Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet NonlinearMeta (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Metamaterials are artificial photonic structures that have revolutionised the field of optics by bringing an array of novel optical properties and applications into reality such as negative refraction and invisibility cloaking. However, the control over electromagnetic waves with metamaterials is so far mostly limited to the linear regime. On the other hand, nonlinear optical effects, such as harmonic generations, are very important technically and have been widely employed in various applications such as laser sources, optical information processing, optical communications, quantum technology and integrated photonic circuits. In this project, the applicant in collaboration with the supervisor at the host institution will explore a new class of metamaterials that enable unprecedented control over the nonlinear susceptibilities. The nonlinear susceptibility control is based on a novel mechanism that involves Berry phase in the nonlinear optical regime, which arises from the coupling between the spin of the photons and the orientation of the individual optical antennas. The realisation of such nonlinear metamaterials would enable exact phase matching condition for achieving high conversion efficiency, nonlinear holography for information coding, and gigantic nonlinear circular dichroism with harmonic generations. In addition, this project will incorporate organic polymers into the plasmonic metamaterial design to further enhance the efficiencies of harmonic generations. Upon completion of this project, the applicant is expected to acquire strong background in metamaterials and nonlinear optics and becomes a scientific leader in these growing research areas.

Mots clés : nonlinear optics, nano optics, metamaterial

Participants :
- University of Birmingham (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 195454.8 €
Projet META-MORPHOSIS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Metamorphosis is one of the most fascinating phenomena in the animal kingdom, implying an abrupt change in morphology and ecology during the lifetime of an individual transforming it from a larva into an adult. Metamorphosis can be thought of as a second birth for an animal, emerging as a completely different organism, despite being produced from the same genetic material. From butterflies to frogs, almost all the successful and speciose lineages of animals are metamorphic, suggesting that metamorphosis may be an important driver of biodiversity. At the time of the sixth mass extinction, where one-fifth of living species are threatened, understanding whether development can be a driver of morphological and functional diversity, and whether it may be advantageous in allowing populations to adapt rapidly to changing environments is of prime importance. The goal of META-MORPHOSIS is to test the impact of metamorphosis on morphological diversification by disentangling the factors (developmental, functional, and ecological) shaping morphological diversity. I aim to 1) identify the patterns of morphological and functional variation depending on developmental strategies across species throughout ontogeny; 2) shed light on the origin and evolution of metamorphosis using the fossil record; 3) understand how metamorphosis fosters diversity and to quantify its impact on the generation of biodiversity. To do so, I will study salamander species with different developmental strategies and ecologies throughout ontogeny using a combination of state-of-the-art approaches, including phenomics (geometric morphometrics), analyses of function (feeding kinematics and forces), phylogenetic comparative methods, development, paleontology and methods exploring diversification. META-MORPHOSIS will produce an unprecedented data set and analyses of diversification considering for the first time how morpho-functional, developmental, and ecological factors shape biodiversity through deep-time.

Mots clés : metamorphosis, functional morphology, head, salamanders, development, diversification

Participants :
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 162806.4 €
Projet MethylRIDE (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

MethylRIDE: Charting DNA methylation reprogramming of Ice Age horses in the face of global climate change and extinction Adaptation is one of the most essential processes in biology, by which species become fit to their environment. Following Charles Darwin, adaptation appears as the result of natural selection acting upon heritable variation. However, recent epigenetic discoveries have established the capacity of non-genetic changes in the regulatory layers of gene expression to shape our traits, including our medical phenotype. As such, our realized phenotype can no longer be considered as the sole product of our genome, but more as the combinatory by-product of our genome and epigenomes. The outcome of natural selection, which favors phenotypes associated to a higher reproductive success in a given environment, might, thus, be at least partly influenced by epigenetic changes. Yet, the possible participation of epigenetic changes in the process of biological adaptation is generally overlooked. MethylRIDE will take advantage of the preservation of ancient DNA molecules in paleontological material to track the changes in DNA methylation profiles of Ice Age horses, as they faced changing climatic conditions and selection pressures and, ultimately, became extinct. The unique combination of novel experimental and computational techniques developed will help assess, for the first time, the role of epigenetics in long-term adaptive strategies of large vertebrates in response to rapid climate change, and more generally the role of epigenetic change as a significant evolutionary force.

