New creative minds at the Zukunftskolleg

In 2023, Jesse completed her doctoral degree in biology at Duke University as an NDSEG Fellow; from 2023-2025, she held a postdoctoral position, also in the Department of Biology at Duke University. Her research project at the Zukunftskolleg endeavours to understand how animals are able to navigate long distances with extreme precision. It is known that many rely on visual and geomagnetic cues to guide their navigation, but theoretical models suggest these are likely insufficient to explain the level of precision/accuracy animals demonstrate in the wild. One hypothesis is that they may use collective behaviour to increase their navigational accuracy, but this has yet to be tested in a long-distance navigator. She will conduct experiments to test whether the Australian Bogong uses collective navigation during its extreme, long-distance migration, using a mixture of laboratory and field experiments. In particular, she will develop a virtual reality apparatus to test various hypotheses about the environmental and social cues they use while navigating.

Gabriella completed her doctoral degree in the Political Science Department at Colorado State University. Her fields were international relations, comparative politics, and environmental politics and policy. The fellowship at the Zukunftskolleg is her first postdoctoral position. In addition to her work at Colorado State University, she is also the media coordinator and a fellow at the North American and Arctic Defence and Security Network.

In general, her work looks at Arctic security, where she explores everything from climate change and human security to military security trends, the changing situation in the Arctic since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, science diplomacy and the role of experts and specifically hybrid threats. She has also worked on European maritime security, ontological security and securitization.

Her research project at the Zukunftskolleg is entitled “Mapping Strategic Convergence: The Arctic and Hybrid Threats in Northern Europe”. In the project, she maps out key trends and patterns of how security decision-making has evolved since 2022, focusing on the two cases of security community formation in Northern Europe and hybrid warfare in the North Sea. In each case, she will map out the constellation of actors involved in the decision-making process, trace EU-NATO involvement and investigate how decision-makers choose to prioritize certain dimensions when making decisions on complex issues. “This work is particularly relevant given the changing security landscape in Europe and the increasing importance of both the Arctic for Europe as well as the role of under the threshold threats that are present beyond regions such as the North Sea,” explains Gabriella.

Anna completed her doctoral degree at the Università degli Studi della Campania “L. Vanvitelli” in 2023 and subsequently continued as a postdoctoral researcher there. Later, she joined Università Roma Tre, where she worked on formal verification and its applications in mathematics. Her doctoral research focused on applying model-theoretic tools to valued fields, which are algebraic structures equipped with a notion of size or divisibility, with a particular emphasis on their value groups. She remains especially interested in the model theory of valued fields and ordered abelian groups, including structures such as Hahn fields and extensions of p-adic fields.

As a postdoctoral researcher, she is specializing in model theory, a branch of logic that studies mathematical structures (such as fields, groups, or ordered sets) through formal languages. “In simple terms, model theory explores what can be defined, proved, or classified within these structures,” she explains. “It has deep connections with many areas of mathematics, particularly algebra, number theory and diophantine geometry.”

At the Zukunftskolleg, her project “Kaplansky Embeddings and Lifting Properties” investigates Hahn fields of power series and their automorphisms. The goal is to construct “good” embeddings of valued fields into Hahn(-like) fields to obtain power series fields with an explicit description of their group of valuation-preserving automorphisms, in both equicharacteristic and mixed characteristic cases.

Much of Gloriana’s research has focused on the topic of how, and why, many animal species maintain predictable associations with a specific set of conspecifics while others do not. For example, in Chaverri and Kunz (2010) she compared different species of tent-making bats to assess how roost ecology might explain various aspects of social living, including group cohesion. In two other studies, she compared populations that encounter differences in resource abundance and found that group cohesion varies among these populations (Chaverri et al. 2007; Chaverri 2010). In fact, one of her main research interests is to understand how the environment influences social aggregations, specifically how groups are formed and maintained.

Following various projects on the question of how the world got into the computer, he was interested in exploring forms of the disappearance of technology. His current research project is dedicated to the formatting achievements of bureaucratic contre rôles. How do citizens, soldiers or employees become the commodities of state, military and corporate administrative apparatuses in the 20th century?

Babu Thaliath’s research mainly examines the historical influence of mathematical formalism on the axiomatization or axiomatic development of early modern mathematical sciences, especially mechanics. The theoretical framework of the research is based on identifying and studying the complementarities between the otherwise historically and theoretically opposed formalism of Hilbert’s and Kant’s intuitionism. This requires an extensive investigation of the genesis and development of synthetic and analytic approaches in the axiomatization of mathematics, particularly geometry, in the modern age. From his previous postdoctoral research in Berlin and Cambridge, Babu Thaliath is familiar with the synthetic framework of the historic axiomatization of early modern mathematical sciences. However, he has yet to procure sufficient knowledge of the analytical frameworks of axiomatics, as is particularly evident in the context of logical empiricism in the 20th century, represented in the works of Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Hans Reichenbach, Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Carl G. Hempel, W.V.O. Quine, Kurt Gödel et al. The seminal works of these philosophers are available in the Philosophical Archive of the University of Konstanz. Therefore, the Senior Fellowship enables Babu Thaliath to find the necessary materials for his research in the archive, the university library and the seminar libraries in Konstanz.

His research project relates to Muslim-Crusader interactions in the 12th and 13th centuries. The historian specifically seeks to study the reciprocal impacts of diplomacy and diplomatic relations between Muslim and Frankish rulers and Islamic law during the period we generally call “the Crusades”. The project’s focus is to identify and examine the role of Islamic law and Muslim jurists who were involved in the drafting and vetting of treatises, truces, alliances, and diplomacy in general, between Muslim and Frankish leaders. It will also study the Islamic religious and legal arguments used to justify them, as well as their terms and duration, and determine if the Islamic laws on war and peace were impacted or revised in light of Muslim-Frankish diplomacy. The project will equally assess whether diplomacy placed restrictions on wars or created alternative avenues and frameworks for Frankish and Muslim actors to pursue in order to settle disagreements and grievances away from the battlefield, and to what extent these dynamics gave rise to an international “system” of medieval diplomacy and peace-making that informed and shaped modern international relations and international law.

During the past 40 years, Raghavendra Gadagkar has established an active school of research in the area of animal behaviour, ecology and evolution. The origin and evolution of cooperation in animals, especially in social insects, such as ants, bees and wasps, is a major goal of his research. By identifying and utilizing crucial elements in India’s biodiversity, he has added a special Indian flavour to his research.

Rita Velloso’s project, "Building Transdisciplinary Research on Brazilian Urban Studies," aims to strengthen institutional collaboration between UFMG’s Institute for Transdisciplinary Advanced Studies (IEAT) and the Zukunftskolleg, creating a sustained academic exchange between Latin America and Europe. Her research not only engages with pressing urban issues in Brazil but also situates them within broader global debates on urbanization, ecology, and social inclusion. Her methodological framework integrates insights from architecture, geography, history, and anthropology, fostering innovative discussions on urban transformations. This interdisciplinary perspective will be particularly beneficial for research clusters at the University of Konstanz, such as the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” and the Latin America Forum, where Rita Velloso’s work on urban insurgencies and cosmopolitan imaginaries can contribute to ongoing discussions on social inequalities and urban marginalization.