Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet AfriVeg (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Livelihoods of most of the African population strongly depend on local ecosystem services, such as grazing, agriculture, firewood, and construction timber. Although an overall greening trend is shown by both dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) and Earth Observation (EO), large uncertainties for each data source are reported and significant divergence between outputs have been documented, impeding accurate assessment of vegetation dynamics in Africa. The overall purpose of this project is to develop methods to for an improved assessment of African vegetation resources based on new capabilities originating from satellite passive microwave observations. Specifically, the vegetation optical depth (VOD) derived from passive microwave data is sensitive to the water content in both the green and woody (i.e., branches and stems) vegetation components which is different from the traditional optical-infrared greenness driven vegetation index (VI) being primarily sensitive to chlorophyll abundance. By combining multi-frequency VOD retrievals with long-term VI datasets, in situ measurements, and DGVMs, this project will accurately quantify woody biomass, green biomass, net primary production (NPP), vegetation phenology and ecosystem functional types (EFT) in Africa, as well as their long-term changes and the climate and socio-economic drivers. The results are expected to pave the road for improved vegetation resource management in Africa and understanding of global carbon cycling. To achieve this, I will be trained in cutting edge skills (EO time series, flux measurements and ecosystem modeling). My major mobility activity will be sparking the integration of passive microwave VOD, carbon and water flux measurements and DGVMs for an improved understanding of changes in vegetation resources and drivers hereof in Africa.

Mots clés : africa, passive microwave, biomass, phenology, ndvi, vegetation

Participants :
- Lund University (Suède) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 185857.2 €
Projet TARGEPILIVER (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Liver fibrosis represents a common pathogenic pathway in most chronic liver diseases (CLDs) and cirrhosis, its end stage, is a huge healthcare burden. The main causes of CLD are chronic viral hepatitis B or C infection, alcohol abuse and obesity-linked steatohepatitis, conditions with increasing global incidence. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) develops on this background of CLD as a multistep process in the context of chronic inflammation and cirrhosis. Among all non-hematological malignancies, HCC has the fastest rising incidence of any neoplasm in USA and Europe. Despite all the progress in understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms of liver fibrosis and hepatocarcinogenesis, there are no effective therapies to halt fibrosis or quell liver cancer. Exposure to environmental factors triggers adaptative epigenetic mechanisms, including alterations in DNA methylation or post-translational modification of histones, which control gene expression and ultimately cellular behaviour in ways critical for the development of CLD and HCC. From the literature and our preliminary observations it is known that many of the enzymes carrying out these epigenetic events, such as DNA and histone methyltransferases, present altered expression and activity in CLD and HCC. The deposition of methyl marks in histones and DNA are very dynamic enzymatic processes, amenable to pharmacological intervention and therefore constitute attractive therapeutic targets. Our proposal has two main objectives: first the analysis of the expression, activity and pathological significance of DNA and histone-methyltransferases in models of CLD and hepatocarcinogenesis; and second the development of new efficacious DNA and histone-methyltransferase specific inhibitors with a good safety profile, which is critical when treating patients with compromised liver function. These new epigenetic therapies could be used to prevent CLD progression, and to treat HCC alone or in combination with existing drugs.

Mots clés : liver fibrogenesis, hepatocarcinogenesis, methylation, molecular therapeutics

Participants :
- University of Navarra (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 170121.6 €
Projet MICROARCHAEODUNG (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Livestock dung is commonly found in many human settlements, especially after the domestication of herds. Although receiving increasing attention in archeology, dung materials and secondary products are still routinely overlooked and this area of research is under-developed despite their worldwide importance as suppliers of manure, fuel source, temper and building material. This oversight is due in part to methodological problems in identifying dung during excavation and many bulk analyses, which destroy critical evidence on dung form, content, deposition and preservation in archaeological assemblages. This research will develop new interdisciplinary analytical strategies for microarchaeological study of dung combining geoarchaeology, bioarchaeology and biochemistry and experimental and ethnoarchaeological approaches. This integrated methodology will be applied to examine the context and content of livestock dung from mobile hunting-gathering to more sedentary farming Neolithic case-studies selected on a transect through the Near East, one of the key heartlands in which plants and animals that were later domesticated occur naturally, to the still little investigated northern Africa, a potentially critical area with implications for surrounding areas including the Mediterranean and the Sahara. It will also provide exciting new insight into the role of livestock and livestock dung in the development of more complex urban societies in Eastern Maghreb. These case-studies offer rich dung evidence for tracing human-animal interactions in different regions through time and key episodes of environmental and social change. The proposed project will establish a standard state-of-the-art interdisciplinary methodology for insight into archaeological dung as a valuable source of information on diverse cultural and economic aspects of past life-ways and the developments early farming and complex urban communities more widely.

