The goal of this project is to promote a long·-term cross-cultural understanding and international academic collaboration between South Korea and Switzerland through an exchange of bath lecture- based and regional physical therapy activity-based programs related to health recovery and improvement, for a promotion of active aging as a foundation for intergenerational relations.

The Health Culture Promotion and Globalization Initiative will develop a strong academic relationship between UNIGE and Yonsei through the exchange of professors and PhD students from each institution who, during their exchange period, will actively
engage in a cultural exchange with the local academic community through joint-research, courses, and special physical therapy activity workshops.

ln recent years Korean Studies at Yonsei University in Korea, as many other Korean studies related institutions do, have an intention to extend its studies, beyond the conventional framework of Korean studies, to the global level of research. Although Korean studies within Yonsei or Korea have relatively abundant human resources as well as material supports and they have easier access to academic esources as well, their researches could have barely escaped their conventional framework and nationalistic perspectives. On the other hands Korean studies in regions other than Korea, including UNIGE's, have suffered a shortage of human resources and difficulties in accessing primary sources concerning Korean studies in spite of securing relatively objective perspectives and fresh methodologies. ln this respect, collaboration between two research units in Korean studies can be complementary strategy to maximize merits on both sides, at the same time to minimize defects. Researchers and Students in UNIGE Korean Studies take advantage of Yonsei University's infrastructures and resources of Korean Studies as a key point in Korea. Yonsei University's Korean studies have opportunities to refine their researches keeping in touch with UNIGE's high level of researches in Humanities in general and reinforcing academic network in Europe.

The goals of the project:

• Establishing Joint Research Lab ( 3+3)
• Annual Academic Workshop
• Researchers (Students) Exchanges
• Opening Library Services
• Establishing Permanent Inter-University Koean Studies Research lnstitute
  (UNIGE-Yonsei Inter University Center for Korean Studies)
• Regularization of Joint Workshops or Conferences
• Developing Joint Educational Program (Graduate Level)
• Joint Degree
• Dispatching Researchers (lncluding Postdoctoral)

Design Thinking is increasingly recognized as a high potential skill and approach in tackling complex challenges (also called “wicked or messy problems”). It is widely used in the areas of Service Design and management as well as throughout all steps of the Design
Science Research (DSR) methodology common in Information Systems and Computer Science. ThinkDesign is a project aiming at developing Design Thinking as a key skillset at both Yonsei and Geneva Universities based on joining forces of two professors active in this area. In doing so, the project will allow to elaborate a shared ontology on Design Thinking including scientific literature, workshops, best practices and concrete projects, based on our respective knowledge, teaching experiences and projects in our own countries, namely Switzerland and South Korea. The project will concretely test and evaluate the shared knowledge by teaching courses at both universities.

ThinkDesing has the following main objectives addressing the issue of developing Design Thinking as an academic skillset in a complex world where creativity is becoming a key factor for purposeful research and innovation :

• Develop a shared ontology in Design Thinking based on European and Asian experience.
• Develop and experiment new academic curricula in Design Thinking at all academic levels including executive education.
• Offer the opportunity for the applicants to participate in the teaching of each other’s universities.
• Allow for Yonsei PhD students to participate in the Doctoral School in Design Science & Design Thinking in Switzerland.
• Define a plan to sustain and develop the initial effort beyond the project funding.

Maintenance of calcium homeostasis and control of oxidative stress in the cytosol and organelles are important for cellular function and survival. Persistent metabolic stress caused by unhealthy lifestyle deteriorates cellular and organellar functions, in particular in individuals with genetic susceptibility to type 2 diabetes. This disease affects 380 million people worldwide and is steadily increasing in the wake of the obesity epidemic. Accumulating evidence suggests pathophysiological implication of mitochondria and ER leading to irreversible loss of normal cell function. However, despite recent progress, the molecular mechanisms underlying organellar stress leading to metabolic diseases and aging remain elusive. Our project focuses on the delineation of mitochondrial stress and ER stress related to calcium overload and oxidative injury. The elucidation of these mechanisms should provide clues on therapeutic intervention to arrest disease progression. Our proposal aims to strengthen long-term close collaboration between eminent scientists with established expertise in the field with documented past collaborations. In addition to scientific advance, both universities should benefit from education of students and postdocs.

