Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet Utop\Intent (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Utop\Intent is a multifaceted research project that advances an original method of political and legal theory research which combines both rigorous theoretical analysis of canonical texts and ethnographic research. Its ambitious goal is both to develop a robust, adaptable model for the theoretical-empirical study of politics in the mid-21st century and rehabilitate the concepts of utopia and limits for contemporary progressive and egalitarian politics in an era that is increasingly marked by political malaise. It achieves this goal as the first book-length study to bridge the theoretical orientation of Critical Theory and Utopian Studies with the empirical orientation of Communal Studies using methods from Grounded Theory and Extended Case Method. Although these primary goals are scientific and aimed at career development, essential qualitative methods training, ERC grant-writing supervision, and networking oriented to obtaining a permanent research position in the EU, the project is also strategically positioned to concretely impact public policymakers, fair housing and community development social activists, and alternative higher education models through its open-access website and innovative higher education courses in collaboration with ULEI and Tamera Peace Research and Educational Center (Portugal).


Participants :
- Leiden University (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 187572.48 €
Projet VIGO (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

VIGO is a study of how visuality affects governance. The project builds on the idea that visuality creates and shares social meaning, thereby shaping governance – intended as the conceptual representation of change in underlying social systems and the efforts to manage or steer the effects of these changes. Visuality’s impact in governance – highlighting an issue’s salience, proposing interpretations, arousing sentiment, and legitimizing or undermining a claim – is so substantial that we can speak of ‘visual governance’. In other words, the pursuit of governance goals can be achieved through systems of visual (re)production at the national and global levels. This is particularly evident if we think of the attention that governance challenges on issues such as migration, climate change, and pandemics have visually attracted. Images of overcrowded migrant boats, starving polar bears on melting glaciers, and infographics showing the latest COVID-19 mortality rates have gone viral. As the adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, surprisingly, scant research has been devoted to understanding the effect that visual representation has on governance. This is precisely where ‘VIGO – Exploring the Role of Visuality in Governance’ will produce crucial insights. By adopting a comparative multi-scalar and multi-modal methodology, the project will be the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive analysis of the role of visuality in (migration) governance. In doing so, VIGO has three key objectives: (1) Contribute to theory-building by conceptualizing visual governance; (2) Explore the role of visuality in governance at the macro, meso and micro levels across two geographic areas (Europe and Canada); and (3) Test innovative methodological approaches in International Relations.

Mots clés : visual studies, humanitarianism, migration policies, ngos, asylum, refugees

Participants :
- University of Copenhagen (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 273687.36 €
- Toronto Metropolitan University (Canada) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet VIR MAXIMUS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

VIR MAXIMUS is an innovative tool that helps trace the history of the ‘soft’ policy transfer in and outside Europe since 17th to the 21st centuries. It is based on the suggestion that the flow of ideas across borders and in time can be unveiled with the help of the sufficiently vast collections of translations of the same text. Such corpora will allow to intercept not only the transmission, adaptation and transformation of moral-political concepts in different countries, but also their evolution over time within a single culture (in cases when multiple translations of a text to the same language carried out in different epochs are available). More than 150 translations of Baltasar Gracián’s writings to more than 30 languages, sometimes by eminent personalities such as A. Schopenhauer, offer an extraordinary example of such a collection, but its potential is still underestimated: in fact, the complete list of these texts is still lacking. VIR MAXIMUS will provide a complete annotated catalogue of translations of Gracián’s work and a concrete example of the use of these texts: the database of the moral-political lexicon in about 50 different translations (the main European languages are considered) that will help to detect the dynamics of the local reception of Gracián’s thought and the shifts in the history of moral-political concepts. The MSCA Fellowship will bring Riva Evstifeeva, Russian language professor in Italy who holds a MA in Medieval European History and a PhD in Comparative studies, to Sorbonne Université where she will work in the research team headed by Mercedes Blanco, the top-rank scholar in Spanish studies and the leading expert in Gracián’s work.

Mots clés : spanish literature, translation studies, siglo de oro, savoir vivre treatises, linguistic databases

Participants :
- Sorbonne Université (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 184707.84 €
Projet VaLiD (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

VaLiD aims to reconsider the nature and the significance of deviant spellings and errors in Latin inscriptions in the light of territorial and sociological diversities, by applying modern approaches to the ancient materials. The privileged field of study will be the Roman province Hispania Citerior but comparisons with other territories represent an essential aspect of the investigation. The project is expected to return important information about the spoken Latin of Hispania as well as about the literacy levels of the province, focusing on the social and gender components of the Hispanic society.

