Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet THREATENED (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Harming another person is considered immoral and punished. However, an exception is made when violence corresponds to a reaction to an external threat, i.e., self-defense. Forgiveness for these violent acts is often explained with legal and moral considerations. However, I suggest that tolerance towards self-defense may also be understood by the considerating the impact of threats on the victim’s emotions and Sense of Agency (SoA), i.e., the feeling of controlling one’s actions. The main objective of THREATENED is to examine threat perception and self-defense from the victim’s standpoint. To this aim, I will combine individual (WP1) and multi-agent (WP2) SoA tasks with fear conditioning procedures, which allow to study how individuals learn to fear a threatening stimulus (CS+) compared with one signaling safety (CS-). In WP1.1, I will test if SoA is lower when key presses are performed following a threatening color cue (CS+) paired with a mildly painful electrical shock, compared to a cue signaling safety (CS-). In WP1.2, I will study if freedom of choice increases SoA and reduces fear of CS+. In WP2.1, I will assess the impact of interpersonal threats, by comparing SoA in a threatening – the "victim" receives a shock by a co-participant (CS+) – vs. a safe social context (CS-). In WP2.2, I will test if self-defense can counter the detrimental effects of interpersonal threats on SoA, by letting the "victim" choose whether to avoid the electrical stimulation (flight) or to react by sending a shock to the "aggressor" (fight). In all studies, I will gauge physiological responses to threat (Skin Conductance Response), and I will employ electroencephalography (EEG) to measure how the victim’s brain processes the consequences of their actions. THREATENED will produce valuable information to devise i) novel ways to interpret the feelings of control of a victim, which could prove useful for legal authorities and ii) new therapeutic approaches for the victims of violence.

Mots clés : agency, fear conditioning, consciousness, decision making, morality, neurolaw

Participants :
- Université de Gand (Belgique) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 200400.0 €
Projet Waste2Ethanol (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The EU Commission’s bioeconomy strategy aims at shifting the European economy towards a greater and more sustainable use of renewable resources, where waste streams are converted into value-added products. Ethanol is a platform chemical and fuel with a global production of 102 billion liters per year. However, its production requires sugar crops, leading to conflicts over land use and potentially contributing to food shortages or increased food prices. Current feedstock alternatives (lignocellulosic materials or algae biomass) require complex pre-treatments, resulting in higher production costs that limit their application. Waste2Ethanol aims to develop a novel non-sterile bioprocess without any pretreatments for the production of ethanol from food waste. For this, our understanding of the metabolic interactions between yeasts (ethanol producers) and carbohydrate fermenting bacteria needs to be expanded. In Waste2Ethanol, this will be done with a combination of mixed culture biotechnology methods, defined microbial co-cultures and cutting-edge molecular and microscopy techniques. Hosted at UGent, I will study the competition and synergies of yeasts and carbohydrate fermenting bacteria with microbial enrichment cultures and bioinformatics techniques to identify selective conditions that would favor the production of ethanol. During the secondment at Osnabrück University, I will gain complementary skills in the use of defined microbial co-cultures and advanced microscopy techniques to study metabolic interactions. This unique combination of expertise will significantly improve my career perspectives towards my ambition to establish my own research group at the intersection of microbial ecology and non-axenic biotechnology. Overall, the generated knowledge will allow to steer a microbial community towards ethanol production and pave the road to a non-sterile bioprocess for the production of ethanol from food waste at higher TRLs.

Mots clés : ethanol, food waste, mixed culture biotechnology, microbial enrichment cultures, defined microbial co cultures

Participants :
- Université d'Osnabrück (Allemagne) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Université de Gand (Belgique) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 175920.0 €
Projet RewSL (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Our visual system constantly encounters a plethora of stimuli, drastically surpassing our processing capabilities for in-depth analysis. It is hence essential to select the element(s) that is most relevant for our objectives and ignore irrelevant ones. One helpful feature for this is that the world is characterized by numerous regularities making it partially predictable. Our brain can extract these regularities from past experience and use them to efficiently guide target selection. Recently, significant scientific interest has been directed to two forms of learning that focus on two types of regularities: in reward-mediated learning (RL), people learn which stimuli are associated with reward, prioritizing the elements related with high (vs. low) reinforcement. Statistical learning (SL), in contrast, allows people to extract statistical regularities from the environment, such as how often a stimulus occurs in a specific location, optimizing future actions toward the location where the relevant element appears frequently. In everyday life RL and SL coexist and they jointly guide our selection of relevant stimuli. However, they have been mainly addressed separately using divergent tasks, hindering a direct comparison of the results and assessing their combined influence. This project seeks to bridge this gap by systematically comparing RL and SL in a systematic and well-balanced experimental setup to understand how people implicitly learn from their past experience. Using a series of consistent experimental tasks, behavioral, ocular and electroencephalography measures will be recorded from healthy human volunteers to assess the individual and joint effect of RL and SL on the process dynamics from target selection until response execution. Furthermore, employing Markov decision process models, we will compare the observed performance with model performance. Jointly, our results will provide important insights into real-world learning mechanisms.