With the theme, “Main Challenges for Christian Theology Today,” for the collaborative research project of UNIGE-Yonsei Seed Funding, we present a 3-year-long proposal. With this project, we seek to create a theological partnership between our two Theological Faculties (University of Geneva, Yonsei University). We envision a three-year program as follows: “Religious Pluralism or Religious Multiple Belonging? Comparative Approaches.” In an age of the so-called migration of Christianity to the East and the South, religious identity is in flux. What is the impact of our societies’ religious pluralism for theology? The second year’s theme, “Humanity Enhanced or Trans-Humanized: Ethical and Theological Reflections,” will deal with the future of humanity theologically and ethically. The theme of the third year, “Eco-Theology and the Call for Justice” will address the question of eco-theology in its relation to the issue of justice broadly conceived. This Theological Consultation between theologians and ethicists from Yonsei University and the University of Geneva will foster a dialogue across cultures (including theological cultures) in order to learn from one another about the current challenges theological and ethical inquiry is facing today: which challenges may be called common challenges? Which ones are specific to each context? Among the common and the specific challenges, what may we learn from one another? In the process of these three consultations, we may discover many similarities, as well as dissimilarities, in our ways of doing theology and of addressing current challenges which confront us all.

The Project intended as a “Tier 1 seed grant” builds on previous research and expertise of both Geneva and South Korea based teams on the insertion of emerging economies in the global economy and their role within the current institutional framework. The seed proposal would lead to a wider project to be submitted to funding agencies such as the Swiss Network of International Studies (SNIS) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF). The project will analyse the causes for emerging and middle powers to create new groupings and institutional settings, integrating into existing ones and at the role of transgovernmental cooperation for establishing new institutions and/or reinforcing existing ones. The grant will strengthen cooperation between the UNIGE based team (composed by Prof. Sandra Lavenex, Dr. Omar Serrano and their research assistant Wang Lei) and the Yonsei team (composed by Prof. Jongryn Mo and a research assistant Hyun Jung Hee). The Geneva team has looked at the challenge that the ascent of large fast-growing emerging economies poses to the EU's and US' continued ability (separately or even jointly) to shape the international order. The Seoul-based team has looked at new governance groups among emerging countries such as the BRICS and the MIKTA. Emerging countries are increasingly attempting to organize themselves and this raises the question on whether their efforts are working and if not, what lessons they can draw from history and IR theory as well as from the mechanisms the EU and US have used to extend their regulatory reach.

Real drug usage and post market surveillance remains a challenge. While there is a lot of information available on drugs due to regulatory processes, it has been shown that social media can help identify new drug related information (reference, Pubmed ID 27311964, 26776212, 26163365). The use of social media information streams and interactions is an important new source of data for drugs, especially to evaluate the effects of drugs outside the controlled settings of trials. In addition, pharmacogenetics, that is the influence of individual molecular process of drugs, is increasingly in focus. For example, the SLCO1B1* 5 variant has been identified to cause myopathies when statins hypocholesterolemia drugs are taken. However, the identification of populations with similar characteristics is difficult. Social networks interactions could potentially identify these populations allowing targeted genotyping with a much improved cost-benefit result. Existing bioNLP tools, such as Gimli (Campos et al. 2013), supporting natural language processing, are not easily applicable to social media. There are numerous new challenges to address, such as temporal disjunction, jargon. This joint project between TSMM (Text & Social Media Mining) at Yonsei Univ. and SIMED (Sciences de l'Information Médicale) at Univ. of Geneva aims at constructing a biomedical surveillance system in order to identify patterns and trends of medication treatments and their side effects over time (10 years). Our system will create a knowledge base by mining two main sources: scientific publications and social media. We will detect the biomedical concepts in scientific literature and also survey and trace the side effects over population.

This proposal aims to initiate the collaboration between two teams of C-CIA (Climate Change Impacts and Risks in the Anthropocene) lab of UNIGE and HECL (Hydrology and EcoClimate Lab) of Yonsei. In this study, we are interested in understanding historical drought events across the Pacific, including Central South America and South East Asia with the data from the multiple sources. HECL, expertized in the drought analysis over the globe, plans to construct the drought index such as SPEI (Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index) over the regions across the Pacific using historical climate data sets such as NCEP and CRU. C-CIA plans to construct the historical drought data using historical archives from Korea and tree-ring data (dendroclimatology). Analyzing such drought-related data from the multiple sources together will improve our understanding of the spatial and temporal variations of historical droughts. Causes, effects, and possible mitigation of drought processes will be assessed, which are similar or different among the regions across the Pacific. At last, such understanding will provide us better management (mitigation or adaptation) strategies for possible future drought events. The detailed work packages for such study will be arranged and discussed through a joint workshop/seminar as well as occasional Skype meetings between UNIGE and HECL.