Mots clés : latin dialectology, computerized dialectology, geolinguistics, roman provinces, roman spain, hispania citerior

Participants :
- Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics (Hongrie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 146239.2 €
Projet PolyVac (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Vaccination has been acknowledged as one of the most effective methods against life-threatening diseases. Vaccines administered by the mucosal route (oral, vaginal…) present the advantage to be needle-free and reduce the risk of pathogen transmission. Among the existing mucosal vaccines, the sublingual ones are an interesting way of immunization since the sublingual mucosa is particularly thin and would allow easy penetration of antigens. Also, this administration allows to bypass the gastrointestinal tract, has better safety record than intranasal vaccines and have better compliance for vaccinating infants and children. Additionally, they have a fast removal by body fluids and enzymes. PolyVac introduces a pioneering system for controlled targeted delivery of bioactive molecules and, for the proof of concept envisages the development of a sublingual vaccine for HIV. This concept comprises the development of a free-standing (FS) multilayer membrane that will present the double specificity to be immunoactive and specifically target the immune cells. To achieve this end, the FS will be loaded with a model antigen for immunotherapy and a chemotactic cytokine to specifically target the antigen presenting cells. Once loaded with the proteins, the FS membrane will become a bioactive patch. This patch will permit to deliver subunit vaccine components both spatially and temporally as dendritic cells will be attracted at the sublingual mucosa/patch interface ensuring efficient immune responses. Preclinical studies will follow in mice, by monitoring their immune response, for clinical translation and commercialisation of the proposed technology. It is expected to have, as final product, an innovative sublingual patch for human immunotherapy that among the advantages presented above will also overcome one of the main drawbacks of injected vaccines that is the storage at around 4°C. Overcoming this issue they could be widely used for immunotherapy in the developing countries.

Mots clés : polysaccharide membrane, layer by layer technology, mucosal vaccination, drug delivery, biomimetic system

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 173076.0 €
Projet DYNAMOD-VACCINE-DATA (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Vaccine hesitancy (delaying or refusing of vaccination) has been identified by the World Health Organization as one of the top-ten threats to global health. The spreading of vaccine-hesitancy in society is a complex phenomenon and no method can currently predict which countries will become vulnerable to this threat. Opinion dynamics models have enormous – as yet unrealised – potential to identify countries where vaccine-hesitant opinions are likely to spread or be resisted. They simulate the evolution of public opinion with computational models in which agents interact based on simple rules, with the goal of precisely modelling the spread of opinions in networks. However, while many successful theoretical models exist, few have been run on empirical data. This is because most models require detailed network information and are therefore not compatible with common data types (i.e. survey data). In this project, I will develop a novel method for reconstructing social network information from survey responses alone. First, the method will be validated using simulations. Then, it will be applied to secondary vaccine-hesitancy survey datasets to compare the predictive capability of different opinion dynamics models in this context. This study will provide two main outputs. First, a toolkit to identify societies most vulnerable to vaccine-hesitancy opinion spreading. Second, a method for inferring underlying social networks from survey data. This will have general value for research on any social issue related to opinion-coordination, e.g. climate change; GMOs etc. This fellowship will transfer my mathematical and computational modelling expertise to my hosts. At the same time, it will provide me with synergistic expertise in social science and network science as a platform for my research career in computational social science.

Mots clés : computational social science, vaccine hesitancy, survey, opinion dynamics, cultural diffusion, attitude, social network, network reconstruction, predictive model

