PIs: Karam Radwan (UChicago); Christopher Poppe (Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin)

Proposal: Adolescent mental health is in crisis. Approximately one in four adolescents aged 12–17 experiences a mental illness, with depression, suicidality, PTSD, and substance use disorders being highly prevalent (Jeffrey et al., 2024; McGorry & Mei, 2023). Conventional treatments are insufficient, leaving substantial unmet needs (Cortese et al., 2024). Psychedelic treatments (including MDMA-assisted therapy and psilocybin treatments) have demonstrated efficacy in adults for treatment-resistant depression and PTSD, and preliminary analyses suggest that carefully regulated research in older adolescents (16–17 years) may offer a favorable benefit-risk ratio (Sutherland et al., 2025). While psychedelic treatments in adults have attracted substantial research interest, adolescents are particularly vulnerable, and contemporary clinical studies have largely excluded minors due to ethical, developmental, and regulatory concerns (Rajwani et al., 2025).
Adolescence is a period of heightened neuroplasticity, emerging autonomy, identity formation, and developing capacities for mentalization, affect regulation, and risk assessment, which intersect with relational and environmental factors to influence vulnerability (Forsberg et al., 2025; Jacobs & Insua-Summerhays, 2025).
The ADAPT research collaboration aims to develop a psychodynamic-developmental framework to understand adolescent vulnerability in the context of psychedelic research, emphasizing risk awareness, prevention, and potential regulatory safeguards. The project will identify relational, identity-related, and affective constructs contributing to adolescent vulnerability, operationalize measurable indicators, and produce a consensus framework that can guide ethically responsible research and academic debate. The project does not involve clinical research, patient recruitment, or trial preparation. Instead, it integrates psychodynamic theory, developmental psychiatry, neuroscience, and bioethics to develop a conceptual and practical framework for safeguarding adolescents in any future research involving psychedelic treatments.

PIs: Nadya Mason (UChicago); Peter Neubauer (Technische Universität Berlin)

Proposal: This project aims to initiate a strategic, interdisciplinary research collaboration between the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) and the University of Chicago/Northwestern University in the fields of molecular engineering, biosystems engineering, catalysis, and sustainable energy. The initiative builds on complementary strengths: Berlin’s expertise in automated, data-driven bioprocess engineering (KIWI-biolab, TU Berlin), catalytic systems (UniSysCat), and translational biomedical infrastructures (Charité, Si-M), and Chicago’s strengths in molecular engineering, synthetic biology, microbiome translation (Duchossois Family Institute, DFI), and computational molecular design (PME).
The broader intellectual context lies at the convergence of automation, machine learning, and molecular-scale engineering to accelerate discovery-to-translation pipelines. In biosciences, this includes high-throughput, FAIR-data-driven bioprocess optimization integrated with clinically relevant manufacturing environments (e.g., DFI cGMP facility). In catalysis and energy, it includes automated catalyst discovery, molecular simulation, and reaction engineering across scales, linking UniSysCat expertise with Northwestern’s catalysis and surface science ecosystem.
The innovation of the project lies not in a single disciplinary advance, but in establishing a structured transatlantic interface that integrates:
 • Automated high-throughput experimentation
 • Machine-learning-guided process modeling
 • Molecular and materials engineering
 • Translational and scale-up infrastructures
By pairing complementary research environments and embedding early-career researchers from the outset, the collaboration is designed to generate preliminary data, joint methodological frameworks, and externally competitive proposals (EU–US, DFG–NSF, Horizon Europe).
This initiative represents a new partnership under the BUA–Chicago framework and serves as a pilot platform for a long-term Berlin–Chicago STEM alliance addressing major societal challenges in health biotechnology, sustainable chemistry, and energy transition.

PIs: Josephine McDonagh (UChicago); Gesa Stedman (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Proposal: The proposed project will explore how commercialization affected colonial policies, in particular with regard to academic collections in Berlin (and ultimately, in Britain), and how looted objects and literary texts were harnessed to justify colonialist expansion in the late 19th and early 20th century, this being the period when Germany competed with Britain and both were heavily involved in colonizing areas such as the Pacific islands and using them for their own commercial interests. The legacies of overlapping empires in academic collections have not been systematically studied, nor has the role of education in this context been explored sufficiently. This collaboration will allow us to study points at which German and British agents intersected, and to consider the intentional and unforeseen consequences of their interactions. Preliminary research in some of HU’s collections shows that British agents, merchants, or dignitaries in colonies or areas of interest (e.g. Greece, what is now Sudan or Turkey) dominated the forbidden but still active trading of archeological objects, which then found their way into German academic collections used for teaching purposes. Conversely, some objects found e.g. in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford were obtained (by often unknown means) by German colonialists with connections to HU. Furthermore, some key thinkers of the period in question developed colonialist ideas in close association with their more straightforward academic work, and disseminated their concepts through public lectures but also popular literary fiction. This attempt to re-map the world according to nationalist, colonialist concepts found its way into academic collections and related popular educational texts and is a case of subtle, often almost invisible cultural exchange with far-reaching consequences. Paying attention to both important agents (colonialists, traders, educators, writers, translators, artists, heads of collections) and their writing, as well as the remaining objects themselves, requires an interdisciplinary approach which emphasizes both the symbolic as well as material cultural exchange in the context of colonialist politics and trade.