The goal of particle physics is to study the existence and interactions of particles, which are the constituents of what is usually referred to as matter or radiation. The theory that describes the particles and their interactions, the Standard Model (SM), has been very successfully confirmed by experiments, such the most recent ATLAS and CMS at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Despite its great success in describing nature, the SM leaves many questions unanswered; Physics beyond the SM (BSM) is required to answer these questions. The Future Circular Collider (FCC) project aims at developing conceptual designs with an energy and a luminosity significantly above what the LHC does, significantly extending the possibility to discover BSM physics.

The FCC study puts an emphasis on electron-positron high-intensity and proton-proton high energy frontier machines. A 100 TeV hadron collider in a 100 km long tunnel defines the overall infrastructure for the FCC study. The collision rates at the FCC will be of unprecedented amounts. It will be impossible to store and analyse all data from these produced events: A “trigger system”, performing real-time analysis, will preferably select the potentially interesting interactions, such as those that will contain Higgs particles or signatures of BSM physics. Typically, the trigger systems is based on fast electronics and highly performant software deciding on a real-time fashion which events to select.

Both the PIs of this proposal have played leading roles in the trigger systems in the ATLAS and CMS experiments, for more than ten years. They propose to brainstorm over the trigger system for the FCC project, building on their expertise and experience from the previous experiments.

Air pollution kills 7 million people yearly, and reduces our life expectancy by 20 months, with an economic cost reaching 6% of the gross world product (WHO, World Bank). Open-source air-quality and lung-capacity monitoring encourages citizens to map their environment, and mutually take care of their health, enhancing public benefits through co-participation. We propose to combine our approaches to tackle the health-related impact of air pollution in urban centers by raising awareness and helping develop the participatory monitoring of air quality and respiratory health into evidence-based policies. We aim to organize two co-creation events to explore how participatory development of air quality and respiratory monitoring can improve health outcomes and foster civil mobilization. Yonsei and Geneva are both urban universities with active communities committed to the United Nations SDGs, to social innovation, and with renowned faculties of medicine and environment. The institutions will have the support from LogAir and Breathing Games. LogAir develops open devices and applications, to enable citizens to map air quality along their day, serving as a basis for advisories on how to lower exposure, and proposed as a starting point for evidence-based policy-making. LogAir is deploying devices on shared bikes in Geneva and partners with other organisations to expand its network around the world. Breathing Games, a member of the WHO respiratory alliance, develops controllers and games to foster self and mutual care in respiratory health. Breathing Games is a finalist of Citypreneurs, a contest organized by the City of Seoul and the World Federation of UN Associations.

In 2005, a Strategy for Education for Sustainable Development was adopted by the UN Economic and Social Council, which aimed to “encourage UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) member States to develop and incorporate ESD into their formal education systems, in all relevant subjects, and in non-formal and informal education” (UNECE, 2005:2). Moreover, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the global community include Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). One of the targets of SDG 4 on quality education we find of special importance is target 4.7, which focuses on ESD. Both the University of Geneva and Yonsei University have been very active in furthering ESD for the last few years. Fostering global citizenship through ESD is a common goal of the two universities. However, at present, there is a lack of studies on pedagogical approaches for ESD in higher education. In order to fill the gap, and to position our universities as leaders in the area of ESD, we are looking to strengthen knowledge sharing and develop a plan for future course materials together. Access to the UNIGE-Yonsei Seed Fund would allow us to carry out the following: (1) field visits in both universities in order to learn and gain expertise from each other; (2) sharing of best practices in the form of case studies for pedagogical approaches, and (3) the development of a “toolbox” of teaching approaches tied to competencies and outcomes, which illustrate innovative, creative and effective approaches. The exchange visits would include workshops, panel discussions, and laying the foundations for tool kit development.

This research and teaching exchange aims to address the following questions: how can poetry be communicated across historical and geographical boundaries in the transnational digital age? How can the comparative study of poetries produced in Asia and Europe, and the close reading of those poetries, enable cross-cultural understanding? The project aims to share ideas, and develop future teaching projects which explore how the methodologies and histories of literary study can play a vital role in enhancing intercultural exchange and shared creative thinking at a time when the development of AI is radically changing the nature of the humanities, and informational technology is transforming global society.