Mots clés : ancient dna, adaptation, horse evolution, extinction, climate change, epigenetics, environment

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 196707.84 €
Projet BlueFlowCell (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Methylene blue is the first fully synthetic drug used in medicine, the most effective and safe medicines needed in a health system. In addition, thioethers derivatives are important materials that are used in organic, bioorganic and medicinal chemistry and are also known to exhibit different biological activities such as antioxidant and antibacterial. These compounds are synthesized commercially by chemical methods that suffer from significant limitations, such as expensive and toxic reagents, solvents, tedious work-up, safety problems. Organic electrosynthesis is recognized as a typical environmentally friendly process with features that many of which cannot be achieved by other methods. Most electroorganic processes are performed under reagentless and mild conditions in one step using efficient and ecofriendly methods and are in agreement with all the principles of green chemistry. Within this field, the use of microreactors in continuous flow is also concurrent with electrochemistry because of its convenient advantages over batch, such as no supporting electrolyte at all, due to the small distance between electrodes; high electrode surface-to-reactor volume ratio, short residence time and etc. This project aims to fabricate an electrochemical flow microreactor by the novel method of photolithography to decrease the interelectrode gap below 100µm. Thus, the resulting device should be suited to the electrosynthesis of a wide range of reactions without a supporting electrolyte solution. Through the present project, we also aim electrochemical synthesis of methylene blue and some new thioethers derivatives for the first time with a facile one-pot and supporting electrolyte-free method. Overall, this method has shown to be a promising tool for electrosynthesis and improving the outcome of standard batch cells. As well as, during the whole of the project the ER will gain maximum knowledge in microfluidic integrated devices and benefit from entrepreneurship skills.

Mots clés : green chemistry, electrosynthesis, methylene blue, electrochemical flow cell, flow chemistry, microfluidics, photolithography

Participants :
- Black hole lab (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 184707.84 €
Projet MicroMod-PSII (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

MicroMod-PSII aims to provide an unprecedented microscopic, structure-based understanding of the excitation energy transfer mechanism in plant photosystem II (PSII) from the outer antennae complexes to the reaction centre under physiological conditions. It will unravel nature’s highly sophisticated way of harvesting sunlight in unrivalled detail. Within the framework of MicroMod-PSII, the first-ever coarse grained molecular dynamics simulations at almost atomistic resolution of PSII supercomplexes in thylakoid membrane patches will be performed. Based thereon, the intra- and inter-antennae excitation energy transfer toward the reaction centre will be modelled using high-level ab initio quantum chemistry. For this purpose, a procedure will be developed to transform coarse grained molecular dynamics snapshots into atomistic structures best suited for quantum chemical calculations. The calculated chromophore properties will provide a detailed understanding of the interplay between rigorous, highly conserved structural organisation and dynamic flexibility at the protein-protein interfaces and its impact on the outstanding light harvesting properties of PSII. The overall strategy developed during MicroMod-PSII can emerge as an important tool for computational biology as it allows modelling of a wide variety of reactions in the electronic ground or excited state catalysed by protein supercomplexes. During MicroMod-PSII, the researcher will acquire extensive expertise in state-of-the-art coarse grain molecular dynamics and will transfer knowledge in quantum chemistry and quantum dynamics to the host group. The improvement of complementary skills such as scientific management, networking, public engagement and team leadership will significantly develop the researcher. Together with the broad knowledge of state-of-the-art simulation techniques covering multiple time and length scales, this will provide excellent preparation for the researcher’s next scientific career step.

