Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet SAC-Cu-CO2RR (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (CO2 RR) driven by renewable power is a promising way to convert CO2 to fuels and chemicals, which has been proposed as a sustainable process for the artificial carbon cycle. Among all products, ethanol (C2H5OH) has received extensive attention because it can be directly used as fuel in internal combustion engines and industrial power generation. Cu-based catalysts can efficiently promote C-C coupling toward C2+ products in CO2 RR. However, most Cu-based catalysts still show an insufficient selectivity for C2H5OH (<50 %) due to unfavorable adsorption of several oxygen-containing key intermediates, which cannot achieve its commercial value. As a frontier in materials science, single-atom motifs anchored on N-doped C support (carbon-based SACs), are widely investigated due to their maximum atom-utilization efficiency and highly metal dispersion. Especially, in the field of eCO2 RR, compared to the pure N-C, SACs exhibit an excellent CO selectivity because of the easily optimized coordination environment along with a reconstructed structure. Therefore, combining SACs with Cu-based catalysts in the proper configuration can increase the local CO concentration near Cu-based materials at a low overpotential where Cu alone would be incapable of doing the CO2-to-CO conversion. Meanwhile, the moderate electron-donating ability of SACs will further stabilize the oxygenic C2 intermediate to make the hydrogenation pathway toward C2H5OH production more favorable. As a result, the objective of this project is to design a carbon-based SACs supported Cu clusters architecture by a chemical in-situ growth process to let it serve as a high-efficient catalyst for achieving a high C2H5OH selectivity (> 75 %) at a low overpotential (< 800 mV). This project will set the scene for the fabrication of highly efficient and commercially available electrodes for the eCO2 RR to production of C2H5OH.

Mots clés : single atom catalysts, cu based materials, co2 reduction reaction, electrocatalysis, energy conversion

Participants :
- Université d'Aarhus (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 230774.4 €
Projet KG-PROVENANCE (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) play a vital role in modern computer systems by organizing information efficiently through structured relations between concepts or entities. They provide a structured framework for storing and retrieving information, facilitating easier navigation and analysis of large volumes of data. This is crucial in interdisciplinary knowledge-intensive applications like disease diagnosis, drug discovery, ecological data interpretation, and specialized search engines. The knowledge in KGs is predominantly derived from unstructured textual sources, such as scientific articles and news feeds. However, verifying the origin of KG knowledge in these textual sources, known as the provenance of KG knowledge, is currently challenging. Provenance detection is essential for explaining and validating the knowledge stored in KGs and identifying potential inconsistencies with textual sources. To address the lack of efficient KG provenance detection models, my method will tackle two major scientific challenges. Firstly, dealing with a large volume of text as a source of information requires significant computational power, which poses a scalability problem. To overcome this, I will design subsampling methods to focus only on the most relevant textual passages that represent the knowledge in a KG. Secondly, the scalability problem is further complicated by the dynamic and evolving nature of knowledge, with millions of new textual sources appearing daily. This presents a challenge in efficiently identifying textual sources that contribute to knowledge shifts and using them as provenance to define KG updates. To address this, I will develop a novel scalable architecture to efficiently align knowledge shifts in text to concrete changes in KGs. Finally, I will closely collaborate with interdisciplinary industrial researchers to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed methodology in real-world scenarios.

Mots clés : knowledge graphs, information extraction, natural language processing

Participants :
- Université d'Amsterdam (Pays-Bas) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Université d'Aarhus (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 230774.4 €
Projet BOOST (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Therapeutic oligonucleotides (ONs) have recently gained increasing importance as new drugs. While conventional drugs are limited to targeting proteins, oligonucleotides are able to target diseases upstream at the mRNA level. This specificity in combination with their easy design renders them highly valuable. Furthermore, their applications are limitless, involving treatment of so-called undruggable diseases. The bottleneck in the development of new therapeutic oligonucleotides lies in the efficient synthesis of modified ONs. Often, these modifications require multi-step syntheses and are laborious resulting in a time-consuming process of drug development. Additionally, these modifications often negatively impact physiological and biological properties. In our proposal, “Backbone-Optimized OligonucleotideS for Therapeutics” (BOOST), we outline a methodology for efficiently modifying oligonucleotides. Key to success will be the development of novel reagents capable of intercepting solid-phase oligonucleotide synthesis due to their high reaction rate. This will enable rapid evaluation of mono- and multiple-modified oligonucleotides to assess their physiological and biological properties. Furthermore, the introduction of multiple functionalities will become possible. BOOST will serve as a new platform for designing therapeutic antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) and siRNA. As a proof of concept, we will evaluate the most promising modified oligonucleotides in biological settings.