Mots clés : livestock dung, farming, urbanism, interdisciplinary, microarchaeology, geoarchaeology, bioarchaeology, biochemistry, ethnoarchaeology, prehistory, protohistory, near east, northern africa

Participants :
- University of Reading (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183454.8 €
Projet HEARTLAND (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Doctoral Networks - Industrial Doctorates
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Livestock farming is increasingly in the spotlight because of its impacts on the environment and human health. Global livestock production, specifically ruminant farming, has been associated with land use change, methane emissions, climate change, deforestation and biodiversity loss. At the same time, consumption of livestock proteins exceeds total human protein requirements for a healthy diet in most European Member States. However, ruminants can convert biomass unsuitable for direct human consumption (e.g. grass resources) into valuable food, including essential macro and micro-nutrients for humans. While grazing, ruminants contribute to: maintaining the landscape and, in specific local conditions, to; enhancing biodiversity and increasing carbon sequestration. The contemporary industry challenge is therefore to develop livestock production systems that simultaneously enhance environmental sustainability and support a healthy diet. This is a knowledge-intensive process. Therefore, this European Industrial Doctorate (EID) programme – HEARTLAND+ will connect one of the most notable industry to the cutting-edge scientific knowledge while maximising the impact of the programme by working closely with experts in communication (to multiple audiences) and dissemination (to potential end-users). The objectives of HEARTLAND+ can be summarized as follows: 1. To train a new generation of creative, entrepreneurial and innovative PhD graduates in the multidisciplinary topic of soil-to-society 2. To design, implement and evaluate a soil, sward, and grazing farm management system aimed at maximising the positive impact on the environment, improving the nutritional and sensory quality of meat, and consequently improving human health in component and systems research 3. To upscale the findings to contribute to the sectoral development of sustainable production systems and land management 4. To communicate, disseminate and exploit the findings

Mots clés : soil, sward, animal, meat quality, human health, environmental health, sustainable farming

Participants :
- Devenish research development and innovation limited (Irlande) — Partner, beneficiary, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 1007175.84 €
- Devenish nutrition ltd (Royaume-Uni) — Partner, organization partner, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 0.0 €
- Wageningen University & Research (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 354159.84 €
- University of Gloucestershire (Royaume-Uni) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- National University of Ireland (Irlande) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- European Food Information Council (Belgique) — Partner, organization partner, Autres, subvention : 0.0 €
- An bord bia (Irlande) — Partner, organization partner, Organismes publics (hors enseignement & recherche), subvention : 0.0 €
Projet PlasmoPore (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) occurring in metal nanoparticles has opened the door to the realization of fascinating novel concepts and technologies. This is possible due to the unique properties of the light-metal nanoparticles interaction mediated by LSPR, for example the efficient light absorption and scattering by metal nanoparticles at resonance, as well as enhanced electromagnetic fields in the vicinity of the nanoparticles. A particularly interesting, yet rarely explored nanoparticle feature with great potential for the creation of plasmonic nanostructures with novel functionalities is porosity, which exhibits numerous so-called "hotspots": regions where the local electromagnetic field is greatly enhanced with respect to the incoming field. Combined with large surface-to-volume ratios, porous metal nanoparticles offer potentials for e.g. sensing and plasmon-mediated catalysis applications. Despite these prospects, porous nanoparticles have so far been rarely exploited due to the fact that they are produced via colloidal synthesis, which introduces several limitations. The objective of the proposed research is to establish a nanofabrication route, by combining nanolithography and wet chemical route, to produce supported array of porous plasmonic nanoparticles with excellent dimension control and utilize these nanostructures in the fields of plasmon-mediated catalysis and plasmonic hydrogen sensing. The action will combine the researcher expertise in nanofabrication, experimental plasmonics and hydrogen sensing and the supervisor and host institute experiences in wet chemistry, single-particle spectroscopy and plasmon-mediated catalysis. The successful results of this action will contribute to the development of new class of materials, that is supported porous nanoparticles, which extends the library of the functional plasmonic materials with wide applications for example in sensing and plasmon-activated catalysis.

