal Investigator from the University of Pisa and one from MIT, will take place between January 2019 and August 2020.
The framework agreement with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), stipulated by the University of Pisa in 2012 and recently renewed until 2021, is designed to promote common research projects and student and researcher exchanges in all scientific fields. Under the agreement, the MIT-UNIPI Project aims to facilitate exchanges and research activities between the two institutions using the Seed Funds, funding which supports new collaborations in their initial phases. The university will finance travel expenses, board and lodging for the research team from our university who will travel to MIT, the team’s participation at conferences for the dissemination of the research results and publication of these results in open access. In the same way, MIT will finance travel expenses, board and lodging for their Principal Investigator and their research team who will travel to Pisa.
25th January 2019