Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet MicroBeaCh (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

MicroBeaCh aims to exploit the biomimetic approach to unravel harmonized spermatozoa beating that favors natural fertilization. Biochemical stimuli in follicular fluid (FF) are pivotal in guiding sperm cells for their traversal through the cumulus-oocyte complex. FF contains peptides, proteins, steroid hormones, polysaccharides, metabolites, antioxidants, and reactive oxygen species. Despite some preliminary investigations and the potential advantages afforded by microfluidics approaches, a noticeable dearth exists in the unraveling mechanism of spermatozoa beating. MicroBeaCh intends to explore the fundamental beating contributions in sperm cell migration. This will be the first study exploiting computer vision and artificial intelligence approaches to obtain the natural beating behaviors of sperm cells. We believe that the successful accomplishment of MicroBeaCh will establish the foundation of novel parameters for quality sperm selection in application to assisted reproduction, where identifying specific beating patterns will advance the outcomes of the practices.

Mots clés : chemotaxis, cumulus, microfluidics, sperm flagellar beating

Participants :
- Beez biotech (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 195914.88 €
Projet MoreSafe (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

EU will aim to have at least 30 million zero-emission vehicles by 2030, primarily powered by the current energy storage technology of choice - lithium-ion batteries. Despite remarkable achievements in developing control strategies over recent decades, many fundamental scientic issues underpinning the safety of these batteries remain elusive, due to a lack of control-oriented models for predicting the internal phenomena that can trigger internal short circuits and the consequent thermal runaway. In this proposal, we document a wholistic new physics-based modelling approach, which adequately incorporates a highly accurate description of battery electrochemistry as well as the accompanying subtle lithium plating phenomenon. It will allow reliable prediction of the occurrence of safety accidents subject to battery operational conditions and the seamless integration into a safety-guaranteed battery management system. As an MSCA-PF fellow, Dr. Yicun Huang will receive crucial training at the Chalmers University of Technology and engage in detailed battery modelling works which span the areas of computational materials and electrical engineering. The interplay between the two areas will spark an innovative and productive throughput, including 1) a multiphase electrochemical model under normal battery operations, 2) a high-fidelity materials model for the growth morphology of lithium plating, and 3) control-oriented models for battery safety assessment. The result of this project will include: a ground-breaking multiple-model framework enabling fast and accurate battery safety state prediction and analysis; a new interdisciplinary research product amalgamating materials modelling and control algorithms; outreach and dissemination to crucial target audiences; and a solid foundation for a safety-guaranteed battery management system intended to revolutionise electric vehicles.

Mots clés : lithium ion batteries, battery safety, internal short circuits, lithium plating morphology, modelling and simulation

Participants :
- École polytechnique Chalmers (Suède) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 206887.68 €
Projet TWISTPVSK (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The moiré patterns in the twisted heterostructures of the layered semiconductors such as graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides, h-BN, etc. have led to the emergence of novel exciting properties such as superconductivity, ferroelectricity, enhanced charge transfer at the interface of heterostructures, etc. Despite being a highly desirable phenomenon in the vertical heterostructures of the layered materials, moiré patterns are yet to be explored in the metal halide perovskites. The 2D layered and 3D metal halide perovskites have become one of the most explored classes of semiconductor materials owing to their excellent optoelectronic properties. The TWISTPVSK project aims to generate twisted heterostructures using ultrathin nanosheets of 2D layered perovskites and ultrathin nanosheets of 3D perovskites. The primary goal is to leverage the enhanced optoelectronic properties resulting from moiré patterns for photodetection applications and establish the role of moiré patterns in the generation of new properties in 2D and 3D metal halide perovskites. The key objectives of this proposal are to: i) synthesize twisted heterostructures of ultrathin nanosheets of 2D layered perovskites, study the moiré exciton dynamics using ultrafast spectroscopy, and explore the effect of twisting angle on photodetection efficiency; ii) chemically convert ultrathin 2D layered perovskites into 3D MA-based perovskite nanosheets, create twisted heterostructures of 3D perovskites, investigate moire exciton dynamics, and fabricate photodetectors based on these heterostructures. TWISTPVSK is at the crossroads of chemistry, physics, and engineering; therefore, it will attract significant attention from different disciplines, offer fresh insights into the behavior of metal halide perovskites, and contribute to the development of next generation technologies.