Mots clés : porous, nanoparticles, hydrogen sensors, plasmon mediated catalysis

Participants :
- Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 187572.48 €
Projet T.I.M.E. (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Locating events on a timeline allows us to keep track of the past, live the present and plan the future. Some individuals can lose this fundamental aspect of human existence: aphasic patients. Aphasia is a language disorder typically caused by a stroke or a head injury that affects the ability to read, write and speak coherently. The source of the temporal impairment in aphasia is still unknown. Previous accounts focused on the linguistic aspect of this deficit, but data coming from clinical case reports and experimental studies suggest that this temporal impairment may not be exclusively linguistic. The main aim of this project is to carry out a systematic investigation of time processing in aphasic patients across different domains and, for the first time, through the use of structural magnetic resonance imaging. Three questions will be addressed: which aspects of time processing are impaired in aphasic patients? Is this impairment language-specific? What is the neurobiological basis of time processing? Behavioral (neurolinguistics/cognitive science) paradigms testing different aspects of non-/linguistic time processing will be combined with a voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) analysis and diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI). VLSM allows to analyze the relationship between lesioned grey matter and patients’ performance on a voxel-by-voxel basis, without the need of grouping patients based on lesion site or behavioral cut-off scores, while dMRI allows to explore which white matter pathways are also affected. Diffusion indexes will be also used to analyze the relationship between white matter fiber tract integrity and patients' performance. This proposal will provide answers to long-standing questions concerning the nature of the temporal impairment in aphasic patients and the neural underpinnings of time processing. This work will also lay the foundations for the development of new clinical tools for aphasic patients suffering temporal impairment.

Mots clés : time, mental timeline, temporal orientation, event location, adverb verb temporal concord, tense, aphasia, voxel based lesion symptom mapping, diffusion mri

Participants :
- Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 245732.16 €
- University of California System (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet MULTI_FOLDS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are abundant in mammalian transcriptomes. However, it remains unclear how many of them are functional, and how their functions are performed. LncRNAs seem to be poorly conserved at the sequence level, but some of them share conserved structural elements and are present at syntenic genomic positions in different species. A recent study revealed that secondary structure constrains sequence variation in lncRNAs, so that polymorphisms are depleted in low accessibility regions and tend to be neutral with respect to structural stability. This is in contrast with previous analyses that dismissed relationships between structure and sequence evolution in lncRNAs. A crucial difference in the former study is that the considered structural feature, accessibility, is computed from an ensemble of thermodynamically stable structures. Moreover, high-throughput structure probing shows that many lncRNA sites exhibit positive signals for both single- and double-strand specific enzymes, suggesting several structures may coexist. Based on this, I argue that the difficulty of identifying links between sequence and structure in lncRNAs results in part from limitations imposed by assuming a single, stable structure. I thus propose to consider ensembles of co-existing structures in lncRNAs, and develop a new computational framework that enables this. Using this new paradigm, I will study lncRNAs from animals and fungi by coupling experimental data from RNA structure probing to novel computational approaches that overcome current limitations. Overall, this novel multidisciplinary approach will profoundly impact our understanding of the evolution of lncRNAs. Furthermore, my project should help to fill the gap between structure and function of lncRNAs in different species. Moreover, as many lncRNAs are involved in a variety of human diseases, these results may provide insights towards novel clinical applications.

