Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet nuHEDGE (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In 2013 the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory has received the Physics World award for the Breakthrough of the Year for the first observations of high-energy cosmic neutrinos. The discovery, indeed, represents the birth of a new research field, the neutrino astronomy, that can definitively shed light on the sources of high-energy cosmic-rays and on the mechanisms through which they are produced. The origin of all of the detected neutrinos is still to be correctly identified. Just recently evidence for emission from the direction of the blazar TXS 0506+056 has been reported. The most important point to understand is if the neutrino events are all of extra-galactic origin or a galactic component is present, and which are the specific characteristics, like size of the acceleration region and magnetic field, of the possible sources. To achieve this goal a multi-messenger approach is necessary. In particular, it is important to compare the single point sources available in the current gamma-ray catalogues with the IceCube data, considering their spatial, timing and energy distribution. After identifying specific plausible candidates for the IceCube events, it is possible to consider the sensitivity of gamma-ray experiments, like the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory and the planned Cherenkov Telescope Array Project, to verify the origin of the IceCube events. For the final correct identification of the IceCube neutrinos, the detection of the events from different experiments will be fundamental. In this regard, the estimation of the prospects for ANTARES, for the possible extension of IceCube and for the planned cubic kilometre neutrino telescope in the Northern Hemisphere, KM3NeT, is mandatory.

Mots clés : high energy neutrinos, gamma rays, cosmic rays

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 184707.84 €
Projet MultiNav (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In Europe 30M people are visually impaired (VI), 2.5M of which are entirely blind. Despite many efforts on the societal level, VIs are still ‘left in the dark’, when it comes to independent navigation. Neuroscience has the long-term potential to provide brain-prostheses, which circumvent damaged parts of the visual system. In the present project, we will investigate how spatial information can assist VIs during navigation by non-invasive and invasive information delivery. We will make use of multisensory integration and optogenetic stimulation to investigate these questions in an animal model of navigation in the dark. Mice use their sensory hairs (‘whiskers’) analogous to how VIs use their cane for exploring their local surroundings. During this tactile navigation VIs also utilize the sound generated by their cane to provide both spatial and material information about their surroundings, evidence for a multisensory strategy. Specifically we will first investigate the effect of multisensory information on the neural representation of tactile information during natural exploratory behaviour. For this purpose we will provide sounds rapidly (<1ms) in sync with each surface contact of the whisker. These sounds are modulated by the animal’s distance to the object or will provide contextually relevant spatial information (e.g. distant targets). We predict that even soft auditory information will boost the usefulness of tactile information (‘inverse effectiveness’) and allow faster behavioural judgments in a spatial task. Next, we will provide spatial information directly to the tactile cortex using optogenetic stimulation, emulating the functioning of future, spatial brain prostheses. We predict that animals will learn to integrate this additional information to optimize their navigation success. In summary, our research will contribute to providing navigation information to VIs non-invasively and invasively, and thus further the ongoing efforts of inclusion in Europe.

Mots clés : assistive devices for the visually impaired, optogenetics, multisensory integration

Participants :
- Radboud University Nijmegen (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 177598.8 €
Projet PEAR_EC (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In Ireland, 29% of children under six are at risk of poverty, compared to 26% in Europe. Poverty negatively affects children's early development and parental engagement in children’s education, with long-term effects. Ending poverty and ensuring quality education for all from early childhood are interrelated UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) can drive development and combat poverty through its multiplier effects, while providing parental support (PS) to engage with children’s education can further extend these effects. Commitments to ECEC and PS are reflected in emerging EU and Irish policy. However, coherent guidance on ECEC PS modalities is lacking and the effectiveness of practice rarely evaluated. Also, despite evidence of beneficial outcomes, the interaction between PS and poverty is neglected, as well as engagement with fathers/coparents. CDI is testing a model to improve children’s outcomes by integrating PS within ECEC services in Tallaght, a disadvantagd area in Ireland. The researcher, Dr. Catarina Leitão, will carry out a fellowship to study this model under the intersectoral supervision of Marian Quinn, CDI’s CEO and Professor Noirin Hayes of Trinity College Dublin. This fellowship will make a timely contribution to ECEC research and policy-practice gaps, particularly in the context of Ireland's recent (2019) commitment to PS through ECEC services. It will advance understanding of the characteristics and conditions related to positive child, parent and service outcomes by examining service quality, family background and gender effects. It will combine a quasi-experimental matching design and standardised tools that allow internal and external comparability, with innovative qualitative methods (e.g. Photovoice) that empower child and family voice. Lastly, it will optimise intersectoral collaboration to widely communicate and disseminate findings, enhancing potential for social impact.

