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Jamie Wright, a researcher at the Namur Digital Institute at UNamur, participated in a study conducted by Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Barcelona and published in the prestigious journal *Nature Human Behaviour*.  The study shows that languages around the world tend towards lexical economy, reusing words to denote different concepts when doing so does not lead to communicative confusion.

The result of a collaboration with Isabelle Frochot of the University of Burgundy Europe, a study in which Alain Decrop, a marketing professor at the EMCP Faculty, participated, shows that the mountains foster a genuine reconnection with oneself, with others, and with one’s environment. The results of this research were published in the prestigious journal *Recherche et Applications en Marketing* (RAM).

Jointly founded by the University of Namur and UCLouvain, the spin-off Intercept Bio aims to take a new step forward in the prevention of viral respiratory infections. Stemming from research conducted by the teams of Professor Stéphane Vincent at the UNamur Bio-Organic Chemistry Laboratory and Professor David Alsteens at the Louvain Institute of Biomolecular Science and Technology at UCLouvain, and a researcher at the WEL Research Institute, the start-up is developing a nasal spray designed to act right at the entry point for respiratory viruses: the nasal passages.

At the University of Namur, a thesis led by Fabian Delhalle, with support from SPW Research as part of the Win4Doc program, is exploring an innovative approach to producing proteins of therapeutic interest. In collaboration with Bio-Sourcing and the Walloon Center for Agricultural Research, this project aims to better understand the mechanisms of lactation in goats in order to optimize biopharmaceutical production that is more accessible, more flexible, and more environmentally friendly.

At UNamur, research is not confined to laboratories. From physics to political science, robotics, biodiversity, law, AI, and health, researchers collaborate daily with numerous stakeholders in society. The goal? To transform ideas into concrete solutions to address current challenges. 

At UNamur, a doctoral thesis led by Juliette Liégeois—with support from SPW Recherche as part of the Win4Doc program—aims to modernize the automated production of radiotracers used, in particular, to diagnose certain cancers and other diseases. Called SMART, the project is being developed in collaboration with Synlock, a company that designs synthesis robots for academic and industrial laboratories.

Through research, teaching, and knowledge sharing, Wafa Hammedi, a professor at Sciences Po’s Faculty of Economics, Management, and Communication (EMCP), has charted a path guided by her convictions. Far from the performance-driven clichés typically associated with marketing, she advocates for socially engaged research that serves society, equity, and inclusion.

Abstract Deep learning has become a central part of everyday life, and has given us powerful digital tools such as machine translators, voice assistants, and large language models. The Deaf communities, however, benefit verylittle from this progress. Sign languages are full natural languages, but they have no widely used written form, so the large text corpora and pretrained models that support these tools for spoken languages have no direct equivalent. As a result, sign language processing is held back by two related problems: a persistent shortage of annotated data, and a lack of tools to analyze the languages themselves.This thesis focuses on one component of the sign language processing pipeline that has received comparatively little attention: sign language segmentation, the temporal partitioning of a continuous signing video into individual sign units. Segmentation sits between raw video and almost every symbolic task built on top of it, yet it remains poorly understood. The goal of this work is twofold: to advance the segmentation task itself, and to turn sign language processing research into tools that are usable by the Deaf community, with French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) as the main setting.The central contribution of this thesis is a set of segmentation models. We first study approaches based on recurrent neural networks, and show that their main difficulty lies in the modeling of the transitions between signs, the brief ambiguous movements that separate one sign from the next and that are easily confused with the signs themselves. This insight motivates the Hydra framework, a new approach that detects each sign as a whole unit rather than deciding, frame by frame, whether a sign is being produced. Concretely, instead of classifying every frame, the model predicts the distance from each frame to the nearest sign boundaries, which makes it less sensitive to the ambiguous regions and improves consistently over prior methods. Around this core, we present further contributions: a sign language-to-text dictionary that recognizes signs from an ordinary webcam, supporting work on isolated sign recognition, and a collaborative platform that gathers new sign data as a side effect of everyday use. Together, these contributions narrow the gap between sign language processing research and the people whose language it concerns. Jury Prof. Benoit Frénay - University of Namur, BelgiumProf. Anthony Cleve - University of Namur, BelgiumProf. Katrien Beuls - University of Namur, BelgiumProf. Barbara Hammer - Bielefeld University, GermanyProf. Michèle Gouiffès - Paris-Saclay University, FranceDr. Mathieu De Coster - Ghent University, Belgium I am registering to attend Pierre Poitier's thesis defense

Catherine Linard, a researcher in the Department of Geography at UNamur, was recognized for her work at the intersection of geography and epidemiology. This Francqui-Collen fellowship will allow her, starting in September and for the next three years, to be relieved of most of her teaching duties so she can devote more time to her research on the influence of environmental changes on the spread of infectious diseases. 