Participants :
- University of Limerick (Irlande) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 294886.08 €
Projet DOPANF (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Value-based decision-making is crucial for human behavior and learning, pervades our daily life and goes astray in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and depression. The neural activity of brain regions producing and being influenced by the neurotransmitter dopamine has been associated with value-based decision-making processes. By extension, one would expect dopamine systems, mainly midbrain regions and their striatal projections, to play a role in such decisions, such as whether a specific reward is worth enduring some punishment. It is a matter of debate, but of surprisingly little empirical investigation, whether the rewarding and punishing aspects of value differentially or similarly depend on the dopamine system. The project DOPANF aims to clarify this issue by investigating dynamic changes of dopamine-related neural activity. DOPANF develops two new paradigms to shed light on this important, yet neglected topic for public health and subjective well-being. Specifically, DOPANF uses recent neuroscientific and technological developments: real-time imaging for immediate analysis of neural activity in the midbrain and multivariate pattern analysis for algorithmic capture of related activity spatially distributed throughout the brain. By observing their own brain activity as neurofeedback in real time, participants will learn to volitionally up- and downregulate activity in the dopamine system. We will then measure the behavioral consequences of this regulation with regard to how much effort participants are willing to exert to obtain a reward. Thus, DOPANF aims to achieve a more precise understanding of decision-making behavior and elucidate the exact role of the dopaminergic midbrain in value processing and its impact on effort discounting. The project is feasible and has the potential to provide a better understanding of psychiatric diseases, such as depression or schizophrenia.

Mots clés : value based decision making, dopaminergic midbrain, adaptive neurofeedback, multi variate pattern analysis

Participants :
- University of Zurich (Suisse) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 175419.6 €
Projet 2DvdWHs (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Van der Waals heterostructures (vdWHs) of atomically thin, two-dimensional (2D) materials have been attracting a wide range of research interests since their unique structures enable tunable and customized optical, electronic and magnetic properties. The vertical layer-by-layer assembly strategies make it feasible to mix and match different 2D materials into various vdWHs without the restraint of lattice matching and processing compatibility. Currently, however, most of 2D vdWHs (termed ‘2DvdWHs’) are predominantly based on inorganic sandwich complexes, especially on graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) and hexagonal boron-nitride (hBN). What’s more, the vertical assembly method for 2DvdWHs mainly limits to small-scale proof-of-concept demonstrations. Consequently, I will develop a new generation of vdWHs through layer-by-layer assembling monolayer 2D polymers (2DPs) with monolayer graphene (Gr) for wafer-scale, flexible opto-electronics. The 2D organic-inorganic interface can engineer the field-induced charge-carrier transport within the 2DP-Gr heterostructures, and thus tailor their opto-electronic properties. The core technology is the advanced monolayer 2DPs synthesized at the air/water interface via Langmuir–Blodgett (LB) techniques based on photo-active conjugated monomers, such as porphyrin and pyrene derivatives. The resulting 2DPs are designed to be freestanding, monolayer semi-conductors with tuned band gaps and photo responses. Importantly, this technology can be extended to other 2D materials (e.g. TMDCs and hBN) and monomers, which structures can be further optimized for the better flexibility of the band gaps, higher enhancement of the charge transfer, and the new introduction of the photoactivity. A critical aspect of the work will be the use of customized 2DPs to integrate with Gr as wafer-scale, tunable 2DvdWHs and to study the unique quantum phenomena that arise from the organic-inorganic interlayer coupling.

Mots clés : two dimensional polymers, graphene, van der waals heterostructures, opto electronics, water interfaces, layer by layer assembly, wafer scale

Participants :
- University of Manchester (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 212933.76 €
Projet FOIPO (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Various pathologies directly impede the conduction of sound through the human middle ear, and thereby produce a ‘conductive’ hearing loss which is the second most prevalent health issue globally. According to Hearing Health Foundation more than 360 million people suffer from hearing disorders worldwide. Hearing depends on a series of events that change sound waves in the air into electrical signals. Sounds that travel down the ear canal set the surface of the flexible eardrum or tympanic membrane (TM) into rapid pico- to nanometer scale vibrations. These motions are coupled to the inner ear by the ossicular chain (the malleus, incus, and stapes). Since the TM and ossicular chain are the primary portal through which acoustic stimuli reach the inner ear, pathological changes in the TM or ossicular chain result in conductive hearing losses. Accurate diagnosis of middle-ear diseases is critical to effective and timely treatments of hearing loss. No currently available clinical technique is capable of simultaneously visualizing and quantifying the structure and sound-induced vibration of the middle ear in vivo. Recently, a new functional imaging technique based on optical coherence tomography (OCT) and the principle of vibrography for middle ear imaging was demonstrated. In this method, termed OCT-vibrography, a speaker is used to excite acoustic vibration in the tissue, and the resulting tissue displacement is captured by OCT. The goal of this project is to make for the first time a miniaturized OCT-vibrography probe for middle ear imaging at high frequencies. The miniaturized probe will be designed through integrated optics which will enable high-speed imaging. The system will operate in two modes: static imaging mode for examining biofilms and ear infections behind the ear drum; dynamic imaging mode for capturing high frequency (up to 20 kHz) oscillations in the middle ear structures. The operation of the miniaturized probes will be validated on ex vivo specimens.