These aims will be developed through communication from the Geneva team about a formative figure in the history of English literary criticism, I.A. Richards, who also taught in China in the 1930s and wrote about how his literary training enabled him to approach and to enter into dialogue with the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius. Richards was also an early figure to address the impact of rapidly-developing communications media on learning and literary analysis, and so anticipates our project. His former student William Empson composed key works of literary criticism in China and Japan. The Seoul team will share their expertise in translation, particularly of T.S. Eliot and Dante, and in the history of close-readings of Western literature in the Korean context. In dialogue with Richards’ understanding of poetry as communication, they will explore how, despite the distinctive linguistic conditions of national languages, poetry can be translated across cultures and periods thanks to its unique capacity to communicate sensibility as well as sense. Much is lost in translation but much can still be recuperated and reconstructed by the creative efforts of translators, as can be demonstrated not only by the translations of poetry between European languages, but also by translations bridging the distance between the East and the West. For instance, European poetry was studied, translated, and adapted in Korea under Japanese rule, playing a key role in shaping the identity of modern Korean literature. A close examination of these encounters--such as that of the poet and translator Kim Ok with W. B. Yeats--allows us to understand the Europe-influenced literary traditions of Japan and Korea not as mere mimicry but as a demonstration of Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih's concept of minor transnationalism, a construction of “lateral networks” of creative solidarity. The history of the conjuncture of the Western and East Asian literatures can offer new perspectives on the circulation and creative reinterpretation of poetry in the digital age, as it highlights the enduring force of the communicative and community-forming potentials of the verbal art.

These histories and methodologies will be shared in visits between Geneva and Yonsei, where team members will give research papers on their areas of expertise and also each guest-teach a seminar at Masters level. The visits will also involve planning meetings where a future joint-teaching project and a co-written journal article based on the project will be developed.

In adopting resolution 60/251 in 2006, leading to the creation of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the member states of the United Nations aimed, in part, to strengthen the accountability mechanisms when member states deal with the protection of human rights. The accountability mechanisms were considered by most observers as deficient in the organ that was replaced by the UNHRC, namely the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR).

Have the accountability mechanisms of the UNHRC operated as well for the past two decades as they had been anticipated back in 2006. While the UNHRC has been studied by various academics in different disciplines, an overall assessment of how the accountability mechanisms put into place operate and especially interact with each other, has not yet been the focus of scholarly research. Hence, we propose to consider how the three accountability mechanisms that we consider as the most important ones, affect the workings of the UNHRC and ultimately its final goal, i.e., an improvement of the human rights situation around the globe.

The first new accountability mechanism introduced with the UNHRC, compared to the UNCHR, concerns the election and possible deselection (respectively suspension) of UNHRC members. While respecting an adequate regional representation, the 47 members of the UNHRC are supposed to be elected taking into account their respect of human rights. In addition, the limitation to two consecutive terms for each member state was also designed to hold member states better to account. With a similar goal in mind, the resolution 60/251 also gives the power to the United Nations General Assembly, to revoke members from the UNHRC or suspend their membership, if they violate egregiously human rights.

A second important accountability mechanism came about by the introduction of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) that subjects every UN member state to a peer review at regular intervals of four and a half years, leading to a report containing recommendations made by peers. The universality of this review process and the goal of putting all member states on an equal footing aims at leading to a less politicized process.

Finally, the third innovative accountability mechanism us the more explicit and formalized inclusion of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) into the UP review process, but also in other arenas, is also designed as increasing the accountability of member states in the area of human rights.

While a considerable body of research on the UPR process exists and a smaller set of studies considers the role of NGOs, few studies considered the role of the election and deselection process, and especially the interaction of the latter with the former two. As these accountability mechanisms are likely to interact and lead to unintended consequences, it seems to us that more comprehensive look at them is needed to assess how well the accountability mechanisms of the UNHRC have worked in the the past two decades.

Our group proposes to initiate a novel philosophical inquiry into the conceptual foundations of quantum cosmology. Quantum cosmology is a field of theoretical physics dedicated to investigating the quantum mechanical nature of our universe, and its origins in particular. It is a relatively young field, whose origins can be traced to Bryce DeWitt’s work in the late 1960s, with a second phase initiated in the 1980s with the “no boundary” proposal of James Hartle and Stephen Hawking, and continuing to today in a variety of fruitful directions. While philosophers have contributed much to understanding the conceptual foundations of quantum theory (e.g., the measurement problem and Bell’s theorem, quantum computing, etc.) and the standard model of cosmology (which is founded on the non-quantum general theory of relativity), so far very little attention has been devoted to the particular conceptual foundations of quantum cosmology, which unites these component considerations, the quantum with the cosmos.