Mots clés : twsited heterostructures, moir patterns, ultrathin nanosheets, 2d metal halide perovskites, 3d ma based metal halide perovskites, photodetectors

Participants :
- Italian Institute of Technology (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 172750.08 €
Projet HYDRIDE (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Climate change is shaping up to be the greatest existential threat that humanity has ever faced. To combat climate change and the corresponding energy crisis, greenhouse gas emissions must be substantially reduced by 2030 while developing non-fossil future fuel alternatives, such as hydrogen. Hydrogen is highly versatile as it can be used in both fuel cells and electricity production. However, currently >95% of the global hydrogen production is fossil fuel-based and not sustainable. Biotechnological hydrogen production is realized through microorganisms harbouring hydrogenases and represents a promising alternative to expand the proportion of sustainable hydrogen within the global budget. However, the utilization of these enzymes is limited by various mechanisms, including inhibition by oxygen, making biohydrogen in its current state not economically sustainable.  HYDRIDE is an interdisciplinary study aiming to overcome the oxygen sensitivity of [FeFe]- hydrogenases by designing and evolving high-performance hydrogenase enzymes. This will be achieved by 2 major steps: 1) Using sequence data, ancestral enzymatic scaffolds (AEC) of [FeFe]-hydrogenases will be designed and characterized towards their ability to produce hydrogen, their oxygen sensitivity and active site characteristics. AECs have been shown to provide good starting points for laboratory evolution. Thus, these ACEs will be 2) evolved to overcome low hydrogen production under oxygen exposure using a high-throughput selection system. Consequently, HYDRIDE will tackle one of the major bottlenecks for the utilization of [FeFe]-hydrogenases, paving the way for sustainable and economical biotechnological hydrogen production. While addressing two societal UN sustainability goals, the knowledge gained from this study will substantially advance other scientific fields, aiding e.g., the development and design of artificial catalysts.

Mots clés : hydrogen, hydrogenases, directed evolution, enzyme design, biohydrogen, directed evolution

Participants :
- Université d'Uppsala (Suède) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 222727.68 €
Projet GREEN-SPECIALISTS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

A goal of plant engineering is to produce valuable resources from CO2 and solar energy while exploiting the natural advantages of plants as production platforms. Plants have highly specialised cell types and sophisticated development programs, resulting in specialist producer cells that are supported by non-producer parts. Plants are the only organisms that combine autotrophy and extensive multicellular differentiation, yet current engineering strategies fail to fully exploit the potential advantages of plants as chemical production systems. This action proposes to develop and demonstrate a crucial technical advance in plant engineering: developmentally-programmed gene knock-outs in specialised cell types. Genetic knockout of competing metabolic pathways is essential to improving the yield of desirable metabolites. CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing in plants has been developed to the point where multiple homozygous gene knockouts can be made with high efficiency, but in all published examples the knockouts are systemic (i.e. present in every cell). I propose to introduce and validate a set of instructions that program the activation of CRISPR/Cas9 in specific cell types during plant development, resulting in gene deletions only in the targeted cells. The ability to produce chimeric plants with deliberately engineered specialist cell types is an essential step toward realising the potential of plant engineering. This action will generate intellectual property and a set of methods that will be useful to the wider plant research community. My broad experience in systems and synthetic biology and the world-class expertise of the host institution in plant biochemistry and light-driven biosynthesis are an ideal match for success in this action. Successful implementation will develop and diversify my skills while creating an ideal opportunity for independent career development, including attracting further funding and forming external collaborations.

