Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet TeSP (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Conscious stimulus perception in humans operates on time scales differing across sensory modalities. At the brain level it remains unknown if the temporal structure of stimuli from different sensory modalities is processed fundamentally differently, or if sensory input from different sensory modalities is sampled similarly. Neuroscientific evidence shows that neuronal oscillatory activity in sensory cortices is crucial for the conscious temporal perception of sensory stimuli by defining discrete perceptual cycles which discontinuously determine temporal perception. However, it remains inconclusive if the neuronal correlates of this discrete sampling mode differ across sensory modalities. The present proposal addresses this question by investigating temporal perception in the visual and tactile domain by means of MEG and ECoG measures of neuronal activity and the analysis of oscillatory and arrhythmic brain activity patterns. The findings provide an understanding of the temporal structure of neuronal stimulus processing, which will be implemented in clinical research. Within the scope of the Global Fellowship, the applicant aims to visit a partner organisation at the New York University, which is internationally renowned for neuronal processing of visual stimuli and the analysis of arrhythmic brain activity. Since the applicant exhibits an expertise on the neuronal processing of tactile stimuli and the analysis of oscillatory brain activity, the expertise of the partner organisation perfectly matches the applicant’s skills. By acquiring these novel capabilities, the applicant will exhibit all skills necessary for a holistic analysis of neuronal information processing, thus significantly increasing his future career chances as an independent researcher. Since the research on neuronal stimulus processing is a critical component for the fundamental understanding of the human brain, this action will greatly increase the European expertise in the field of neuroscience.

Mots clés : tactile perception, visual perception, conscious perception, perceptual temporal resolution, perceptual cycles, ecog, neuronal oscillatiory activity, arrhythmic neuronal activity

Participants :
- New York University (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 239860.8 €
Projet EcoSpy (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Conservation planning and action critically relies on information about dynamics in ecosystems, habitats, and species’ populations in order to define baselines, set conservation targets, and to identify areas for protection and restoration activities. Following the opening of the Landsat archives, remote sensing became a key technology for providing information to conservation, but many world regions experienced widespread changes in habitats and species populations prior to the Landsat history (1980s). In EcoSpy we propose to pioneer the broad-scale use of recently declassified historical, global, high-resolution spy satellite photographs from the Cold War era (Corona) to extend the temporal scale of ecological and conservation remote sensing studies as far back as the 1960s. We will integrate Corona with Landsat and GoogleEarth Images in three proof-of-concept studies to test the usability of Corona for conservation research and applications. We will assess changes in (1) ecosystems of conservation concern, by identifying long-undisturbed forests and their fragmentation in Romania, (2) endangered species habitats, by analyzing saiga antelope habitat in Kazakhstan, and (3) keystone species’ population dynamics, by analyzing population density of steppe marmots in Kazakhstan. Additionally, we will carry out a synthesis study on uses and benefits of Corona imagery for ecology and conservation worldwide. EcoSpy is deeply interdisciplinary, located at the intersection of ecology, conservation science and remote sensing. Scientifically, EcoSpy will enhance the long-term understanding of ecological processes such as fragmentation, range shifts and population dynamics, and will extend availability of high resolution remotely sensed data by two decades prior to Landsat. EcoSpy will inform conservation action such as identifying priority conservation areas and defining conservation baselines for vulnerable habitats and species, advancing conservation and ecology worldwide.

Mots clés : historical spy satellite photography, remote sensing, corona, historical ecology, habitats of conservation concern, endangered species distribution, keystone species population density

