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

Behavioral choice is essential for an animal's survival, but the underlying neuronal mechanisms are poorly understood. A main obstacle is that the circuits involve many brain regions. Hence investigation necessitates the study of whole-brain connectivity and dynamics. Although the connectome structurally links all potential circuits, it is insufficient for constraining functional models and must be complemented by neuronal recordings during behavioral tasks. Furthermore to test models it is necessary to manipulate identified circuit elements. Recent advances in microscopy facilitate the acquisition of complete connectomes for small animals and support neuronal activity monitoring across entire brains. The challenge remains to directly combine these techniques in the same organism. We have developed a method for observing and identifying neurons with interesting activity patterns, whereby the same sample undergoes whole-brain functional imaging and subsequent electron microscopy imaging. We propose utilizing this approach to study the neuronal mechanisms of behavioral choice in Drosophila melanogaster larvae, an ideal model system for this work. We developed a paradigm to study the choice between one of five possible exclusive actions that occur in response to the same stimulus. The aim is to identify circuit mechanisms that promote one action while suppressing all others. Based on function, structure, and neurotransmitters, we will develop models for these competing circuit motifs. Specifically, we will correlate neuronal activity with each action and combine this information with connectomic data. We assume that the competing circuits interact by inhibition, which were described before in literature. These will be tested by genetic manipulation of specific circuit elements, which will alter the probability of certain behaviors. In conclusion, we combine functional and structural information in the same organism to study the neuronal mechanisms of behavioral choice.

Mots clés : whole nervous system calcium imaging, electron mircoscopy, light sheet microscopy, behavioral choice

Participants :
- University of Cambridge (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 212933.76 €
Projet ACTUS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Behind statements and statistics about newly urbanized populations in Africa, behind maps of rapid and unregulated growth and numerous disaster/risk assessments there are real people with compelling tales of coping and adapting capacities to urban challenges brought by the rapid transformation of cities. Their stories often contain more hope, ambition and imagination as portrayed in reports and scientific publications. Their ability to bounce back despite disadvantageous ecological, economic and political settings implies a new form of normality framed outside traditional city development models. ACTUS is concerned with people's everyday experiences of solid waste and sanitation in peri-urban areas to discern the interdependences between urban infrastructure, pro-poor growth and climate hazards. In ACTUS I place a particular focus on local processes of adaptation and self-organization to cope with increasing flooding impacts in East Africa. The lens of everyday experiences of waste management and sanitation offers an innovative approach to expend our understanding on multiple spheres of livelihoods considering how local processes and technologies may act as a benefit for the poor and may trigger sustainable technical infrastructure ACTUS is not a 'stand alone research project. It is designed to run complementary to a PhD program on 'Urban Infrastructure in transition: The case of African cities from the Graduate School of urban Studies at TU Darmstadt. The benefit of such close collaboration lies in the breath of knowledge I will gain not only within my specific research project but also through regular exchanges with a multidisciplinary group of scholars focusing on urban infrastructure regimes in Africa.

Mots clés : local adaptation, pro poor growth, urban infrastructure, africa, urbanization, peri urban areas