Mots clés : photosynthesis, coarse grained molecular dynamics simulations, intra  and inter antennae excitation energy transfer, plant photosystem ii supercomplex, membrane protein

Participants :
- University of Groningen (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 165598.8 €
Projet DebtRisks (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Economic Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Much we have been learning about the flawed design of eurozone form the current crisis. Non-optimality of euro as a currency zone, banking system fragmentation, weak institutional structures, insufficient political integration, lagging competitiveness and global imbalances, are all blamed for the crisis. At a country level problems are attributed, according to The World Bank and IMF, imprudent public debt management, weak macroeconomic management, and debt overhang. Our project looks into these over-arching challenges with the broad objective to: "Develop the capacity for risk management of public debt that can be used in response to crises, and to analyze policy proposals for debt restructuring and common assumption of debt in a currency union". The eurozone crisis challenges us to develop our capabilities for public debt management and advance the state-of-the-art.This is the purpose of the project. The four specific research tasks, taken together, advance the broad objective: 1. Develop an asset-and-liability management framework for risk management of public debt. 2. Operationalize the framework using multi-period stochastic programming integrated with multi-factor simulations. 3. Extend the optimization model to incorporate debt sustainability analysis and study debt restructuring of crisis countries. 4. Extend the simulation models to integrate current proposals for EU-bonds in public debt risk management. The project is devoted to complementing existing skills and broadening the fellow's knowledge base to develop models for asset-liability management optimization and EU-bond pricing, implement and calibrate them using market data, and demonstrate their efficacy in addressing policy issues for public debt management in crisis countries. The models will be tested in depth on the interesting case of Cyprus, for which we have special knowledge and data, on IMF stylized examples, and for the Italian and Argentinean debt where we also have access.

Mots clés : debt crisis, eurozone, risk management, sovereign default, debt restructuring, eurobonds, liquidity premium, credit premium, multi factor simulations, optimization, stochastic programming

Participants :
- University of Cyprus (Chypre) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 218094.3 €
- University of Pennsylvania (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet DiLeBaCo (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Multi-agent systems offer a great potential to improve the quality of modern society life. In the near future fleets of autonomous cars will be able to reduce traffic congestion and fuel consumption while increasing road safety. With almost half of all freight being transported by road, it makes up approximately a quarter of the total EU energy consumption and accounts for 18% of the greenhouse emissions. Fuel reduction in this area will have a significant impact on the environment. One way to achieve such reductions is through platooning where heavy-duty vehicles drive close to each other to reduce their aerodynamic drag and thus increase their fuel efficiency. While autonomous driving and platooning are areas of active research, open challenges arise in complex traffic scenarios with human interactions. Another challenge is that hierarchical control design with several different layers is required. The specific goals of the project are to develop novel algorithms for the control of safety-critical multi-agent systems in real-world scenarios, to understand the role of local informational constraints on the performance and safety of such systems and to design incentives for the individual agents that lead to a desired coordination of a fleet. This way global objectives will be optimized while accounting for complex traffic situations. The scientific contribution lies in combining and extending recent results from distributed predictive control, statistical learning and game theory as well as understanding the role of informational constraints in distributed learning-based control of multi-agent systems. The developed methods will have a high impact on both industry and society. In particular, the project will enable platooning in more complex scenarios, which has the potential to reduce fuel consumption of the transportation sector by up to 10% and thus make a significant contribution to the overall energy consumption and greenhouse emissions of the EU.

Mots clés : multi agent systems, learning based control, cooperative robotics

Participants :
- KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Suède) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 219875.52 €
- University of California System (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet MLGPIL (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Multi-level policy-making between EU, national and sub-national levels has become increasingly complex. This has created the need for innovative governance solutions to address this complexity, which in turn has had an effect on political legitimacy. This project aims to address this topic by developing the linkages between procedural innovation in governance and the legitimacy of these processes in a multi-level political context, looking at how (or whether) political legitimacy can travel between governmental levels. The main research questions that will be addressed are: 1. In what ways does procedural innovation affect legitimacy in the multi-level context of the EU? 2. How do EU governance tools affect perceptions of legitimacy at Member State and regional levels? The project will look at the effects of the EU-level Social Open Method of Coordination on Member State policies in the UK and Ireland, and what this means in terms of legitimacy at all political levels. A combination of literature review, discourse analysis, network analysis, interviews and statistical approaches will be used to assess legitimacy as citizen input, policy output and procedural throughput. It is hypothesised that EU innovation does act to improve throughput and input legitimacy at the EU levels, but fails to increase this legitimacy at national levels. However, output legitimacy in Member States is likely to increase due to EU oversight. The work is highly relevant and innovative. It looks to disentangle serious questions faced by the EU in this age of Euroscepticism regarding legitimacy and democracy, showing how EU decisions are made, whether these decisions are seen to be legitimate and how this filters down to the national level. This research will help to disentangle the role of different governmental levels in both creating and receiving legitimacy derived from new governance approaches using innovative methodological and theoretical approaches.

