NewsUniversité Côte d'Azur congratulates the four teacher-researchers who have received the Collegium of Advanced Studies award.

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Université Côte d'Azur has selected four teacher-researchers to join the Collegium of Advanced Studies, launched by the IdEx in 2024.

As part of its strategy to promote scientific excellence and strengthen its international reach, Université Côte d'Azur has selected four teacher-researchers to join the Collegium of Advanced Studies, Launched by the IdEx in 2024, the evaluation committee, composed primarily of international experts, reviewed 18 high-quality applications. Following a two-phase selection process, including candidate interviews, four projects were chosen. The winners, comprising two professors and two associate professors, will benefit from a reduced teaching load, a bonus, and operating grants to carry out their ambitious research projects.

The 2025 call for applications

The call for applications for the 2025 edition is open from October 15, 2024 to January 20, 2025. The announcement of the results is scheduled for May 15, 2025.

The winners of the 2024 call for proposals and their projects Collegium

Ingrid Bethus, Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience

After completing her PhD at the University of Bordeaux 2, Ingrid Bethus pursued postdoctoral research in Edinburgh, Scotland, from 2006 to 2009, funded by a grant from the French Foundation for Medical Research. She returned to France in 2009 for a second postdoctoral position in Marseille, funded by an ANR (French National Research Agency) grant, where she developed her expertise in in vivo electrophysiology on behaving animals. In 2011, she was appointed Lecturer at the University of Côte d'Azur within the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology (IPMC). For several years, she has been developing interdisciplinary projects at the interface between integrated neuroscience and modeling through her local collaborations (LJAD, I3S, INRIA) within the NeuroMod Institute. Her Collegium project is part of this ongoing research, aiming to study dynamic neurocognitive states in learning processes from animals to humans. To achieve this, she built a consortium with her collaborators from the NeuroMod Institute and her collaborators from Polytechnique, Paris and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa.

Andreas Höring, Professor of Mathematics

After studying in Bayreuth, Lyon and Grenoble and obtaining a doctorate in mathematics, Andreas Höring was a lecturer at the Jussieu Mathematics Institute from 2007 to 2013. He has been a professor at the JA Dieudonné Laboratory since 2013 and was a junior member of the IUF from 2018 to 2023. His research focuses on the classification of Kähler complex projective and compact varieties.

His Collegium project aims to tackle the famous non-vanishing conjecture, an open problem even for small-dimensional Calabi-Yau and Hyperkähler varieties. One difficulty with this conjecture is that natural objects have indeterminacies (such as the function 1/x, which is undetermined for x=0). Andreas wants to provide a description of the geometry of these indeterminate loci; this description would provide new tools for proving the conjecture.

Jacques Barik, Professor of Neuroscience

Jacques Barik obtained his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Bath (England) in 2006, before undertaking a postdoctoral fellowship at the Collège de France from 2007 to 2010. He was a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France in 2013 and received an ANR Young Researcher grant that same year. Since 2013, he has been a lecturer at the Université Côte d'Azur, within the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology, and since 2018, he has led a research team recognized by the Foundation for Medical Research.

Her Collegium project explores the developmental origins of comorbid psychiatric disorders, particularly the interaction between tobacco addiction and mood disorders. Her work focuses on adolescence, a critical period of brain development, and aims to understand how brief exposure to nicotine or stress during this phase affects emotional and motivational processes in adulthood.

Paolo Zeppini, Senior Lecturer in Economics

After a master's degree in physics, Paolo Zeppini worked in mobile telecommunications consulting before moving into quantitative finance with a second master's degree, then into investment banking trading. Following a research master's degree, he obtained his doctorate in economics from the University of Amsterdam in 2011. His research combines his expertise in theoretical physics and economic modeling to study the dynamics of collective decision-making. This innovative approach allows him to explore nonlinear phenomena such as different attractors beyond stable equilibria, and to propose concepts like social tipping points to escape these equilibria.

His Collegium project aims to address the major challenges of our time, such as environmental sustainability and social inequality, by drawing inspiration from phase transitions in physics. He is developing a modeling framework to empirically identify and detect critical points, or "social tipping points," that can guide societies toward more desirable states.