PIs: Jorge Jaramillo (UChicago); Claudia Böhm (Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin)
 
Proposal: Flexible behavior, the ability to adapt decisions and actions to changing goals and contexts, is a hallmark of intelligence and is critically impaired in many neuropsychiatric disorders. Understanding how the brain achieves such flexibility requires identifying how abstract knowledge about task structure (rules, goals, action sequences) is combined with moment-to-moment contextual information, such as spatial location.
While the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is known to encode abstract variables, and the hippocampal formation is central to spatial and episodic representations, how these systems interact in real time to guide flexible, goal-directed behavior remains poorly understood. Resolving these critical research questions will be significantly accelerated by tightly coordinated experimental and theoretical approaches across laboratories. The objective of this project is to establish a transatlantic research partnership focused on understanding interactions between the subiculum and PFC. The subiculum is a major hippocampal output structure whose role in decision-making and behavioral flexibility is only beginning to be appreciated. This seed project is designed to lay the conceptual, methodological, and collaborative groundwork for a sustained joint effort to reveal key mechanisms underlying adaptive behavior.
Specifically, the project will pursue three objectives. First, we will generate a set of targeted pilot data using an established goal-directed navigation task in rodents and high-density electrophysiology, sufficient to probe candidate signatures of prefrontal–subicular interaction during decision points. Second, we will jointly analyze these data in a dedicated workshop that brings together experimentalists and theorists from both labs as well as invited external speakers to develop shared analysis pipelines and identify key variables for future study. Third, we will use these results as a foundation to co-develop mechanistic hypotheses and circuit models. Based on these objectives, we will prepare a joint grant proposal and a joint review article synthesizing current experimental and theoretical perspectives on subicular–prefrontal coordination.
This project will accelerate future discovery in the neural mechanisms of flexible cognition and establish a durable transatlantic network for our teams and interdisciplinary research with broad implications for cognitive neuroscience, computational modeling, and mental health.

PIs: Anastasia Giannakidou (UChicago); Mingya Liu (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Proposal: Modality is concerned with the speaker’s attitude towards the truthfulness of a proposition. The use of modal expressions is indispensable and pervasive in natural language and communication.
In information-exchanging situations, the semantics of modal expressions indicates different degrees of truthfulness or speaker commitment. However, natural language communication encompasses more than simple exchanges of semantic information, as illustrated below.
• Context dependence and subjectivity: The choice of modal expressions may relate to more than just the semantics and epistemic stance of the speaker but depend on the entire social context. For example, persuasive language can involve the use of strong modals (e.g., “We must act now to climate change”). In contrast, weaker modals can be used for plausible deniability (“You may get a promotion soon.”) or as politeness strategies (“You may leave now.”). Relatedly, speaker commitment is largely subjective, or in other words, modal sentences often convey speaker bias, due to missing or limited information, perspectivetaking or strategic communication in competitive situations (Giannakidou & Mari 2026. Modal Sentences. Cambridge University Press; Rotter & Liu 2025. A register approach to modal (non-)concord in English. doi:10.1017/S1360674325100361).
• From humans to machines: A more recent and challenging question is how knowledge and ignorance, as well as certainty and uncertainty are handled in Large Language Models (LLMs), and how they are communicated, in comparison to the human mind and act. For example, it has been pointed out that LLMs express certainty more often than uncertainty (Ulmer et al. 2025. Anthropomimetic Uncertainty: What Verbalized Uncertainty in Language Models is Missing: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10587), and that LLMs sometimes make logically inconsistent judgements from epistemic modals (Holliday & Mandelkern, 2024: Conditional and Modal Reasoning in Large Language Models,
https://arxiv.org/html/2401.17169v1).
The project investigates modal use in natural language and communication, focusing on the communication of knowledge, bias, rhetoric and (un)certainty. Although modal expressions have been extensively studied in linguistics, we do not have a sufficient understanding of their use in situated context. Additionally, the handling of (un)certainty in human- and AI-agent communication raises many challenging questions which requires a more holistic perspective for understanding the production and use of information.