Mots clés : optical coherence tomography, vibrography, modal analysis, middle ear imaging, ear drum, ossicles, sound excitation, integrated optics, miniaturized probes

Participants :
- Amsterdam University Medical Centers (Pays-Bas) — Partner, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 66838.57 €
- Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 110760.23 €
Projet PI3K-VAs (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Vascular anomalies are rare soft tissue tumours and malformations formed by abnormal vascular elements of various types, and mainly affect infants, children and young adults. These lesions are painful, many lead to bleeding, infections, organ dysfunction, and they can damage and metastasise to other tissues. Current treatment strategies are invasive, not fully efficient, and there is a high risk of recurrence. To date no specific targeted therapies have been developed. Most of the studies on vascular anomalies are descriptive and focused on their clinical aspects; at the moment, there is a lack of molecular understanding and pre-clinical studies on the field of vascular anomalies. Thus, identifying the causative molecular alterations of vascular anomalies and understanding their biology will lead to more refined diagnoses and will provide better and more directed therapies. Recent published and unpublished observations from our laboratory show that activation of phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) signalling pathway drive to the developments of a fraction of vascular anomalies; however, the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms remain enigmatic. In this proposal we aim to (i) unveil alterations in the PI3K signalling pathway components that are involved in the pathogenesis of vascular anomalies, (ii) understand the role of PI3K pathway activation in the development and maintenance of these lesions, and (iii) explore the potential of repurposing PI3K pathway inhibitors for these conditions. For this, we have set up collaboration with clinicians who will provide a large collection of vascular anomalies from patients. Also, in collaboration with Pharma, we aim to use PI3K inhibitors for these diseases. Importantly, these collaborations will allow us to translate our findings into the clinic for future clinical trials. This project proposal seeks to broad our understanding of PI3K activation in vascular biology and to ultimately improve patients’ quality of life.

Mots clés : pi3k, vascular anomalies, vascular tumours, vascular malformations, angiogenesis, signal transduction, pre clinical studies

Participants :
- Institut d'Investigació Biomédica de Bellvitge (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 158121.6 €
Projet VAW-Experts (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Violence against women is a widespread phenomenon. The task of monitoring EU states’ compliance with their commitments in this field is largely dependent on a set of expert Treaty Bodies within the UN and the Council of Europe, which issue recommendations to states on how to improve their performance. Since these recommendations cannot be legally enforced, scholars posit that Treaty Bodies need to be credible in the eyes of states in order to generate effects. Yet, the extent to which these bodies’ credibility leads to the implementation of recommendations remains underexplored. This project assesses the credibility of UN and Council of Europe Treaty Bodies engaged in fighting violence against women, and tests the extent to which their credibility influences states’ implementation of recommendations. This assessment is necessary in view of improving the functioning of these bodies, stimulating states’ compliance with provisions protecting women from violence and thus, ultimately, ensuring the fulfillment of women’s rights. Data sources will be official documents and 50 interviews with UN, Council of Europe, and state officials involved in these mechanisms. Results will shed light on these instruments’ effectiveness, highlighting possible areas for improvement. I will perform this research at the School of Social and Political Science (SSPS) of the University of Edinburgh under the guidance of Prof. Christina Boswell, a world-leading political scientist. Conducting this project will strengthen my academic profile, preparing me for the tenure-track market and for obtaining advanced funding, which will allow me to establish my own research group. SSPS will strongly benefit from my stay in three ways, as I will: 1) share my knowledge and provide feedback to colleagues; 2) establish new collaborations between Edinburgh and other academic and non-academic institutes; 3) share my experience with acquiring postdoctoral funding with Edinburgh’s early-career researchers.

Mots clés : global governance, human rights, knowledge and governance, united nations, council of europe

Participants :
- University of Edinburgh (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 224933.76 €