Mots clés : early learning and care services, parental support, engaging fathers, quasi experimental evaluation, children and families  voice

Participants :
- Tallaght west childhood developmentinitiative company lbg (Irlande) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Autres, subvention : 196590.72 €
Projet OsteoNano (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In OsteoNano project the training-through-research is targeted at the developing of biomimetic surfaces to study and control the osteogenic differentiation of human Mesenchymal Stem Cells (hMSCs). Osteogenic differentiation of hMSCs can be guided by growth factors, such as bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP-2). Currently, recombinantly expressed BMP-2 is applied clinically to enhance the healing of fractured sites. However, the absence of a control over the growth factor surface density and adhesion of cells induce side effects such as ectopic bone formation. The first aim of this project is to present BMP-2 to hMSCs in a spatially controlled manner by applying surface sensitive and high-resolution techniques. The growth factors will be linked to the surface using glycosamminoglycans (GAGs) such as heparan sulphate (HS), and combined with adhesives molecules such as cyclic RGD sequences, which are known to increase the osteogenic effects of BMP-2 by activation of Integrin alphaV-beta3 and alpha5beta1. Our approach will be to design biomimetic surfaces with stepwise increasing complexity, by binding each component in a controlled manner, in terms of orientation, surface density and spatial arrangement. By using these functionalized substrates for hMSCs osteogenic differentiation we will answer several fundamental questions regarding the role of BMP-2 and its interaction with HS and RGD sequences on the osteogenic commitment of hMSCs. The biomimetic surfaces proposed here, present several fundamental studies, advantages and breakthroughs (i) reduced use of BMP-2 bound on the surface: indeed (i) the binding prevents the cellular internalization of the growth factors; (ii) possibility to enhance the osteogenic differentiation by surface co-presentation of BMPs or/and of RGDs; (iii) surface versatility with respect to stiffness which could positively impact osteogenic differentiation.

Mots clés : physical chemistry of biological systems

Participants :
- Max Planck Society (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 159460.8 €
Projet PLACABIN (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : SIGNED

In PLACABIN, the candidate proposes a novel mode of plasmonic-nonplasmonic bimetallic photocatalysts based on the intermetallic effects between the plasmonic metal and catalytic metal. As a specific model, Au-Pd bimetallic nanostructures will be developed for the selective oxygenation of hydrocarbons, among which methane, cyclohexane, and toluene are adopted as the substrates. He will first syntheses Au-Pd bimetallic nanostructures and clarify their structure-activity relationship (WP1). Then he will make major effects to reveal the intermetallic effects between Au and Pd which contain optical and electronic coupling (WP2) and the plasmon-driven selective mechanism (WP3) through combined computational and experimental methods on both ensemble and single-particle levels. Based on these theoretical achievements, he will develop a designing principle guiding the construction of effective Au-Pd bimetallic nanostructures for plasmon-driven catalysis, which will be smoothly extended to other plasmonic-nonplasmonic bimetallic nanostructures. He will also develop a flow photochemical selective catalysis system based on Au-Pd bimetallic photocatalysts (WP4) to provide an application paradigm of this solar-driven procedure for selective oxidation reactions. The candidate is an excellent researcher with the motivation and capability to conduct cutting-edge research, the skills to share and manage knowledge and supervise students. PLACABIN will generate high-impact publications guaranteeing the dissemination among academia. The well-organised outreach activities will help to communicate the results to a wider audience. The implementation of this fellowship will contribute significantly to the professional development of the candidate to become a mature and independent researcher. It will strengthen his innovative research potential and his management and outreach skills, thus placing him in a leading position in his long-term research career.

