Health and Well-being: Understanding and promoting a healthy life and well-being

Living well means enjoying good health at all ages, benefiting from healthy nutrition, a supportive environment, socio-economic conditions, and an efficient healthcare system.

To tackle this challenge, the University of Toulouse will encourage exploratory research through a multi-scale approach, from molecular levels to socio-ecosystems. This will contribute to generating new insights into the complex effects of environmental and social factors on the quality of life for humans, animals, and plants.

The University of Toulouse will also foster new interactions between life sciences, AI, applied disciplines (such as clinical studies, agronomy, and engineering), and humanities and social sciences to develop innovative solutions for promoting healthy living. Such solutions will address key issues like healthy ageing, personalised medicine, and agro-ecological transitions. Social sciences will play a crucial role in understanding the conditions for adopting these solutions and designing public policies.

 

Understanding the interaction of environmental and bio-psycho-social determinants on life and health

A comprehensive approach to environmental exposures, encompassing all dimensions (exposome), whether chemical, physical (heat, noise), biological (pathogens, allergens), or psychosocial (isolation, stress, diet, sedentary lifestyle), will enhance our understanding of pathological mechanisms (including molecular, genetic, and epigenetic). This understanding aims to develop new means of prevention or treatment.

Interdisciplinary research (integrating high-throughput biology, AI, and social sciences) will be crucial for developing such approaches. By combining strengths in human and animal biology, microbiology, and ecology, Toulouse aims to lead in EcoHealth research.

Drivers and issues of "well-being"

• Keys to Successful Ageing

Achieving healthy ageing involves advancing research in Gerosciences, which integrates fundamental, clinical, and population-based studies. The goal is to shift prevention strategies and healthcare focus from diseases to functions (physical, mental) to develop personalised prevention and care strategies through translational research in Geroscience.

These strategies, tested in clinical research and increasingly in participatory research, benefit from established collaborations with researchers in biology, epidemiology, artificial intelligence (AI), social sciences, and economics.

• Designing more precise medicine through therapeutic and diagnostic innovation

New strategies for combating diseases (multi-scale AI in biology and health, personalised therapies, biotechnologies, new antibiotics) will be developed through research combining scientific and clinical approaches, leveraging advanced technological platforms such as intravital imaging, animal models, organoids or organs-on-chips, and the use of cells and antibodies as medicines.

These strategies benefit from excellence in materials science, engineering (chemical engineering, fluid and solid mechanics, electrical and electronic systems, process engineering, etc.), mathematics, and computer science.

 

Supporting agroecological transitions

Agricultural production systems face the dual challenge of reducing the environmental impact of agricultural practices and adapting to climate change. UT benefits from a unique set of expertise to study complex interactions (between plants, microorganisms, and the environment, between crops and animals) and research infrastructures at various scales (genomics, phenotyping, agronomy -field trials, management systems, remote sensing)

Cutting-edge research will be enhanced through the integration of these approaches. Social sciences, along with engineering, will contribute to designing and analysing transition pathways addressing systemic barriers that hinder the necessary sociotechnical trajectory changes.

 

Societal change and impact: Understanding global changes and their impacts on societies

The consequences of human activities on climate change, ecosystems, the environment, and consequently society are central to the global scientific debate.

To contribute to predicting, mitigating, and repairing the effects of global change, this pillar will employ a multi-scale and holistic approach.

The goal is to understand long-term phenomena, the changes they induce, and to guide public action, economic models, and individual behaviours. Therefore, the project considers government and its democratic institutions, human-technology interactions and social media, as well as the design and implementation of transition policies.

This ambition entails optimally integrating the vast amount of qualitative and quantitative data produced by natural and life sciences, as well as humanities and social sciences, and effectively sharing them with decision-makers, public institutions, and citizens at large.

 

From observation to modelling

To understand the functioning of the Earth system across different scales of length and time (from local territories to global scales), new approaches integrating physical, biological, and human dynamics are necessary. Toulouse has a unique range of capabilities (spaceborne, airborne, and in-situ measurements) to observe the planet in all its components (air, land, sea, ice) and at all scales. Social sciences also contribute to understanding the social space in its various dimensions (territorial, economic, political, and civic).

