„A poetic system: the development of contemporary Polish poetic language (1795–1918)” – amount of funding: PLN 545,340.

Her project combines natural language processing, corpus linguistics, and quantitative modelling, and treats nineteenth-century poetry as material for large-scale computer analysis.

The basis of the research will be a digital corpus of poetic texts, enriched with structured metadata and subjected to morphosyntactic annotation adapted to historical Polish. The analysis will be based on stylometric methods, lexical diversity and dispersion, and quantitative verse analysis, all implemented with the tools developed at CLARIN-PL (among others WebSty, LEM, CompCorp), as well as original R and Python procedures. A separate component is relational modelling, which integrates linguistic features with historical and social data.

Part of the project is a three-month research internship at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, one of the leading European centres of computerized poetry analysis. The research results will include not only scientific publications, but also open, reusable digital resources: a corpus with metadata, documented analytical scripts, and procedures ensuring research reproducibility.

The project fits into the profile of Wrocław University of Science and Technology as a centre for language technologies and reinforces the university's presence in the European network CLARIN ERIC.

„Enantioselective oxidation reactions catalysed by nitroxide mini-proteins” – funding amount: PLN 760,987.

The aim of the project is to develop innovative, sustainable catalysts. New biocatalysts, so-called “artificial enzymes”, will be developed by combining the unique properties of mini-proteins with stable nitroxide radicals. The systems will enable efficient and selective transformation of alcohols into valuable chiral compounds.

The results have the potential to reduce costs and minimize the negative impact on the environment during the production of medicines and plant protection products. These studies directly align with the principles of green chemistry and the promotion of innovative, ecological technologies.

An important element of the project is the development of international mobility and the establishment of scientific cooperation with leading centres worldwide. To this end, Dr. Mateusz Piotr Sowiński will undertake a 6-month scientific internship at the prestigious Stanford University in the USA. This trip will allow an innovative combination of bio- and electrocatalysis in the team of Prof. Song Lin – a pioneer in the field of electrochemical methods that advance organic synthesis and enable more sustainable chemical processes.

„Parallel sensitization of luminescence in the visible and near infrared range in lanthanide-doped nanocrystals for optogenetic stimulation and bioimaging” – funding amount: PLN 503,067.

In his project, our researcher designs nanocrystals doped with lanthanide ions, which act as miniature light converters. The main goal is to develop a new generation of nanomaterials for theranostics, which combines diagnostics and therapy methodologies.

One of the challenges of modern medicine, including optogenetics, is the limited ability of visible light to penetrate tissues. This problem can be overcome with the use of safe near-infrared light (NIR), which reaches far deeper into the organism. Nanoparticles developed as a result of the project will serve as dual light converters – they will transform NIR radiation into visible light, enabling remote activation of neurons, while emitting NIR radiation of lower energy allowing their tracking in the body. Such dual functionality is crucial for the effectiveness and safety of future therapies. However, the remaining significant challenge results from the competition between processes for the same excitation energy, which leads to signal weakening.

In his project, Dr. Wojciech Piotrowski investigates various strategies for sensitizing luminescence, i.e. enhancing the intensity of light emission through the modification of the structure and composition of nanocrystals. This will allow the identification of mechanisms responsible for efficient emission in both the visible and NIR range. Special attention will be paid to combining various methods of enhancing luminescence, the potential of which has not yet been unambiguously confirmed in experiments.

The key results of the project will be verified during a research internship at BAM in Berlin, in Dr. Ute Resch-Genger's group, specializing in standardization and certification of spectroscopic methods.

„Studying the phase structure of dense QCD matter using multi-messenger signals from core-collapse supernovae” – funding amount: PLN 611,200.

The project focuses on researching matter in extreme conditions which prevail inside massive stars ending their lives as supernovae by core collapse. In this case, particular importance is attributed to the equation of state of dense matter, describing the relationships between its pressure, density, and energy. Its understanding can help explain both the explosion mechanism and the fundamental processes in nuclear physics and elementary particles.

We can learn about what happens inside the supernova by studying gravitational waves and neutrinos. Both signals originate deep in the center of the collapsing star and reach the observers before the light emitted when the shockwave reaches the surface. Their cross analysis allows us to study processes that cannot be directly observed, including the properties of very high density matter.

The aim of the project is to develop modern models of supernovae using large-scale computer simulations. The research covers, among others, the possible states and phase transformations of matter described by quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which is a theory of interactions between the fundamental components of nuclei.

Improved models will allow us to determine how the properties of dense matter affect the explosion process as well as neutrino signals and gravitational waves. Comparing simulation results with detector data can bring us closer to a better understanding of the laws of physics that apply in conditions impossible to replicate on Earth.