Mots clés : oligonucleotide backbone modifications solid phase oligonucleotide synthesis

Participants :
- Université d'Aarhus (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 214934.4 €
Projet Den-LLZO (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries have gained crucial importance for energy storage systems due to their high energy and power density, reliability and cyclability. Solid-state electrolytes provide a promising alternative for highly flammable conventional liquid electrolytes, as they offer high thermal stability, high conductivity and improved safety. Dendrite formation and growth through solid electrolyte is one of the main challenges, critically reducing the performance of Li batteries due to battery short circuit. However, the origins of dendrite formation and parameters affecting its growth rate are still unclear. It has been hypothesized that internal defects such as cracks, and grain boundaries serve as potential nucleation sites for dendrite formation as Li transports through solid electrolytes. The objective of Den-LLZO project is to obtain a fundamental understanding the origin of dendrite formation and growth in the vicinity of the microstructural features. Den-LLZO project aims to use atomic scale simulations to establish a mechanism map for dendrite formation in the presence of microstructural defects and to develop continuum models to predict the dendrite nucleation and growth rate in solid electrolytes. In the first phase, we perform first-principle and molecular dynamics simulations to identify when, how and to what extent different internal defects trigger dendrite formation and growth. The second phase seeks to develop predictive continuum models, informed through atomic scale simulations, for monitoring dendrite nucleation and growth in solid electrolytes. The ambitious goal of Den-LLZO project is to propose design principles for suppressing dendrite formation in solid electrolytes, resulting in improved lithium-ion battery performance and lifetime, and hence facilitated transition toward renewable energy.

Mots clés : solid state batteries dendrite formation atomistic simulation grain boundary fracture mechanics continuum modelling

Participants :
- Imperial College London (Royaume-Uni) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Université d'Aarhus (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 214934.4 €
Projet PopPolMPME (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The growing interest in interplay between politics and popular culture lacks consideration of mediated sports mega-events (SMEs) like football championships. This hinders our understanding of how popular sporting events reflect and impact political life, and how populations engage with and interpret political meanings through media events. This project bridges this gap by investigating the lasting political significance of SMEs through an assessment of their mediation and public memory—both comparatively and retrospectively—in democratic and authoritarian contexts.  The project’s research objectives are to 1) compare the mediation of SMEs across political environments, during and after the events, and vis-à-vis prominent political narratives surrounding them; 2) understand how members of the public remember the events, their mediation, and related political developments; and 3) explore the implications of the public and mediated memory of SMEs for their lasting political legacy, and how popular events reflect and influence people’s engagement with politics.  Specifically, the project will comparatively assess the mediation and public memory of two recent football championships—the pan-European UEFA 2020 and the Russia 2018 FIFA World Cup—in the context of two crises affecting politics and public life in Europe: the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Brexit. The two research strands, conducted in the comparative English and Russian national settings, include a) an analysis of media coverage of the tournaments and their legacies by national broadcasters; and b) focus groups with audiences of the SMEs.  This project will develop a novel concept of ‘Mega-event Political Memory Ecology,’ which will have scientific, economic, and societal implications. Marrying approaches from digital memory studies and popular geopolitics, this concept will account for the interrelationship between shifting public and mediated memories of SMEs and public understandings of the political world.