Participants :
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 171460.8 €
Projet CLEF (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Conserving the Legacy of Evolution (CLEF) would provide a comprehensive framework for translating biodiversity datasets into conservation plans. We now have a unique opportunity to improve the outlook for biodiversity by taking advantage of the wealth of newly available data on species ranges, functional characteristics, and phylogenetic data. CLEF proposes to: (1) develop sophisticated, yet easy-to-use biodiversity models that improve our understanding of where diversity occurs and better predict how diversity might change in the future, and (2) integrate the output of these biodiversity models with systematic conservation planning. CLEF would advance a new generation of biodiversity modelling that considers multiple species in one step rather than the standard practice of estimating species diversity by aggregating individual models. Early work has suggested these multi-species biodiversity models show great promise for improving present and future biodiversity estimates, but these models have yet to be comprehensively tested. Here, we will build and test these models for plant species in the French Alps, and compare the outputs to existing process-based models at identical scale and resolution. The second phase of CLEF is to develop a tool that directly uses the outputs of these models in conservation prioritization software. This tool will have the option of including phylogenetic, functional data, and future distributions by building on recent developments in this area. CLEF will demonstrate this approach for 2700 plant species to assign conservation priorities for the entire French Alps Region considering functional diversity, evolutionary diversity, climate and land-use change and protected area status. The methods resulting from CLEF could be used for any species-level biodiversity dataset—helping scientists and conservationists better understand, predict, and plan to keep evolution’s legacy intact.

Mots clés : conservation biology, species distribution models, phylogenetic diversity, functional diversity, conservation prioritization, climate change

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 185076.0 €
Projet MARKTHEPIG (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Considerable progress has been made in characterising genomes, allowing comprehensive insights into patterns of genetic diversity in many organisms. However, the question of how genetics and environment interact to influence phenotype still remains challenging. Recent advances in DNA sequencing and phenotyping technologies, in concert with analysis of large datasets have spawned 'phenomics', the use of large scale approaches to study how genetic instructions from a single gene or the whole genome translate into the full set of phenotypic traits of an organism. Phenomics can be used across the full range of biological sciences, from cell culture studies in well-defined laboratory environments to populations of organisms under rapidly changing conditions. Advances in “omics” technologies, are providing the necessary tools to extensively phenotype increasingly large collections of individuals. The application and integration of these technologies in animal science will provide great opportunities to tackle biologically important questions (e.g. how to improve animal welfare, the environmental impact) at a whole new level. Indeed, these information could be used to develop precision livestock farming with the ultimate aim to offer a real-time monitoring and management system, solving in part problems of animal productions in high density populated regions, like Europe. The aim of the current project is to take advantage of the knowledge obtained by the University of Bologna in highly phenotyped pigs to better understand the factors, both genetic and non-genetic, that contribute to its variability. In the project, the use of mass spectrometry-based proteomics and metabolomics, will be the approach employed to provide new insights into the spectrum and structure of phenotypic diversity and the characteristics influencing the ability to accurately predict phenotypes. Indirect benefit for human health will be obtained by strengthening the pig as a biomedical model.

Mots clés : animal breeding, animal genetics, animal science, phenomics, precision livestock, farming, molecular markers, meat production

Participants :
- University of Bologna (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 168277.2 €
Projet FULFIL (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Considering the cultural construction of minority identities in medieval Europe, FULFIL interrogates the impact of the Christian perceptions, conceptions and uses of the Hebrew Bible on the religious identification of Jews as a distinctive group. Given that Christianity was understood as fulfilling, not abolishing, the Old Law, how did the Jews’ purported misreading of their own sacred text affect ideas about their moral, social qualities? FULFIL’s objective is to investigate the intellectual forms, cultural processes and social effects of Christian ideas, as these emerged in a world with living Jews and Jewish practice. The close study of scholastic, narrative and iconographic sources in the Middle Ages aims to demonstrate that theological thought was not disconnected from common beliefs and representations. The first stage of the programme, at the interface between intellectual and doctrinal, religious, legal and social history, will consist of defining a coherent corpus of texts and images, and of critical editions of chosen texts. At the second stage, these documents will be analysed in order to set the contexts, identify the intellectual arguments, motives and metaphors, and evaluate their social effects. Incorporating the study of Jews and Judaism within the global history of Europe, FULFIL will help demonstrate and understand the constructedness of minority identities, as well as the social effects of intellectual labour. This makes it fully consistent with part 13 (« Europe in a changing world – inclusive, innovative and reflective societies ») and part 16 (« Science with and for society ») of the H2020 2016-2017 work programme. The gender dimension that it involves is related to the filiation between Christianity and Judaism and to the peculiar distribution of paternal and maternal statuses within this relationship of Old and New Laws. FULFIL will thus help better understand the European history, identity and relationships to religious minorities.