PIs: Sarah B. King (UChicago); Hannah Catherine Nerl (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
 
Proposal: MXenes, two-dimensional transition metal carbides and nitrides, have emerged as a highly promising materials class for applications ranging from energy storage to electromagnetic shielding. However, most MXenes produced via conventional etching methods possess a disordered mixture of surface terminations (–O, –OH, –F), which complicates both fundamental understanding and technological optimization. Recent advances in molten-salt synthesis have enabled the production of single-termination halide MXenes (e.g., Ti₃C₂Cl₂), which offer welldefined surface chemistry, higher electrical conductivity, and improved stability compared to mixed-termination counterparts. Despite these advances, the fundamental dielectric properties of single-termination MXenes remain poorly understood. The dielectric function ε(q,ω), which governs optical response, plasmonic behavior, and electron-phonon interactions, has not been systematically mapped across momentum space for these materials. Moreover, local disorder such as defects, edges, and strain is expected to influence these properties, requiring spatially resolved measurements. This project brings together chemistry and physics to address this gap. We will use momentumresolved EELS (q-EELS) with a Nion Ultra-STEM to directly measure the loss function Im[1/ε(q,ω)] across a range of momentum transfers and energies. Crucially, STEM-EELS provides nanometer spatial resolution alongside momentum resolution, enabling us to correlate dielectric response with local structure, such as variations near edges or defects. This approach bypasses the limitations of near-field techniques and provides direct access to the intrinsic dielectric response, enabling comparison with ab initio predictions and establishing structure-property relationships between surface chemistry and electronic behavior. The scientific questions are fundamental: How do uniform halide terminations modify interband transitions? What is the momentum dispersion of collective excitations? How do defects and edges alter the local dielectric response? This collaboration brings together sample synthesis capabilities at the University of Chicago with momentum-resolved electron spectroscopy expertise at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Dr. Hannah C. Nerl has established q-EELS as a powerful tool for mapping energy-momentum dispersion in 2D materials, including recent work on exciton-polaritons in WSe₂ and hybrid plasmon-phonon modes in van der Waals heterostructures. Her expertise, combined with access to advanced STEM-EELS instrumentation through JEMA, provides the ideal platform to address these questions and generate the first comprehensive ε(q,ω) dataset for single-termination MXenes. Prof. King has extensive expertise on the plasmonic and electronic properties of MXenes and has conducted previous experiments with mixed termination MXenes using interferometric EELS at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy User Facility. However, due to disorder in the samples, the previous experiments were not successful. Q-EELS does not have that limitation and is an ideal approach to investigate the electronic structure of these promising new materials on the nanoscale.

PIs: Kimberly Kay Hoang (UChicago); Franziska Cooiman (Technische Universität Berlin)

Proposal: As wealth concentration increases globally, sociological research has begun to examine its drivers. Scholars point to several factors that enable the concentration of wealth, including inheritance or tax regulations. However, these factors have neither been studied systematically nor comparatively. To this end, the project advances a novel perspective on the varieties of wealth support systems by systematically comparing the actors, mechanisms, and institutions that enable wealth concentration across countries. Key actors include wealthy elites, financial service providers, and entrepreneurs; core mechanisms encompass inheritance, taxation, and offshoring; and central institutions involve law, family, and gender. The project’s central innovations are to systematize and theorize these factors as wealth support systems, and to empirically map and compare these systems, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in Germany and the United States.

In Chicago and Berlin, internationally recognized research clusters on wealthy elites and their support systems have formed, which this project brings into sustained collaboration (see Appendix). The Chicago team comprises PI Kimberly Kay Hoang, whose cutting-edge research on global financial elites has set the agenda for the study of wealth-enabling actors, advanced further by doctoral researcher My Nguyen; Karin Knorr Cetina, a leading sociologist and theorist in the field, and Doron Shiffer-Sebba and Camille Biron-Boilea, who contribute novel insights on the family and family offices as enablers of wealth. The Berlin team comprises PI Franziska Cooiman, with innovative work on venture capital as a wealth-enabling mechanism; Isabell Stamm, a leading economic sociologist studying succession and class-making among wealthy elites; and early-career researchers Sanja Beronja and Allan Sandham, who contribute novel research on entrepreneurs and foundations as wealth-enablers. Collectively, the team has received numerous prestigious awards and fellowships and shaped contemporary sociological scholarship on wealth support systems.

The project’s central activities—research visits, a two-day workshop, and regular hybrid collaboration—correspond to three interrelated goals:
1. To establish an institutional disciplinary partnership between Berlin and Chicago that fosters mentoring and exchange across institutions and career stages.
2. To facilitate global, interdisciplinary discussion on wealth support systems.
3. To formulate a comparative perspective on wealth support systems, providing the foundation for future joint work