Mots clés : long non coding rnas, evolution, secondary structure, fungi

Participants :
- Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 85060.8 €
- Centre for Genomic Regulation (Espagne) — Partner, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 85060.8 €
Projet photonicIons (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Long-coherence times, high-fidelity individual-ion control and entanglement-mediating Coulomb interactions make trapped-ion qubits a very attractive platform for quantum information processing (QIP). Entangling gates performed by coupling the internal states of ions in the same potential well via their shared motional mode have recently reached the high fidelities necessary for the implementation of quantum error correction protocols which can enable fault-tolerant QIP. However, scaling this type of gate up to long ion chains (>20 ions) is not feasible: large ion numbers lead to crowding of the motional mode spectrum of the chain, eventually preventing addressing of specific modes. Cavity-mediated ion-photon coupling is a promising avenue to scalability. Photons emitted into a shared cavity mode can be used as a quantum bus to entangle short ion arrays. If implemented between arrays of N ions, this photonic interface benefits from an N-fold enhancement of the ion-photon coupling. Strong collective coupling has been shown with neutral atoms and 3D ion crystals, but has not been performed in a system with individual-qubit control and Coulomb-mediated entanglement capabilities. Prof.Vuletic’s MIT group operates a multi-zone ion trap which holds several linear ion arrays (of up to 20 ions each) spaced along the trap axis and features an integrated macroscopic optical cavity. Cooperativity measurements indicate that the strong-coupling regime should be achievable with this apparatus for cavity-mediated entanglement of arrays as short as 5 ions in length. As an MSCA fellow, I will use this trap to pursue the first demonstration of cavity-mediated entanglement of two spatially separate ion arrays. Upon returning, I will join ETH's effort to integrate micro-machined cavities into ion traps and use them to demonstrate strong ion-cavity coupling in a scalable environment, an essential step in the drive to build large-scale photonically-interfaced quantum computers.

Mots clés : cavity mediated ion photon coupling, remote entanglement, quantum information processing, trapped ion qubits, quantum networks, micro cavities, strong coupling regime of cavity quantum electrodynamics

Participants :
- Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (Suisse) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 265840.2 €
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet NANO-SUPREMI (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Staff Exchanges
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Long-range research and innovation goal: The long-range goal of Nano-Supremi is to develop case studies to enable the advanced super-resolution microscopy to investigate nanoscale synthetic and biological structures and to probe nanoscale dynamic processes. Long-range biomedical research and technology goal: The implementation of Nano-Supremi will allow for tracking nanometer-scale bioprocesses such as (i) nanomedicines cellular uptake and trafficking and (ii) single-molecule dynamic processes of DNA-protein, (iii) protein-membrane interactions. Key Research Goals: The objective of Nano-Supremi is to turn the following creative research ideas into advanced microscopy technologies and services. This will ultimately results in the evaluation of in vitro protein and DNA activity and therapeutic efficacy of nanomedicines plugging the gap between innovative research and its exploitation in clinical setting. Scientific impact: We identified a few innovative case studies to explore the potentiality of super resolution microscopy techniques in solving nanoscale bio-structures and dynamic processes. Impact on early-stage researchers: Nano-Supremi involves key participation of junior researchers with outstanding record of achievements in education and research, providing strong support for the development of their careers. Intersectoral dimension: A synergistic approach in using advanced technologies developed by microscope manufacturers to answer fundamental and applied questions on bioprocesses will be pursued. Interdisciplinary dimension: A complementary research program, ranging from nanophotonics, materials science, to molecular biology and bio-analytical chemistry, will drive the implementation of research tasks towards the full achievement of the objectives. International dimension: Funding of this program will enable long-term, transformative research collaborations between groups settled in European Countries and in four non-EU Countries (AU, US, Brazil, Cu)

Mots clés : super resolution microscopy, dna switch, trascriptiom factors, nanomedicine, stem cells

Participants :
- Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología y Medio Ambiente (Cuba) — Partner, organization partner, Organismes publics (hors enseignement & recherche), subvention : 0.0 €
- St. Anne´s University Hospital (Rép. Tchèque) — Partner, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 148500.0 €
- University of Melbourne (Australie) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- University of Rome Tor Vergata (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 306000.0 €
- Universidade Federal do ABC (Brésil) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Italian Institute of Technology (Italie) — Partner, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 270000.0 €
- University of California System (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €