Sept. 24 – Analysis, projects, and research: the University of Milan continues to compete successfully at the European and international level, and the European Research Council confirms the high quality and excellence of projects implemented by the University. The first EU agency dedicated to the support of scientific research frontier, the ERC is similar to the National Science Foundation in the United States, an independent agency for funding research in all disciplines: mathematics, physics and natural sciences, engineering and the humanities. The European Research Council has awarded to the University of Milan and the Centre for Research and Documentation “Luigi Einaudi ” of Turin a grant of almost €2.5 million, which went to Maurizio Ferrera, Professor of political Science and coordinator of the RESC -EU project (Reconciling Economic and Social Europe: Values, ideas and Politics). The project – five years long – aims to develop a theoretical framework on the origins and consequences of new tensions between welfare state and European integration. Starting from Weber’s institutionalist theories, the project – as stated on the website of the University – will analyze the political and intellectual dynamics that have accompanied the birth and evolution of social protection and the Union, with particular emphasis on the role of values, ideas and the search for consensus in favor or against institutional change. This theoretical analysis will be accompanied by in-depth empirical work. Using process tracing techniques and event structure analysis, the project will reconstruct the dynamics that led to some critical decisions in the historical development of national welfare and supranational integration. The project will analyze the public’s opinion on issues of welfare and the role of the EU in this field, through an original survey whose answers will be compared using new methodological analysis on social media. The Centro Einaudi in Turin will launch EUvisions, an Observatory to monitor and analyze EU policies, and the related intellectual debate, in order to develop new scenarios and proposals for action. The prestigious grant to Professor Maurizio Ferrera arrives almost a year after the assignment of another major funding to the University of Milan: in November 2012, a group of researchers, led by Professor Adriana Maggi, set up a project (“Role of liver estrogen receptor in female energy metabolism, reproduction and aging: what about your liver sexual functions?”) which received the ERC Advanced Investigators Grant. Awarded to researchers in the Department of Pharmacological and Biomolecular Sciences at the University of Milan, the grant amounts to almost €1.5 million for the next five years, and will allow to study the effects of estrogen production on women’s health during menopause and aging.