Mots clés : metabolic engineering, chimeric plants, crispr, cas9, promoters, differentiation, fluorophore, facs, arabidopsis thaliana

Participants :
- University of Copenhagen (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 200194.8 €
Projet SKILLS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Economic Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

A growing body of cross-disciplinary research highlights the importance of a child’s environment in the first years of life for skill development and outcomes over the life course. This period is thought to be important for human capital accumulation both because very young children are sensitive to their environment and because deprivation during this period can have long-term consequences. Long-term follow-up studies of early childhood development (ECD) interventions to improve nutrition and create stimulating environments have found large and wide-ranging effects into adulthood: increased college attendance, employment, and earnings and reductions in teen pregnancy and criminal activity. These promising long-term effects of ECD interventions have led to calls from policy-makers and academics to develop large-scale programs that integrate ECD interventions into existing public service infrastructure. Despite this recent call to action, evidence of medium-term impacts of more recent integrated ECD intervention shows that there is substantial fade-out of short-term treatment effects. The puzzling persistence and fade-out patterns of ECD interventions requires more evidence on follow-up studies of existing ECD interventions. Of equal importance is a more detailed analysis of which early skills interventions should target to achieve medium-and long-term improvements in human capital. The proposed research agenda aims to address those concerns in two ways. First, by providing new evidence of medium-term effects on a wide range of child development outcomes of a clustered randomized controlled ECD intervention. Secondly, by developing a new methodology to measure infant skills using innovative tools from the field of machine learning. Both research projects would bring more clarity to the academic literature and policy-makers on which type of infant skills are worth investing in.

Mots clés : early childhood education, human capital, skill formation, impact evaluation, measurement

Participants :
- University of London (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 212933.76 €
Projet SOFT (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

A key challenge for sustainable intensification of agriculture is to reduce hunger and poverty by producing increasing amounts of food, feed, and bioenergy for a growing world population, but with minimal loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. In intensive conventional farming systems yields are high, but soil biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are often reduced, and soil food webs are simplified. Organic farming provides a more environmentally sustainable alternative, but it typically produces lower yields, particularly in early years after conversion. In SOFT (Steering Organic Farming Transition), I will test if soil inoculation may be a promising tool to speed up the transition from high-yield conventional to high-yield organic agriculture and can help to overcome ‘soil legacy effects’ due to impoverished soil communities. First, I will use a chronosequence of farmers’ fields throughout The Netherlands that have been converted from conventional to organic farming to study the role that the structure of soil networks may have in soil functioning. Then, I will use soil collected from these sites to test the potential of soil inoculation to aid the transition of soil communities and coupling of soil networks in organic farming systems. By revealing the potential of whole soil inoculation to regenerate soil networks, and how soil networks relate to functioning in agroecosystems, SOFT will be a ground-breaking advancement compared to current efforts to understand the transition from conventional to organic systems and may serve as a baseline for downstream manipulation studies in which certain soil communities may be engineered as inoculants to steer and speed-up this transition. Taken together, SOFT will contribute to establish new management practices that may help to shorten the transition period from conventional farming to a more organic type of farming that maintains high crop yields while having less negative environmental impacts.

Mots clés : soil inoculation, organic agriculture, sustainable transition, soil biodiversity, ecological networks

Participants :
- Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 187572.48 €
Projet ARCTICO (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

A key challenge in climate change science is to provide informed constraints on the magnitude of future climate change. Uncertainties associated with such predictions remain large due to the shortness of our observational records (at best 150 years) and the absence of large climate shifts therein to serve as an analogue for future change. This is especially problematic when estimating Arctic climate change because the response in the Arctic is amplified relative to the global mean, making the Arctic the most sensitive and vulnerable environment with regards to global warming. Efforts to assess the magnitude of past (e.g. pre-industrial) climate changes using climate proxies are thus crucial to further our understanding of how the Arctic system will respond to continued global warming. The proposed investigation seeks to constrain the magnitude of Arctic amplification by quantifying the influence of the carbonate ion concentration of sea water on the temperature signal recorded in the Arctic planktonic foraminifera Neogloboquadrina pachyderma sinistral (NPS). Using NPS shells collected from stratified plankton samples, I will combine established and new analytical techniques in trace element and isotope geochemistry to derive and isolate carbonate system parameters from the climate signature recorded in NPS. This approach is innovative and interdisciplinary as it takes advantage of cutting edge knowledge in proxy development without compromising on the benefit of a seasonally and spatially constraint dataset. This will provide a holistic understanding of how changing hydrological and other environmental conditions impact not only NPS lifecycle but also the geochemical signal recorded in their shell. Given the uncertainties associated with available paleoceanographic tools this will provide a major advancement in the field of paleoceanography and climate change science.