Mots clés : medieval studies, jewish christian relations, theology and law, religious identification, social exclusion

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

Contemporary Earth’s ecosystems are threatened by accelerating extinction rates, but their responses to biodiversity losses are not detectable on short time scales. However, many large-scale biodiversity crises, or ‘mass extinctions’, occurred in the past and played a fundamental role in evolution. For instance, modern-style ecosystems originated from the worst biodiversity crisis in Earth history (PTME) at the Permian-Triassic boundary (~252 million years ago). The PTME killed over 70% of vertebrate species and created opportunities for new groups to diversify. After the extinction, Triassic land vertebrate assemblages were transformed, and new species diversified in ecological roles that were unexploited in Permian ecosystems. This suggests that extinctions may change the evolutionary trajectory of ecosystems and increase ecological complexity. Nevertheless, the ecological impacts of mass extinctions on ecosystems are still poorly understood. For the first time, this project critically investigates how the ecological structure and composition of land ecosystems changed across the PTME and its connection to biodiversity recovery. We will target the fossil record of exceptionally preserved Permian-Triassic ecosystems, alongside new field data from critical, but poorly sampled time intervals. Using a suite of novel approaches modified from modern ecology, we will quantify changes in ecological diversity, richness and stability of land ecosystems and major vertebrate groups. These patterns will be used to understand what factors drive biodiversity and the evolution of ecosystems during and after times of crisis. Through a comprehensive training and knowledge exchange programme, the experienced researcher and hosts will bring together and integrate their expertise in palaeontology, biology, quantitative techniques, and macroevolution to deliver this timely, innovative, and interdisciplinary project that will address fundamental ecological questions.

Mots clés : triassic, permian, vertebrate, ecological diversity, mass extinction, fossil, tetrapod

Participants :
- University of Birmingham (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 271732.8 €
- Virginia Tech (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet RISING (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Contemporary astronomical research relies heavily on simulations. However, the current state of the art has no objective way to measure how `realistic’ a simulation is, nor how informative it is with respect to the scientific questions it was designed to address. Comparison between simulation and observation is left to the subjective judgment of the individual researcher. The set up of simulation sets, the choice of parameters and ingredients to include, and the number of runs to execute are all also left to the researcher’s preferences, given hardware constraints. Numerical astronomy has, as of now, no shared standard of experiment design. Additionally, numerical simulations are often so slow and expensive that it is impossible to quickly and cheaply produce new outputs to improve statistical significance or for rapid prototyping new techniques. To address these issues, I will develop the RISING framework. RISING (Realistic and Informative Simulations with machine learnING) is a bundle of machine learning tools: anomaly detection tools to measure the realism of simulations, active learning tools to plan optimal sets of simulations under resource constraints, and generative modeling tools to obtain credible simulation outputs without running the underlying simulation. RISING will find immediate application on dynamical simulations of star clusters and hydrodynamical simulations of their parent clouds, which are being run in large numbers by the ERC-funded DEMOBLACK group led by my host, Prof. Michela Mapelli. RISING will be written in Python 3.7 using the Keras API on top of Tensorflow, integrated with frameworks for multi-scale, multi-physics simulations, such as AMUSE , whose author is Prof. Portegies-Zwart (Leiden Univ.) with which Prof. Mapelli has a current ongoing collaboration. The source code of RISING and selected data products will be made freely available to the numerical astronomy community.

Mots clés : anomaly detection, generative neural models  variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, numerical experiments, experiment design, active learning

Participants :
- University of Padua (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 255768.0 €
- Université de Montréal (Canada) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet NeuroLSD (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Continuing development of novel brain treatments, which bypass blood-brain barrier, further emerges the need to establish prognostic magnetic resonance (MR) markers to track progressive brain alteration in lysosomal storage diseases (LSD). Excessive intracellular accumulation of lysosomal substances such as glycosaminoglycans in mucopolysaccharidosis (MPS), globotriaosylceramide in Fabry disease and glycocerebroside in Gaucher disease (GD) triggers multi-organ malfunctioning and significant damage to the central nervous system. While LSD are associated with various levels of cognitive deficits, and distinct extents of morphological brain abnormalities (e.g., atrophy, leukodystrophy or enlarged perivascular spaces) ranging from non-existing in GD type 1 to severe in MPS type 2, microstructural and metabolic processes have not been comprehensively described in brains of LSD patients in vivo yet. We will utilize cutting-edge accelerated proton MR spectroscopic imaging methodology that was developed at the Medical University of Vienna in combination with advanced diffusion MRI, high-resolution T1-/T2-weighted ratio, and pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling technique. Our protocol will reliably quantify levels of all relevant brain metabolites, while sensitively describe microstructural and functional deficits to determine the relevance of MR measures in psychological deficits in LSD. Reproducible MR methods are needed to assess effects of novel treatments that overcome blood-brain barrier such as intrathecal enzyme administration, chaperones and gene therapies in clinical LSD trials. Increased understanding of brain LSD pathology will critically boost search of optimal therapies in age-related neurodegenerative diseases that share some common features with LSD such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease.