Participants :
- Ardhi University (Tanzanie) — Partner, organization partner, Recherche, subvention : 0.0 €
- Technical University of Darmstadt (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 219693.6 €
Projet Founders (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Between 10.7 and 10.2 ka cal. BP a process culminated in southwest Asia that marked the path of human history: the domestication of plants. A group of eight species including wild cereals, pulses and flax become the “founder crops” of Neolithic agriculture, revolutionizing our economy and subsistence for the time to come. But why were these species domesticated and not others? It has often been assumed that these species were staples, and the increasing need to procure more of these daily foods eventually triggered their cultivation, and domestication. However, recent archaeobotanical evidence is starting to challenge this long-held view. Building on eight of the richest and most iconic Natufian hunter-gatherer and Pre-Pottery Neolithic farming sites in SWA (14.6-10.2 ka cal. BP), this project seeks to test the hypothesis that the Neolithic “founder crops” were also staples before the emergence of agriculture. Any deviation from this view will revolutionise our understanding of the factors that triggered the process of plant domestication in SWA. To provide fresh perspectives, the work will focus on one of the most innovative, yet understudied, frontiers of archaeological research: the analyses of charred food remains (CFR). The fellow will receive training on the analyses of CFR, and pioneer an inter-disciplinary approach based on state-of-the-art archaeobotanical and biomolecular techniques, ethnobotany and experimental archaeology. In turn, she will transfer her world-class expertise in hunter-gatherer plant subsistence and archaeobotany and expand the analyses of CFR to periods and regions not previously explored by the host, as well as to foster new collaborations with academic (secondments) and non-academic partners (gastronomic faculties and haute chefs). All together, this project guarantees the two-way transfer of knowledge and represents a solid investment of funds from which the fellow, the host institutions and the European society will largely benefit.

Mots clés : archaeobotany, plant domestication, southwest asia, epipaleolithic, neolithic, food, plant subsistence

Participants :
- Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 196707.84 €
Projet EU and SSR (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Between 2002 and 2014, the EU has deployed 30 civilian and military operations in Europe, Africa and Asia, under its Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP). For most of these operations, the EU has a mandate to do activities related to the Security Sector Reform (SSR), aimed at the provision of national and human security within a framework of democratic governance. One of the core assumptions underpinning the EU’s operations has been that SSR has to be “locally owned” in order to be successful, meaning that local agents should internalize principles and objectives of externally driven reforms. Local ownership, however, remains a neglected concept not only theoretically speaking, but it is also very difficult to be implemented in practice. The theoretical and policy gap informs three principal aims of this project. First, the project will adopt a fresh theoretical framework for the study of local ownership. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, the project will conceptualize local ownership as a technology of international security “governmentality” wherein external actors employ set of techniques with the aim of turning local agents into subjects responsible for externally-driven security sector reform agenda. Such an approach will situate local ownership of CSDP operations within a wider context of emerging liberal security governance and explain why it continuously face implementation difficulties in semi-liberal or illiberal settings. Second, the project will obtain new empirical insights into how local ownership is being practised on the ground within three ongoing CSDP operations (EULEX Kosovo, EUPOL COPPS and EUTM Mali) and into why these projects continue to face implementation problems. The third objective of the project is to develop a set of policy recommendations that will assist future policy planners in conceiving more reflexive, context-sensitive and cost-effective local ownership strategies to be applied in current or future CSDP operations.

Mots clés : csdp, security sector reform, governmentality, local ownership

Participants :
- University of Bristol (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183454.8 €
Projet FORPRAL (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Indexes of prohibited books alone included more than seventy prayers in the vernacular, all deeply rooted in the daily practice of everyday piety and widely disseminated in pamphlets and books of hours. These prayers were mainly used to ask for favours: curing sickness, seeking protection from sudden death or controlling the will of a lover and were effective whether they were read out, worn round the neck like reliquaries or amulets, in contact with the diseased part of the body or used with herbs or other elements. For this reason, they were widely disseminated among the uneducated and represent a hybrid category of text-object. Taking into account the nature of the prayers as a whole, the Indexes tried to eradicate objects, practices and forms of piety looked upon as vain or superstitious. The effectiveness of these prohibitions in the countries of the so-called Counter-Reformation was such that many texts and pamphlets were, or were thought to have been, lost for ever. This project proposes to fill the bibliographical gap in this corpus neglected by the studies on early modern censorship, to consider extending the prohibitory categories of the text to include the devotional object, to restore this pan-European heritage of piety by recovering preserved or indirect testimonies of forbidden prayers, and to perform a rigorous analysis of the censorship policies aimed at regulating simple forms of religiosity. The use of a corpus unexplored to this day and the approach to the study of prayers in their historical, symbolic and material dimensions are some of the novelties of this proposal. The action will culminate with the compilation of a digital repository, the Forbidden Prayers Digital Library: a catalogue raisonné and a space of open access to the text and object that will contribute to the recovery of a part of the European religious culture erased by the effects of Inquisitorial censorship.