These data feed into numerical and theoretical models, whether they are aimed at describing the physico-chemical processes of the planet (e.g., climate models), biological systems, or societal dynamics.

The objective is to predict the future behaviour of the Earth system, essential for assessing and defining action strategies and anticipating societal changes.

 

Adaptation and transformation of social worlds

Transitioning from knowledge to action requires generating actionable insights for policymakers and stakeholders. This need will be met through the development of new diagnostic and prognostic tools. These "digital twins" will be driven by multi-source data describing possible scenarios and their impacts at the scale of territories, regions, or even globally, leveraging state-of-the-art social science methods (network analysis, textual analysis, qualitative and mixed methods).

This theme will also focus on studying the dynamics of social and technical structures (standards, legislative and regulatory frameworks, technical devices, imaginative dimensions) and ways of living and constructing territoriality.

 

Long-term evolutions and societies

The third priority of this pillar recognises that envisioning futures is grounded in understanding the dynamics and processes of both recent and distant pasts. Anchoring the present within a long-term perspective will be approached from various angles: (i) the physico-chemical functioning of the planet and its place in the universe (astrophysics, geology, paleoenvironments, etc.), biology (evolutionary biology, paleoecology, etc.), the evolution of human societies (human evolution, environmental evolution, etc.), the evolution of human/non-human relations (ethology, psychology, paleogenetics and paleogenomics, etc.), the social and environmental responsibility of businesses, consumers, and markets, and finally, social organisations and material or immaterial heritage through historical, anthropological, archaeological, literary, artistic, and philosophical analyses. Identifying long-term processes and integrating different scales of time, various methods, and different disciplines will constitute a hallmark of the University of Toulouse.

 

Sustainable transitions: Accelerating sustainable transitions for mobility, energy, resources, and industrial mutations

Major societal challenges require profound and rapid transformations in consumption (sobriety) and production processes (sustainable resource use, energy efficiency, circularity, waste and emissions treatment and reduction, etc.) as well as adapting mobility at both local and global scales.

 

Energy issues in all their aspects (production, capture, transformation, storage, consumption, waste, work organisation, etc.) lie at the heart of these challenges. The appropriation of these issues by individuals and society (raising the question of social appropriation) and the behavioural changes they induce, both individually and collectively, are also essential dimensions of future work.

Research in this area aims to better understand the dynamics of transitions and provide actionable knowledge to promote these profound transformations through sustainable engineering that combines engineering with social sciences.

 

Future transportation

The first challenge concerns the future of air and land transportation, urgently requiring investment in research at levels closest to industry (clean and quiet propulsion, lightweight structures, autonomous vehicles, cybersecurity, etc.) as well as closest to users (sustainable aviation, smart mobility).

Decarbonised energy

The second challenge revolves around energy. The objective is to design, implement, and study the use of processes, materials, devices, and systems for low-carbon energy production (hydrogen, solar, etc.), the production of fuels and renewable material sources based on carbon as a substitute for fossil resources (biofuels, biomass, industrial/domestic waste, etc.), energy conversion and storage, CO2 conversion and storage, decarbonisation of energy carriers, and to measure their cost-effectiveness and societal benefits.

A broader theme is environmental, social, and governance taxonomy, which should guide investments towards actions with the greatest impact.

 

Resources, production, and industrial change

 

The third challenge is to study and implement, across various territories, the different stages of a circular economy cycle (production, capture, storage, consumption, reuse, recycling), integrating materials concepts through design, prevention through design (PtD), atomic economy, life cycle analysis, digital twins, digital design chain, AI contribution to operational systems, for all types of processes and manufactured products.

The objective is to foster, through hybridisation of heterogeneous knowledge sources, new eco-designed pathways towards industrial ecology, enabling better management of pressure on natural resources, reducing the impact on the environment and health from current production and usage patterns.

New economic models, eco-industry performance, safety, overall ergonomics, creativity and design are also addressed, along with the role of public policies in encouraging and supporting change.