Mots clés : sporting mega events media events sport sociology memory studies popular geopolitics popular culture and world politics russia 2018 football world cup uefa 2020 euro illiberal regimes

Participants :
- Université d'Aarhus (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 230774.4 €
Projet AFM-LDH (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Layered double hydroxides nanoparticles (LDH NPs) composed by divalent/trivalent metal ions are efficient vaccine adjuvants to assist antigens to induce potent humoral and cellular immunity. However, the adjuvant mechanisms of LDH NPs still remains elusive. Since the metal ion species and ratio are closely related to the adjuvant activity of LDH NPs, this study will investigate how the metal ion composition will affect the adjuvant activity of LDH NPs. Then, an atomic force microscopy (AFM)-based approach to physico-mechanically map the specific interaction occurring between NP and Toll-like receptor-4 or scavenger receptor A1 in vitro on living cells. Finally, the adjuvant signaling pathways of LDH NPs will be investigated in antigen presenting cells. This study will greatly advance the knowledge on the interplay among nanomaterials and innate immunity. The single-cell, quantitative approach can be readily applied to study the binding of other nanomaterials and the testing of anti-inflammatory molecules on living cells of the innate immune system.

Mots clés : layered double hydroxide atomic force microscopy

Participants :
- Université d'Aarhus (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 230774.4 €
Projet NeFLaRA (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

NeFLaRA (A New Framework for Landscape Research in Archaeology) is an interdisciplinary project that will help address landscape archaeology’s most fundamental challenge: the inherent uncertainty in archaeological reconstructions of past landscapes as a result of the fragmentary nature of archaeological data. Landscape archaeology studies the relationship between past societies and their environments. Computational and other methods in archaeological landscape research, and the humanities more broadly, focus almost exclusively on spatial elements, although there is a clear notion that time and histories are fundamentally connected to the landscape. Yet, this dominance of space in landscape research suffers from the major challenge of the fragmentary nature of archaeological data, particularly when this data comes from a ‘non-systematic’ regional survey as opposed to ‘systematic total area’ survey. While landscape archaeology has benefited from computational developments, a protocol to overcome the embedded uncertainty on spatial data is absent. By defining best practices, identifying optimal methods and outlining clear protocols for different datasets and spatial analyses, this project will create a new robust quantitative framework for more accurate computational models of past landscapes, improving their reliability and enhancing their interpretative potential. To achieve this, NeFLaRA will focus on three methodological gaps: (1) the lack of validated methods for quantifying the uncertainty of non-systematic regional archaeological data and models, (2) the poorly explored field of research combining spatial analysis (statistics and geographical information systems [GIS]) and network analysis to study non-systematic regional databases, and (3) the lack of a best practice guidelines and method pipelines for geo-visual representations that take into account uncertainty in multiscalar spatial data.

Mots clés : landscape archaeology gis and spatial analysis uncertainty quantification spatial networks geo visualization

Participants :
- Université d'Aarhus (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 230774.4 €
Projet IntraHouseDecisions (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Economic Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Much of today’s policies addressing poor’s welfare are based on the presumption that women are more likely than men to use income in ways that improve household welfare. An approach of predominantly targeting women however may overlook opportunities from how men could be encouraged to contribute more to the household welfare. I develop a framework that joins empirical and theoretical findings on intra-household allocations and gender norms in developing countries by incorporating the role of intra-household responsibilities in spouses’ financial decisions. I use a lab-in-the-field experiment with spouses in Ghana to map these intra-household responsibilities and evaluate their causal role on spouses’ expenditures and inter-temporal decisions. By demonstrating causes of inefficiencies in resource allocation and low savings, my findings may help to inform on how women’s role can be strengthened and on the potential for harnessing men’s role in improving the household welfare.

Mots clés : lab in the field experiment, social norm elicitation, intra household decision making, saving behaviour, gender

Participants :
- Université d'Aarhus (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 230774.4 €
Projet ARCHAIC (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The current project, ARCHAIC (Adaptive Risk Cultural Heritage Assessment In Conservation), aims to provide a new intelligent method for the risk management of heritages. In ARCHAIC, I plan to recognize physical deterioration and degradation evolution in monuments by computer vision methods (using a combination of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and social media imagery) and use them as inputs to assess the degree of vulnerability via the neuro-fuzzy method. To compare social media photos captured at various times for detecting changes, deterioration, and achieving deterioration growth, I encounter the challenge that the images vary in camera. By reconstructing 3D models of monuments at various times via NeRF and comparing images, we can effectively identify changes and deterioration over time. Camera pose estimation is performed using Inerf, a deep neural network-based method specifically designed for accurate camera pose estimation of social media images. The estimated poses are utilized and given to the NeRF models to generate pair comparison viewpoints for image analysis. Finally, I consider detected deterioration’s type, boundary, amount, and growth for the fuzzy rules. ARCHAIC leads to determining the amount of intervention to manage the risks of a query case of a monument.