Mots clés : censorship, inquisitions, indexes of prohibited books, private piety, spain, portugal, italy

Participants :
- Autonomous University of Barcelona (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 172932.48 €
Projet M-INHIB (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Bi-stable perception has been the key tool to investigate how retinal information reaches consciousness. In existing theoretical work to explain this phenomenon, it has been assumed that a neural circuit, called mutual inhibition, plays the key role in perceptual alternations. Two neurons (or neuron groups) representing competing percepts inhibit each other and one becomes dominant while another becomes suppressed. Adaptation of the dominant neuron and recovery of suppressed neuron causes the reversal of the dominance after few seconds. While there are elaborate theoretical models implementing this circuit, its physiological data from real neurons is missing. I will use in vitro preparation combined with a state-of-art “dynamic clamp” system where the disynaptic inhibitory connections between two real pyramidal cells are established by model synapses and inhibitory neuron models. I will run paradigms equivalent to experimental paradigms known in the research of bi-stable perception. In this way, I aim at elucidating the neurophysiological factors underlying the known dynamical properties of bi-stable perception. I will investigate how dominance durations and their distributions are influenced by the activity levels of the two neurons (equivalent to the well-known Levelt’s propositions), how their stochasticity is influenced by noise, how memory effect can be observed, and how feedback projection influences their dynamics. There is often an ambiguity in input images due to noise or conflicting information. Coherent representation of such input can be established if the mutually inhibiting neurons representing conflicting cues are influenced by feedback such that the neural signals consistent with global properties are enhanced. Therefore, mutual inhibition may work as a fundamental unit of signal processing in establishing coherent perception. This project will elucidate this essential mechanism underlying perceptual organization.

Mots clés : perceptual organization, vision science, in vitro patch clamp recording, neuro computational model, stochastic neural activities and noise, short term plasticity

Participants :
- Radboud University Nijmegen (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 165598.8 €
Projet CIP (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Bias in the perception of bodily sensations (interoception) can be dangerous or even fatal; for example, if we do not recognize signs of a stroke or take medication anytime we feel the slightest change in our body. Research consistently reports that anxiety is closely related to interoception and (mis)interpretation of bodily sensations, but little is known about more fundamental processes underlying this relationship. The aim of this project is to test whether categorization as basic perceptual process links anxiety and interoception via generalization and perceptual decision strategies. Bundling the continuous flow of interoceptive information into distinct categories such as “pain” or “pleasure” can facilitate perception and coping. By assigning sensations to interoceptive categories (e.g., symptom groups) we can infer information about causes and consequences and apply coping schemata fast and efficiently. Research on visual perception, however, suggests that anxiety can be related to excessive generalization which may turn into harmful over-generalization, particularly if stimuli are misclassified. We will test whether also in interoception, anxiety is related to excessive category-related generalization. Furthermore, we will test whether individuals higher in anxiety are more prone to take a “better safe than sorry” strategy and misclassify benign sensations (e.g., heartbeat and breathlessness associated with exercise) more often as sign of disease. We will test our hypotheses of categorization linking anxiety and interoception in a newly developed research paradigm. In contrast to traditional paradigms, it allows distinguishing interoceptive accuracy and bias. The project is of theoretical relevance by targeting fundamental processes linking anxiety and interoception. Furthermore, it is of clinical relevance by testing the relationship between anxiety and interoceptive classification strategies, which are related to choices in health behaviour.