Mots clés : palaeothermometry, foraminifera, arctic amplification

Participants :
- University of Bremen (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 94686.8 €
Projet FLYghtCaRe (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

A major challenge for any visual system is the dramatic difference in ambient light between a starlit night and midday sun. In contrast to the ciliary rods of vertebrates, the rhabdomeric photoreceptors of the common fruitfly not only reliably detect single photons when dark-adapted (generating responses called ‘quantum bumps’), but continue responding in full daylight. At the core of this performance lie positive and negative feedback loops, many involving Ca2+ entry through the light activated transient receptor potential channels TRP and TRPL. Although Ca2+ modulates virtually every step of the phototransductive cascade, key targets are the channels themselves, leading to: (i) amplification by positive feedback during the rising phase of quantum bumps, (ii) gain reduction by negative feedback during quantum bump termination and during light adaptation. Our objectives are to combine single cell electrophysiology and optogenetics to explore Ca2+ signalling in fly photoreceptors, dissecting both its molecular interaction with TRP and TRPL channels and its dynamics within the cell. Our first aim will be to characterise the role of Calmodulin binding sites and other unknown regulatory sites on TRP and TRPL, in the feedback loops described above. Flies expressing mutated and chimeric TRP/TRPL channels will be used. Our second aim will be to obtain measurements of Ca2+ dynamics with subcellular spatial resolution under physiological illumination. Genetically encoded Ca2+ indicators will be targeted to specific cellular compartments and imaged in intact flies by exploiting the optics of the compound eye. Measurements will be made in fly mutants displaying defective light responses and retinal degeneration, leading to precise hypotheses on the mechanisms responsible for their phenotypes. This project will bring our understanding of rhabdomeric phototransduction to a new level of sophistication, while enriching my professional skills in a world-class laboratory.

Mots clés : phototransduction, drosophila, photoreceptors, calcium signaling, calmodulin, trp channels

Participants :
- University of Cambridge (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183454.8 €
Projet NeuralFieldTheoriES (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

A major challenge in statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics and theoretical neuroscience over the last half century has been to understand the self-organizing principles governing the dynamics of large networks of neurons. Physicists and applied mathematicians have proposed simple mean-field descriptions of spatially-extended neural networks in terms of a relevant macroscopic observable, the firing rate. This approach has been particularly successful and so-called Neural Field Models (NFM) have become an extremely popular mathematical tool in neuroscience, physics and applied mathematics. Yet, to date, mean-field theories describe networks with chemical synapses, but it remains a major theoretical challenge to incorporate electrical synaptic interactions in such mathematical descriptions. Recently, a mean-field theory for large networks of spiking neurons has been proposed, which exactly links the dynamics of single neurons with that of two mean-field variables: The firing rate and the mean membrane potential. Remarkably, this theory permits to incorporate electrical interactions, but the mathematical derivation and the analysis of the dynamics of the first NFM is lagging. This project proposes the formal mathematical derivation of such NFM, as well as the thorough analysis of its dynamics and bifurcations. Towards this goal, at the host institution UPF in Barcelona, the ER will apply mean-field methods and nonlinear dynamical systems theory to derive the novel NFM (which we conjecture is of reaction-diffusion type). During a secondment at VU Amsterdam, the ER will be trained to become an expert in numerical analysis of partial differential equations, which will further allow him to perform extensive state-of-the-art computer simulations. The expected results will provide completely novel mechanistic insights on the emergence of complex spatio-temporal patterns of neuronal activity due to the intricate interplay between chemical and electrical synapses.

Mots clés : collective synchronization, neuronal dynamics, neuronal oscillations, neural mass and neural field models

Participants :
- Pompeu Fabra University (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 160932.48 €