Researchers at UNamur have developed a new method that has uncovered 32 previously undetected bugs in some of the most widely used software libraries for training artificial intelligence models. Originating from a master’s thesis, this research has already led to fixes in several software programs used by millions of developers around the world. 

Abstract Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is a heterogeneous malignancy in which human papillomavirus (HPV) status strongly influences therapeutic response. HPV-positive tumors generally show greater sensitivity to treatment, whereas HPV-negative tumors are associated with a poorer prognosis and increased resistance. This thesis investigated how HPV status shapes cellular adaptation to therapeutic stress, with a particular focus on therapy-induced senescence (TIS), autophagy, and MMS19.HPV- HNSCC cells developed a senescence-like phenotype following cisplatin or X-ray irradiation, whereas HPV+ cells showed limited induction. Silencing of the viral oncogenes E6 and E7 in HPV-positive cells enhanced this phenotype, indicating that HPV actively modulates treatment-induced cellular responses. Proteomic analyses further identified autophagy- and lysosome-related pathways as major features distinguishing HPV- from HPV+ cells. Autophagy inhibition predominantly impaired proliferation and clonogenic survival in HPV- cells, supporting an HPV-dependent autophagy–senescence axis involved in treatment adaptation.The second part of this thesis identified MMS19, a component of the cytosolic iron–sulfur cluster assembly machinery, as a potential determinant of HPV- HNSCC resistance. MMS19 was associated with poorer clinical outcomes, while its silencing impaired proliferation and clonogenic survival, particularly in HPV- cells.Together, these findings identify autophagy-dependent remodeling and MMS19-associated genome maintenance as potential vulnerabilities contributing to therapeutic resistance in HPV- HNSCC. Jury Prof. Anne-Catherine HEUSKIN (UNamur), ChairProf. Carine MICHIELS (UNamur), SecretaryProf. Francis RODIER (UMontreal)Prof. Yves POUMAY (UNamur)Prof. Anabelle DECOTTIGNIES (UCLouvain)Prof. Marc THERRIEN (University of Montreal)Prof. Sue YOM (UCSF)

AbstractPopulation aging is accompanied by an increase in the prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases, including tauopathies. This family of diseases, which includes Alzheimer’s disease, is characterized by the mislocalization, hyperphosphorylation, and accumulation of the tau protein in a pathological form, leading to neuronal dysfunction and ultimately neuronal death within the central nervous system. Numerous studies conducted in humans and in various animal models have demonstrated an association between repeated head trauma and the development of a specific tauopathy, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. This progressive neurodegenerative disease is attributed to repeated exposure to impacts to the head that generate acceleration-deceleration forces in the brain.Although the brain and spinal cord share many cellular and tissue characteristics, the consequences of spinal cord trauma on the development of tauopathies remain largely unexplored. To investigate this question, a new mouse model of repeated mild spinal cord trauma was developed in the PS19 mouse, a transgenic model of tauopathy that replicates several characteristics of frontotemporal dementia. Two low-intensity spinal cord contusions (30 kDynes), administered three weeks apart, were performed at two months of age to assess their impact on the long-term progression of the disease.Although these injuries induce neither immediate clinical deficits, nor detectable tissue lesions, nor neuronal loss, they elicit a marked glial response as well as neuronal and axonal damage, as evidenced by increased circulating concentrations of neurofilament light chains. Longitudinal follow-up of the animals revealed an earlier onset of motor and sensory deficits, associated with an accelerated decline in their overall health.In the short term (3.5 months), no worsening of tauopathy was observed. However, at 6.5 months of age, a significant increase in the density of hyperphosphorylated forms of tau, detected by the pTau(Ser202/Thr205) and pTau(Ser422) antibodies, was observed near the epicenter of the lesion in the contusion-injured animals. By 9 months, this exacerbation of the pathology had spread along the rostral-caudal axis, between spinal cord segments C2 and C7, as well as to the thalamus. Although spinal cord injuries did not alter Tau protein aggregation, in vitro analyses showed that the insoluble protein fraction extracted from the spinal cord of contusion-injured animals possessed greater recruitment capacity.Although no direct causal link could be established, histological, biochemical, and transcriptomic analyses suggest the involvement of microglia, type I interferon signaling, and the p38 MAP kinase pathway in stimulating Tau hyperphosphorylation.Taken together, these results highlight a previously largely underestimated role of mild spinal cord injuries as a factor promoting the development and progression of tauopathies. They also reinforce existing literature suggesting that neuroinflammation—and more specifically, microglial activation and type I interferon signaling—contributes to the progression of these diseases. Finally, this study underscores the importance of long-term follow-up for individuals exposed to spinal cord injuries—even mild ones—due to the potential increased risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases involving the Tau protein.JuryProf. Pascal KIENLEN-CAMPARD (UCLouvain)Prof. Karelle LEROY (ULB)Prof. Aurélie LADANG (ULiège)Prof. Charles NICAISE (UNamur)Prof. Patsy RENARD (UNamur), ChairProf. Laurence RIS (UMons)