Mots clés : categorization, interoception, anxiety, anxiety sensitivity

Participants :
- University of Luxembourg (Luxembourg) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 172800.0 €
Projet BBEB (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Bildung is a controversial German neo-humanist term that, as conceptualised by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), proposed a whole new educational project: to bring all the potential contained within each person to full expression as a means towards social progress. Bildung is the object of renewed attention in theories of education today. While it is contested for its classist and sexist bias, it is also reconceptualised as a powerful tool to counterbalance market-oriented instrumentalist uses of education. Seeking to contribute to these debates from the perspective of the history of education, my project will put into play a critical reading of Bildung in order to explore personal correspondence as educational instruments in the life of English feminist, artist and philanthropist Barbara Bodichon (1827-1891). Persuaded of its potential as a thinking tool, reading letters through the lens of Bildung is an original way of exploring epistles as sources of informal education for literate women in nineteenth-century England and an alternative path to review and nuance our understanding of this already studied historical figure.

Mots clés : bodichon, bildung, epistolary education, epistolary self, textual agency, feminism, performativity, power

Participants :
- University of Roehampton (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183454.8 €
Projet VATTECH (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Billions of euros are being lost yearly by EU Member States (MS) due to fraud related to Value Added Tax (VAT) . VAT fraud erodes budgets of both MS and the EU and leads to distortions of competition. It affects honest businesses and consumers and violates the very fundaments of the Internal Market. The loss of tax revenue impedes the fulfilment of redistributive tasks of the MS and thus their role in protection of basic economic and social rights of individuals. The advancement of new technologies – including big data analysis and ever more complex algorithms – has the potential to significantly reducing VAT fraud across the EU. The overall aim of the project on “New technologies in VAT reporting, collection and auditing: legal opportunities and challenges” (VATTECH) is to investigate – from a legal perspective - the opportunities and challenges in the use of new technologies in reporting, collection and auditing of VAT. I will do this by: a) Mapping the new technologies used within the VAT area, identify the most efficient ones along with the legal base and background related to these technologies; b) Evaluating the identified technologies based on functionality and consistency with taxpayer’s rights, and the existing EU’s legal framework; c) Based on a) and b), assessing the potential (functional as well as legal) for extension and harmonization of the evaluated technologies to the whole of EU. My ambition is to provide important, new insights into the EU VAT system, and through that, to make a significant contribution to the improvement of the tools to combat VAT fraud, administrative cooperation and exchange of information on VAT between and across EU MS.

Mots clés : value added tax, european vat, tax avoidance, tax fraud, new technologies, tax administration, human rights, fundamental freedoms

Participants :
- University of Copenhagen (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 219312.0 €
Projet SMILES (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Billions of people suffer from oral diseases world-wide while oral health treatments are not affordable for everyone. Goal 3 of the United Nations Sustainable Development challenge/priority programs, to be reached by 2030, is to promote “access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines [..] for all”. The WHO points therefore towards cost-effective oral disease prevention as a key strategy to reach a universal health care access. The main scientific objective of SMILES is identifying, characterizing, and harnessing antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) produced by Streptococcus dentisani and select cocktails with biomedical application in the treatment of caries and periodontitis. S. dentisani is a probiotic bacterium which produces AMPs, and which is naturally found in oral disease-free individuals maintaining the balance for a healthy oral microbiota. Caries and periodontitis are two oral diseases resulting from microbial dysbiosis. These cocktails could be incorporated in the future as additives in conventional oral hygiene products (ex. toothpaste), as oral disease preventive agents accessible for the public independently of their monetary resources. Dr. Revilla-Guarinos has expertise in antimicrobial resistance and will lead SMILES. The research and training at the academic host institution will be complemented with an intersectoral secondment in DENTAID (an oral health care products leading company), international networking & collaborations, specialized training courses & complementary skills workshops. Dissemination & exploitation activities, as well as communication & outreach events will promote the action and its results. The overarching ambition of this action is training and preparing Dr. Revilla-Guarinos for her to start her own group in academia or, alternatively, to develop a new path by changing to a career in industry, working at the forefront of Applied Microbiology in Europe.

Mots clés : antimicrobial peptides, bacteriocins, oral disease prevention, microbial dysbiosis, universal health care, cost effective, caries, periodontal disease, translational research, applied innovation

Participants :
- Fundación para el Fomento de la Investigación Sanitaria y Biomédica de la Comunitat Valenciana (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 160932.48 €