Mots clés : plasmonic photocatalysis, bimetallic nanostructures, au pd, hydrocarbons oxygenation

Participants :
- Cardiff University (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 224933.76 €
Projet VIVIR (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In VIVIR, I will conduct state-of-the-art research on supporting collaborative face-to-face data analysis. This is motivated by the increasing need for interdisciplinary teams to collaborate on understanding and analysing data. Additionally, as the scale and complexity of data increase, so does the demand for data-based insights and decision-making. My approach is to empower people who are working with large and complex data, by letting them lay out as many visualization views (in the following, denoted views) as necessary on large displays, and creating specialized meta-visualizations to show relations between these views. These meta-visualizations will allow team workers to be aware of each other’s work and the changing view- and data-relationships as they work. While the potential of view meta-visualizations has been acknowledged , there are currently only a few frequently used and considered essential examples of such meta-visualizations. These might show that data in two views are compared in a third view, or that a view shows a subset of the data shown in another view. Most importantly, there has been no thorough exploration into the power and potential of meta-visualization support for data-driven decision-making. To understand the potential impact of meta-visualizations on data analysis, we need to take a structured approach, to formalize these possibilities, which will improve our abilities to support knowledge worker teams as they face the challenges of analyzing increasingly complex data. In brief, data can be difficult to understand. Creating visualizations of data lets people see their data more clearly. As data size and complexity increases, more views are needed to reveal the information hidden in data. Large displays might be useful to solve this. However, a new problem is emerging – how to be aware of the data relationships, and keep an overview of analysis provenance , findings, and decisions between these multiple views. VIVIR tackles this issue.

Mots clés : information visualization, large and high resolutions displays, large displays, meta visualization, multitouch interaction

Participants :
- University of Calgary (Canada) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- University of Copenhagen (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 263719.8 €
Projet Womenswriting (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In a time when high-profile outbreaks such as zika and ebola frequently make news headlines, the proposed research project, ‘Women’s Plague Writing in Early Modern England’, provides an opportunity to interrogate how we interpret medical writing, who talks about medical problems and how gender becomes entangled in outbreaks by looking to the past. ‘Women’s Plague Writing in Early Modern England’ will undertake a survey and analysis of women’s plague writing in England from 1550 to 1700. A three-year Global Fellowship project with a two-year outgoing phase at the University of Toronto (UofT) and incoming phase at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), the research action takes an interdisciplinary approach to women’s plague writing across the early modern period in England. The research programme explores the medical humanities through the lens of literature in its historical context. This project will change the canon of plague writing, which has hitherto focused on male-authored texts. Moving from the single outbreak focus seen in my first monograph, The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan), the outcome of the project makes the significant leap to studying a period of plague writing, a bigger-scale picture, with a broad chronology that captures major plague outbreaks in 1592, 1603, 1625, 1630, 1636 and 1665. The project encapsulates a full-period picture of women’s interactions with plague and medicine and the corresponding gendering of plague writing. It will examine how women discuss the disease and how this differs from male-authored texts. It will ask how the medium chosen for publishing a text, print or manuscript, impacted how women discussed the disease. It will investigate how women’s understanding of plague was gendered and, more broadly, how the textual construction of pestilence was gendered in early modern England.

Mots clés : early modern literature, women s writing, cultural history, medical humanities, medical history, plague writing, life writing, history of science, religious writing, recipe books, manuscript and print

Participants :
- Queen's University Belfast (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 255349.8 €
- University of Toronto (Canada) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet HYTEM (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : SIGNED

In a world of enormously rising energy consumption and environmental pollution, the demand for clean and renewable energy sources and for minimizing the energy loss is of critical importance. One strategy towards improved efficiency involves capturing and recycling the “waste” heat from all energy conversion processes. With a special class of materials, known as thermoelectrics, thermoelectric generators can be devised, which allow a direct conversion of heat into electricity. The goal of HYTEM is to develop advanced organic-inorganic hybrid thermoelectric materials by applying a newly developed concept of simultaneous vapour phase coating and infiltration (VPI/SCIP) of polymers with inorganics. SCIP is a viable, scalable and robust preparative strategy for obtaining high-performance hybrid superlattice TE materials with chemically linked organic/inorganic interfaces, which have never been demonstrated before. The originality of this work lies in creating a new hybrid materials set, where hierarchical superlattice structures of different inorganic materials are simultaneously grown in the subsurface of a polymer and on its top, which will allow to obtain a superior TE performance. An initial growth of inorganic nanoparticles inside a polymer bulk by infiltration will generate nanoscale point defects in the polymer, which will reduce the thermal conductivity of the matrix by inducing phonon scattering, while at the same time the electrical conductivity will be enhanced. To date, no work has been done to explore the potential of VPI/SCIP to generate hierarchical inorganic structuring in polymers. The knowledge gained from these experiments will have a great impact on the research of hybrid TEs due to the uniqueness of VPI/SCIP.