Mots clés : multi level governance, policy innovation, legitimacy, regionalisation

Participants :
- Swansea University (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183454.8 €
Projet Multi-time Integral Eqs. (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Mathematics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Multi-time wave functions are quantum-mechanical wave functions with N space-time arguments for N particles. They were suggested by the Nobel laureates Dirac, Tomonaga and Schwinger as a particularly natural way of achieving manifest Lorentz invariance in the Schrödinger picture. While for a long time it was not clear how to obtain consistent interacting dynamics for multi-time wave functions, this has changed recently when a series of papers has clarified the theory of multi-time Schrödinger equations and provided the first interacting toy models. This project aims, with the long-term goal of a rigorous multi-time formulation of quantum field theory in mind, at improving on these models by considering the possibility of integral equations to formulate interacting dynamics for multi-time wave functions of N=2 particles. This is especially promising, as integral equations avoid a restrictive consistency condition that one faces for differential multi-time equations. Furthermore, the typical ultraviolet divergencies of quantum field theory are avoided. The objectives are (1) to study the existence of solutions of a particular integral equation similar to the Bethe-Salpeter equation, (2) to assess whether the integral equation is compatible with a probabilistic meaning, as well as (3) to determine the classical limit of the integral equation and to compare it with the action-at-a-distance formulation of classical electrodynamics due to Gauß, Fokker, Tetrode, Wheeler and Feynman. Objective (1) shall be approached using the theory of Fredholm integral equations, as well as partial results in the physics literature. For (2), suitable conserved tensor currents with a positive density component shall be constructed. (3) shall be reached by studying wave packets concentrated around the classical world-lines of particles using (and extending) functional-analytic methods of the classical limit, such as Hagedorn wave packets and Wigner functions.

Mots clés : relativistic quantum mechanics, integral equations, relativistic wave equations, bethe salpeter equation, continuity equations and probability conservation, action at a distance electrodynamics

Participants :
- University of Tübingen (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 239860.8 €
- Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet MechanoSpectrin (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Multicellular organisms have evolved complex mechanisms to sense and adapt to the surrounding environment by dynamically controlling cell shape and exert forces. While the most studied mechanisms are the Actin and Microtubule networks, there is poor understanding of a third system called Intermediate Filaments. In this context, a particularly overlooked mechano-sensing protein is spectrin, a resilient structural platform firstly described to maintain cell shape in erythrocytes and recently proposed to be involved in neuronal plasticity and maintenance of axon rigidity. Spectrin is ubiquitously expressed and the knock-out is detrimental. It is proposed to act as an elastic spring engaged in membrane-cytoskeleton connections, but molecular organisation and dynamic observations are unknown in most eukaryotic cell types. Particularly, is not understood how spectrin-based meshwork assemble-disassemble and react to mechanical perturbations, except from mostly static observations from erythrocytes and neurons. In this proposal, I plan to investigate spectrin dynamic during cell spreading, cell migration and its role in membrane mechanical adaptation. Using fibroblasts, a well characterized model system for membrane and cytoskeletal dynamic studies by Dr. Gauthier’s group, I aim to describe how spectrin dynamically contributes to cell shape changes, cell-substrate interaction and migration. With membrane-tension analysis by optical tweezers, time-resolved super-resolution microscopy, substrate micro-patterning techniques and various mechanical perturbations, I will unveil how spectrin reacts and contributes to mechanosensation and mechanotransduction. Overall, our results in fibroblast will elucidate the poorly understood contribution of Intermediate Filaments during mechanical adaptation and unveil why the spectrin family is evolutionary highly conserved and ubiquitously expressed.

Mots clés : mechanobiology, membrane tension, cytoskeleton, actin, spectrin, plasma membrane, dynamics, fibroblasts, cell spreading, cell migration, super resolution, live imaging

Participants :
- FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 168277.2 €