Mots clés : reward mediated learning, statistical learning, eeg, computational model visual selective attention

Participants :
- Université de Gand (Belgique) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 175920.0 €
Projet TRACED (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Dengue, a vector-borne disease transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes, has emerged as a significant global health challenge, particularly in regions like East Africa, where its impact is increasingly felt. Tanzania, with recurrent outbreaks and an expanding range of mosquito vectors, offers a critical case study for understanding dengue's broader epidemiological trends in these regions. The spread of Aedes aegypti, driven by global changes such as rising temperatures, urbanisation, and increased transportation networks, has intensified the threat of dengue in Tanzania. Despite this, substantial knowledge gaps remain, particularly in predicting future hotspots for transmission and understanding the extent of the population at risk, now and in the future.  The TRACED project aims to address these gaps by integrating innovative methodologies to assess ecological niches, human population dynamics, and dengue transmission risk. The project's outcomes are expected to support global efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3.3, which focuses on ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all, by raising awareness among policymakers, which is crucial for effective intervention strategies. Given the limited research and funding in this area, particularly in Africa, this project will provide critical insights and methodological frameworks that can be applied across resource-limited regions, contributing to better preparedness and response to future dengue outbreaks.  Researchers from Technological University Dublin and the Institute of Tropical Medicine are collaborating with Tanzania's Ministry of Health's Neglected Tropical Disease programme and local experts from the Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST), and the Ifakara Health Institute (IHI).

Mots clés : vector borne diseases, aedes aegypti, climate change, global change processes, infectious diseases, outbreak preparedness

Participants :
- Technological University Dublin (Irlande) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 268568.64 €
- Institut de médecine tropicale (Belgique) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet FIReSafeTimber (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Urban densification, sustainability drivers and technological advances foster the development of high-rise structures using bio-based materials like engineered wood products. Their main worldwide barrier relates to fire safety. Although a natural fire has a decay phase, structural capacity is traditionally assessed according to a standard fire curve: an unrealistic ever-increasing thermal exposure with time, conceived as worst-case design scenario. This results in inadequate assessment for timber, often disqualifying it as potential material. Also, the decay phase, deemed less onerous due to its lower temperatures, is generally omitted from structural calculations. However, for structural performance it is of crucial importance for timber. Unlike traditional non-combustible construction materials, wood loses its mechanical properties at relatively low temperatures. Thus, the precise interaction between fire and structure needs to be understood because the temperature propagation through the load-bearing timber can unexpectedly lead to structural collapse, even after a fire seems extinguished. Current regulations fail to consider this hazardous issue and available literature on the matter is limited. Fundamental technical issues still need to be resolved and pertain to the nature of the fire dynamics and the resulting deterioration of the engineered timber mechanical properties. In FIReSafeTimber computational models are built to simulate the thermal exposure to structural elements for various fire dynamics conditions (e.g., fuel and compartment characteristics). Bench-scale and full-scale fire tests are conducted on loaded timber structural elements with varying fire decay phase. FIReSafeTimber will formulate a novel constitutive model to predict the heat transfer and the structural capacity of timber elements and will develop performance-based methodologies for the fire-safe design of timber structural systems that include the effects of the fire decay phase.

Mots clés : timber fire safety fire decay phase timber structures performance based design fire dynamics structural capacity engineered wood products heat transfer charring bio based materials

Participants :
- École polytechnique fédérale de Zurich (Suisse) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Université d'Édimbourg (Royaume-Uni) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Université de Gand (Belgique) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 175920.0 €
Projet VIZPROP (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

In this project, I aim to tackle the growing trend of studying the issue of dispossession and property conflicts by bringing the MENA region into the discussion. The MENA region has a significant contribution to make to this issue. New interest in the issue of dispossession has been revived in the decade following the Arab revolutions. Due to increasing urbanization, climate change, and political conflict, MENA has been experiencing several political crises, increasingly focused on housing, land, and property rights. My project will combine the examination of the formation of property rights with digital practices and spaces. My research hypothesis states that in circumstances where property rights are uncertain and contested, the emerging use of digital technology as a tool to reclaim property rights by dispossessed communities creates a virtual space for envisioning alternatives to current property regime. I suggest that these new methodologies allow for the legitimization and re-imagining of an alternative property regime that contests the current legal regime by providing what I refer to as a virtual "proof of existence". VIZPROP builds on my previous work, seeking to develop a collaborative web platform to examine the contested conceptions and claims regarding land and property ownership in Palestine/Israel, Morocco, and Tunisia. Using innovative methodologies, it combines a cross-country collaborative mapping exercise with an ethnographic study of actors and organizations using information and communication technology (ICT) to reclaim property rights. Through collaborative work and open innovation, my research will lead to the development of innovative digital tools aimed at the gathering of collectively assembled data, maps and knowledge on property and property rights with the long-term goal of securing property rights of marginalized communities and creating advocacy tools in their interactions with policy makers.