Mots clés : hybrid superlattice thermoelectrics, organic inorganic hybrids, simultaneous vapor phase coating and infiltration  vpi, scip

Participants :
- CIC nanoGUNE (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 160932.48 €
Projet Ether (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In an era that Internet of Things (IoT) applications are getting increasingly dynamic and mobile, the Achilles heel of such efforts remains the management of the application state (e.g., consistency, availability, performance, fault tolerance). For stateless applications, functionalities like load balancing (active-active), failover (active-passive), and job continuity (roaming) are easily addressable at the network level. For stateful applications though, the developers must provision a clustered data layer for managing the ever-growing collections of geographically spread data. This layer needs to provide geo-transparent data access, integrate well with the interplay of backend services, and be tailored (described by structure and purpose and expressed in functionality) to the specific application requirements. Over the last few years, research efforts are mainly focused on security, privacy, confidentiality, energy efficiency, and reliability of storage systems. An important aspect that has not been thoroughly investigated yet is programmability. To keep pace with the increasing birthday of new application models it is essential to pass the technological barrier of 'programming storage systems' and enter the age of 'composing storage systems'. So far, no competent solution has been proposed either by industry or academia. Herein, we propose an open-source development ecosystem intended for engineers and researchers looking to invent, build, verify, evaluate, and release storage systems, tailored on a per-application basis. The ecosystem, called Ether, consists of i) the virtualized storage platform for managing application state whose data are spread across heterogeneous services provided by third-party vendors ii) the virtualization framework for specifying the control flows and the data management of the platform, as hierarchies of virtual functions iii) and the community hub for sharing virtual functions, platform configurations, or best practises.

Mots clés : pass the technological barrier of  storage system programming  and enter the age of automated  storage system composition  with minimal or no human intervention

Participants :
- Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (Grèce) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 153085.44 €
Projet Kinaddict (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In decades, the 5-year survival rate of several cancers has barely been improved and the esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (eSCC) is not different with a rate around 25%. In order to increase the survival, chemoradiotherapy prior surgery has become the reference for eSCC despite still a high mortality. eSCC tumors harbor a variety of genetic alterations directly or indirectly affecting the activity of kinases involved in signaling pathways, the cell cycle or the proliferation. Evidence on how eSCC tumors are addicted to such oncogenic alterations remains missing to evaluate alternative treatment modalities. The heterogeneity of eSCC tumors presenting deregulations of diverse constellations of kinases has rendered difficult the development of a unique therapeutic strategy similar to prior successes targeting EGFR or BCR-ABL. However, as the CDK4 activity lies downstream from most of the oncogenic deregulations of signalling pathways, it has been proposed to represent the therapeutic target of choice, confirmed by the first approval by the FDA/EMA of 3 CDK4/6 inhibitors to treat ER+ breast cancer. Despite this, not all tumors respond to CDK4 inhibition and long-term treatment triggers escape mechanisms. In this context, the main aim of the present proposal consists to preclinically evaluate if and how eSCC respond to inhibitors targeting kinases with an altered activity using a multi-omics approach. In this cancer, we will (1) identify the kinases with a deregulated activity associated to different genetic landscapes and determine the addiction of eSCC to their activity, (2) characterize the sensitivity of eSCC tumors to CDK4 inhibition and decipher their molecular response for effective combined targeted therapy, and (3) experimentally define the treatment modalities of eSCC in mouse models. The results will provide a strong basis to extend the study with clinicians to human tumors to determine biomarkers of responsiveness to efficient alternative therapy.

Mots clés : kinase activity, cdk4, oncogene addiction, mass spectrometry, chemotherapy

Participants :
- Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgique) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 178320.0 €