Mots clés : lysosomal storage diseases, brain, cognitive performance, magnetic resonance spectroscopy imaging, diffusion magnetic resonance imaging, arterial spin labeling

Participants :
- Medical University of Vienna (Autriche) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 166156.8 €
Projet poro sos (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Mathematics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Continuum mechanics represents one of the most important research fields in applied sciences and engineering. Numerical simulation is increasingly prominent in this field, which forms the natural ground for application of very recent techniques of numerical analysis and scientific computing. In the last decades, the simulation of multiphysics problems, where different models interact to describe a complex phenomenon, has received a lot of interest. The current project is framed in this spirit, with the double aim of advancing in the numerical simulation techniques as well as in the improved understanding of the physics in the application field. As main line of work, we treat mathematical and practical aspects of models for nonlinear poroelasticity, with an emphasis on stable numerical discretizations and the use of fast solvers for the highly efficient solution of the resulting algebraic systems. Regarding the practical aspects, we focus on the simulation of the deformation of reservoirs during the carbon dioxide injection stage. In this innovative proposal, we also develop efficient methods for uncertainty quantification in order to assess the risks involved in such process and to evaluate the impact on the environment. The cooperation between Professors Francisco Gaspar and Cornelis Oosterlee goes back 20 years, when they met (as young and fresh) researchers in FhG SCAI in Germany, and cooperated very successfully on multigrid methods. Then, both researchers went their own way (one in Spain, the other in the Netherlands). Now, both being almost 50 years of age, it is important to cooperate closely again, at Oosterlee’s host institution in the Netherlands. Prof. Gaspar is willing to come over to Amsterdam for two years, to boost the research and open new research directions, such as uncertainty quantification.

Mots clés : multilevel methods  deformable porous media  carbon dioxide storage  uncertainty quantification  multigrid methods

Participants :
- Dutch Research Council (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 165598.8 €
Projet EYEPOD (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Controlling how the body is propelled through space is paramount for survival of most animals. Many species, including humans, use feedback from their visual and proprioceptive systems to correct or confirm body movements. However, feedback is limited to events that form part of the past. For many high performance behaviors, such as catching a fast incoming ball, the appropriate movement must be 1. anticipated from a short observation period and 2. actuated without sensory feedback. Understanding how visual information is processed and re-coded in a predictive manner for the purpose of movement implementation is a fundamental question in neuroscience. Such ballistic movements have been studied in predatory species, however previous investigations on the neural basis of such behaviour focus on the early circuits. Much less is known about the sensorimotor conversion of this behaviour. Here I propose to investigate the sensorimotor control of the fastest predatory strike on earth, boasted by stomatopods. This work will yield novel insights and fill the current knowledge gap on the neural basis of anticipatory and ballistic movements. As one of the few world experts in the field of stomatopod visual ecology, I am uniquely qualified to initiate this line of research. This project utilizes both my expertise as a stomatopod visual ecologist and the expertise of my host supervisor, Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido, who is a leader in the use of behavioural, histological, and electrophysiological techniques to study sensorimotor conversion in predatory insects. Using a combination of our expertise, I will address three specific questions related to the vision-strike conversion in the stomatopod nervous system: 1.) What are the neural controls for releasing stomatopod ballistic strikes? 2.) Which dimensions of visual stimuli influence the stomatopod strike decision-making process? 3.) What are common themes among arthropods for the neural control of anticipatory movements?

Mots clés : visual ecology, neuroethology, crustacean

Participants :
- University of Cambridge (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 195454.8 €