Our group members have much expertise in these component studies, and we see an intriguing opportunity through this funding initiative to unite our research interests and capabilities in a novel investigation into a mostly unexplored area of significant theoretical importance in modern physics. Christian Wüthrich (co-PI), Niels Linnemann, Marta Pedroni, and Charlotte Zito are all members of the University of Geneva’s Symmetry Group, much of whose work over the past decade has been devoted to developing the philosophical aspects of quantum gravity research. The members from Yonsei, Casey McCoy (co-PI) and Natalja Deng, bring to bear expertise in the standard model of cosmology and cosmic inflation (a theory that may play a crucial linking role between quantum cosmology and standard cosmology) and the philosophy of time, an area at the center of the two-way interaction between physics and philosophy concerning developments in quantum gravity and cosmology.

Our plan is to use the UNIGE-Yonsei Seed Funding to carry out a research exchange between the two institutions. We plan two workshops, one in Seoul and one in Geneva, which are dedicated to focused explorations and identifications of significant research problems and solutions which can be the basis for future collaborations between the group members. While some time will be made available for traditional academic talks and discussions, our intention is to use the occasion of a workshop to create a collaborative environment focused on seeding future collaborative endeavors. Preliminary work will identify prospective key issues, such as how to conceptually understand the quantum-to-classical transition (related to the well-known “quantum measurement problem”), the status of space and time in the early universe (including the emergence of spacetime), the nature of singularity resolution, and of boundary conditions of the universe; discussion leaders will be appointed for the various key issues, and sessions devoted to detailed group member exploration of them. We plan both of these workshops to take place during 2025 (in Seoul in the spring, in Geneva in the summer or fall).

Our world is shaped by the legacies of destructive wars and characterized too often by violence. Divisions and conflicts appear more challenging than ever. Our task as scholars and educators is to become bridges between the East and the West, Asia and Europe, by promoting exchanges between the University of Geneva, including The Ecumenical Institute Bossey of the World Council of Churches, and Yonsei University. 2024 is the 70th Anniversary of the Geneva Peace Conference, the last major international attempt to reunify Korea. 2025 marks the 75th Anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War. 2026 is the 40th Anniversary of the Glion, Switzerland dialogue between North and South Koreans. Interfaith discussions between Islam and Christianity have increased internationally to address conflicts, but this engagement has not evolved in Korea yet. Muslim-Christian relations must be prioritised as the Muslim population grows due to immigration and student mobility. Cold War-style ideological conflicts could be easily shifted toward otherness, such as the Muslim minority. Our purpose is to train World-class experts in Switzerland and Korea in Multi-disciplinary approaches to Inter-cultural and Intra/Inter-Religious engagement, grounded in a deep appreciation and understanding of History, particularly the legacies of Colonial and Postcolonial conflicts such as the Korean War, in order that we can equip contemporary Global Society with insights to solve critical Social Issues.

Our project has three parts, Historical, Socio-Cultural, and Religious aspects, in order to increase mutual understanding of different contexts and address our situation:

1. Under Japanese Colonialism in Korea
   a) Ahn Jung-Kun of Korea and Peace in Northeast Asia / Prof. Meehyun Chung
   b) Yun Chi-Ho of Korea / Prof. Samuel Guex
2. Cold War, Korea and Beyond Hostility / Prof. Paul Tonks
3. Current Debates between Islam and Christianity on Da‘wa and Mission for a Convivial Togetherness in the Swiss Society and Globally / Prof. Benjamin Simon

As Cosmopolitan Citizens we seek peace in each context toward Reconciliation and Companionship. By listening to each other, we explore difficulties and address challenges in socio-cultural contexts to increase Inclusivity in our Global Society.

-Exchanges and Cooperation in Education and Research between Korea and Switzerland for Solidarity and Companionship towards Sustainable Peace
-Finding Solutions for Social Conflicts by developing Models of the Humanity of Companionship.

• To sum up: Our Goal is to establish an International Research Programme aligned with Horizon Pillar 2 that fosters Cluster 2: Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society. We will deal with SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) & 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We shall educate Peace Mediators, Cultural Communication experts, NGO leaders, and Religious experts who contribute to Social Justice and Healing.