Mots clés : cultural heritage, artificial intelligence, conservation, risk assessment

Participants :
- Université Pablo de Olavide (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 209914.56 €
- Université de Durham (Royaume-Uni) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet EXONS (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

This fellowship tackles traditional barriers between control engineering and small-scale robotics (i.e., the robots in millimetre and micrometre scales): as the size of the robot decreases, the physics that governs their modes of operation (also called dynamical responses) changes dramatically, requiring novel control methods. For example, a micro-robot needs to change its mode of operation from walking to crawling to cross a tunnel, enabling it to reach into narrow and vulnerable environments. The great obstacle to its practical deployment is that nonlinear effects, such as friction and collision, are essential for its motion, but these nonlinearities are poorly understood for effective control. This fellowship will create new approaches to modelling, analysing, and controlling nonlinearities in small-scale robots, in turn opening potential for their applications, such as for medical interventions and environmental exploration. It will create fundamental methods that can be applied to different small-scale robots by other researchers and engineers. This work will focus on a particular scene: a small-scale robot moving in the gut. The long-term vision of this fellowship is to develop small-scale robots that exploit nonlinear mechanical effects to enhance their locomotion and control while operating in complex difficult-to-access environments. The unique research approach of this fellowship, a joint effort of numerical and experimental studies, will be hosted by Prof. Yang Liu from the University of Exeter (UNEXE) with the secondment supervisor, Prof. Matthieu Fruchard from the University of Orléans (UOR), and the consulting gastroenterologist, Dr Shyam Prasad, from the Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.

Mots clés : small scale robots micro robot piecewise smooth dynamical systems, non smooth dynamical systems, ddes nonlinearity bowel cancer minimally invasive medical intervention

Participants :
- Université d'Exeter (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 276187.92 €
- Université d'Orléans (France) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet SynLncRNAs (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Precise spatiotemporal regulation of gene expression is essential for healthy embryonic development. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) contribute to the regulation of gene expression. However, our current understanding of lncRNAs derives mostly from in vitro studies, with little known about their function in vivo. The core aim of this action is to dissect mechanisms of gene regulation by lncRNAs in vivo. The lncRNA Maenli is a perfect model to gain insight into lncRNA function as it activates a specific target gene in a tissue-specific manner during mouse embryonic development. This enables a quantitative in vivo read-out without compounding genome-wide effects. My hypothesis is that Maenli function is restricted to its 3D chromatin domain where it activates its target gene through transcription-associated processes, and not via the mature lncRNA transcript. To test this, I require methods that enable manipulation of the entire ~25kb locus and site-specific insertion in the genome. I will use cutting-edge synthetic biology to re-construct and manipulate Maenli, insert it in specific genomic regions, and examine its effect on target gene expression and phenotype in the mouse embryo. I will use low-input CUT&RUN to assess the functional chromatin state associated with Maenli. This interdisciplinary approach will go beyond the state of the art to illuminate specific mechanisms of cis-acting lncRNA function in vivo. This has not been possible until now due to technical limitations in conventional gene editing and challenges associated with studying lncRNAs in vivo. I anticipate that SynLncRNAs will set a new standard to study lncRNA function in vivo; impacting fundamental, disease and evolutionary research on gene regulation, as well as society and education. With expertise in the non-coding genome and in vivo synthetic biology, the Mundlos laboratory is the perfect environment for me to execute this action and train to become an independent group leader in the future.

Mots clés : long non coding rnas, lncrnas, epigenetics, gene regulation, developmental biology, synthetic biology, genomics

Participants :
- Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 202125.12 €