Mots clés : dispossession, property rights, mena, digital humanities

Participants :
- Université de Beir Zeit (Palestine) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Centre Jacques Berque pour les études en sciences humaines et sociales (Maroc) — Partner, associated partner, Autres, subvention : 0.0 €
- Université de Gand (Belgique) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 279120.0 €
Projet BioDir-X (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The analysis of the directionality of fibres forming the white matter is a fundamental task in the investigation of the nervous system (NS), in terms of understanding its development and ageing as well as many neurological conditions. The imaging of white matter directionality is usually accomplished by means of diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DTI), which exploits the anisotropic diffusion of water molecules in the NS parenchyma. While DTI meets all the requirements for clinical imaging, it suffers from low resolution, which makes it difficult for pre-clinical small animal imaging where high resolution is required. In addition, it cannot be used for the imaging of materials where no water is present, requiring an alternative technique. In both cases, this can be represented by X-rays, which provide high resolution as well as the capability to extract directional information. However conventional, attenuation-based imaging is not directional, and the multi-modal capability offered by the new phase contrast techniques must be used. In addition to attenuation, these techniques also provide refraction and ultra-small angle scattering, which are directional signals and can be exploited to retrieve fibre orientation on a multi-scale level, above and below the system’s resolution. In particular, the retrieval of directional information from dark-field has been demonstrated by means of grating interferometry, which requires the use of two or three optical elements depending on the source size. The main goal of the project is to introduce a beam tracking (BT) multi-modal technique as an alternative for directional imaging. BT is based on the use of a single mask regardless of the source size, therefore providing the same capabilities as grating interferometry but a significantly simpler and more versatile setup. Directional BT will be used to extract the direction of fibres in sections of murine NS using both synchrotron facilities and laboratory sources.

Mots clés : pre clinical imaging, x ray imaging, multi modal imaging, ultra small angle scattering, directional imaging, phase contrast

Participants :
- Conseil national de la recherche (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 172750.08 €
- Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi (Italie) — Partner, associated partner, Recherche, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet SynAb4Toxin (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Food safety plays a critical role in society. When it comes to avoiding food poisoning, most of the attention goes to preventing microbial growth in food products. However, the cause of intoxication is the presence of toxins produced by these microorganisms. Yet, standard industrial or household food processing and preparation techniques effective at removing the producing microorganisms fail to remove the actual toxins. As a result, these toxins, which typically are not detected in routine microbial food analysis, are consumed daily by the general population. Beauvericin (BEA) and enniatin B (ENN B) are mycotoxins produced on crops that can easily end up in the final food or feed products. Other examples include cereulide (CER), which is produced by bacteria and has a high prevalence in ready-to-eat foods. Multiple consequences and even fatalities have been reported due to the consumption of food contaminated with BEA/ENN or CER and as such, the detection and sequestration of these toxins is of utmost importance, both in public health and economic terms, as well as from a broader stakeholder perspective. Despite numerous attempts worldwide, the current state of the art does not allow the production of antibodies against CER, BEA or ENN B via classical animal immunization. This hampers the creation of a fast, robust, inexpensive and on-field (kit-based) detection system for these toxins in food commodities. In the current project, I intend to use artificial synthetic antibodies (SynAbs) that bind to these toxins (ionophoric cyclic depsipeptides) to produce valuable technologies for detecting and isolating these toxins in complex food samples.

Mots clés : food safety, mycotoxins, bacterial toxins, affinity reagents, elisa, lfa, spe

Participants :
- Université de Gand (Belgique) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 175920.0 €
Projet CROC (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally and in the EU, and was responsible for an estimated one in six deaths in 2018. Early diagnosis plays an important role in determining cancer treatment outcomes, but the diagnosis of ovarian cancer poses significant challenges; the routine screening of asymptomatic average-risk women is not recommended by any professional society. Chemotherapy using Pt-based compounds (e.g. carboplatin, cisplatin) is a standard treatment, but tumours that are initially responsive may develop chemoresistance, resulting in treatment failure. The ability to predict patient response towards post-operative treatments would allow for ineffective treatments and harmful side effects to be avoided and alternative treatments to be commenced at earlier stages. Several mechanisms underlying tumour cell resistance have been identified so far, including the altered expression of ion channels (Na, Mg, K, and Ca) and Fe-, Cu-, and Zn-binding proteins, but these remain poorly understood and it is unclear whether they can be exploited as markers of resistance. To that end, I will apply high-precision isotopic analysis by multicollector-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry to Fe, K, and Cu to understand processes and determine whether changes in the natural abundances of these isotopes are associated with the development of resistance to Pt-based chemotherapeutic drugs in high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC), the deadliest gynaecological cancer, which accounts for ~70% of ovarian malignancies. Deviations in natural isotopic abundances signal biochemical changes (affecting the extent of isotopic fractionation accompanying some biochemical processes) occurring as a result of a disease in a systematic and reliable way. Through ovarian cancer cell line, tumour spheroid, and HGSOC patient plasma experiments, I aim to develop a revolutionary, minimally-invasive prognostic marker of Pt-based chemotherapeutic drug resistance.

Mots clés : ovarian cancer, hgsoc, isotopic analysis, chromatography, metal homeostasis, mc icp ms

Participants :
- Université de Gand (Belgique) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 175920.0 €