For thousands of years, humankind had only been aware of the handful of planets composing our Solar System. This changed dramatically over the last two decades with the discovery of several thousand planets around nearby stars. Most of these, so-called exoplanets, show remarkable differences when compared to the Solar System. We believe that processes leading to the formation of planets, combined with environmental effects associated with the protoplanetary disk in which they form, play a fundamental role in sculpting planets and planetary systems. Thus, in order to understand the wide diversity of planets we observe, and contextualize our Solar System, it is critical to study and characterize such mechanisms self-consistently together with the dynamical evolution of the protoplanetary disk. One of the processes that may play an important role is the so-called planetary migration due to the mutual gravitational interaction between the planet and the disk. As a planetary embryo grows accreting material from the protoplanetary disk, it exerts a gravitational force onto the disk which, by the law of action-reaction, exerts an opposite force onto the planet. This force accelerates the planet and makes it move. So far, it is not clear observationally, whether migration due to planet-disk interaction occurs over large spatial scales during the formation of planetary systems. Identifying and characterizing the various mechanisms that set the speed and direction of planet migration demands a thorough understanding of the physics and dynamics governing protoplanetary disks and planets. In this context, the core of the project was to study the contribution of physical mechanisms that have been overlooked until now and could play a significant role in this story. One of the highlights of the project was the realization that dust (known to constitute only a small fraction of the protoplanetary disks mass) may play an important role in the early dynamical history of planetary embryos.
