Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet DYNABUP (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The environment is structured in time, allowing humans and animals to make predictions about the future and adjust behaviour. To this end, they perform ‘dynamic belief updating’ whereby beliefs about event probabilities are iteratively revised in light of new observations. However, this strategy is challenged by two properties of the world, namely stochasticity and volatility. These features imply that an unexpected observation might either simply reflect noise in the generative process or indicate that the process itself has covertly changed. While remedying to stochasticity requires to integrate over past observations so as to cancel out noise from the estimates, the countermeasure for volatility instead dictates to discard past observations so as to compute the most up-to-date estimates. How do humans and animals strike this difficult balance? In this interdisciplinary proposal, I offer to tackle this question using a unique combination of human cognitive neuroscience and rodent neurobiology, all guided by computational modelling. Authorities in these fields (Valentin Wyart, Ph.D. and Benjamin B. Scott, Ph.D.) will provide me with the missing skillset which, combined with my pre-existing expertise, will put me in an unprecedented position to unravel how mammalian brains factor in uncertainty during dynamic belief updating. Notably, I will test the idea that a sensory gain control mechanism gates the impact of novel observations onto past beliefs, and that this sensory gain is tuned by noradrenaline release from the locus coeruleus. The findings will inform neurocomputational theories of learning as well as contribute to a better understanding of cross-species similarities and differences, which is key for more fruitful translational research programs and better optimized use of animals in research. Furthermore, the acquired skillset will ideally position me as an independent researcher equipped with a cutting-edge approach at the frontiers of fields and species.

Mots clés : electroencephalography, cognition, cortex, human, inference, learning, locus coeruleus, mouse, optogenetics, probability, rat, sequence, uncertainty, widefield imaging

Participants :
- École normale supérieure PSL (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 276681.6 €
- Boston University (Etats-Unis) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet STORAGE (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Recent global plastic pollution models predict that two thirds of the plastic mass released from land into the ocean since 1950s is likely to have stranded around the world’s shoreline. Yet, our knowledge about the degradation, burial and transportation fate of beached Marine Plastic Debris, MPD, remains limited and little is known about the exact capacity of beaches to store MPD. To fill in current knowledge gaps in global monitoring of MPD, we propose a novel approach based on repeated field-surveys of surface and buried MPD and studying the physico-chemical transformations induced by MPD aging on Hawaiian beaches, which are known hot-spots for MPD due to their proximity to the north pacific garbage patch. Data collected from repeated surveys of surface and buried MPD on beaches will generate 3D maps of MPD and assessment of temporal MPD fluctuation and accumulation zones of MPD with respect to the type, size and density of MPD present on the surface and in the sand column. Following the aging of plastic debris when stored on beaches will reveal dominating MPD transformations and rates, including fragmentation rates, which will provide key information (e.g. changes in density, buoyancy and fragmentation) to model fate (transportation and transformation) of MPD in coastal environments. We envision that outcomes from STORAGE can timely provide scientific evidence supporting decision making within the present and future legislative measures against plastic pollution prompted by the EU and global agreements. The interdisciplinary transfer of knowledge needed for STORAGE will be facilitated through stays at the Center for Marine Debris Research, (CMDR) at Hawaii Pacific University (HPU) in the U.S., Laboratoire Structures Matériaux Avancés et Sollicitations Hyperbares (SMASH) at Ifremer in France and a secondment at the Research Team at The Ocean Cleanup office in the Netherlands, and brings together key actors in MPD analysis and sampling, plastic pollution modelling and polymer science.


Participants :
- The Ocean Cleanup (Pays-Bas) — Partner, associated partner, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 0.0 €
- Institut français de recherche pour l'exploitation de la mer (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 276681.6 €
- Hawaii Pacific University (Etats-Unis) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet EpigraFET (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Two decades ago, epigraphene (EG) nanoelectronics was proposed at Georgia Tech as a successor of silicon because this 2D material can exploit currently unutilized properties of charge carriers, like quantum coherence and the electronic spin, to realize faster, smaller and more energy efficient devices than is possible with silicon. In a recent breakthrough paper EG grown on a silicon carbide was shown to be a record breaking 2D semiconductor that is uniquely compatible with conventional nanoelectronics production methods. Working with the pioneers of EG, my research project proposes to demonstrate low power semiconducting epigraphene (SEG) tunnelling field effect transistors (TFET), with record breaking speeds. At GT I will grow chip-scale SEG, fabricate and optimise conventional SEG FETs, followed with development of prototype TFETs devices. SEG will be interconnected with epigraphene nanoribbons that have extraordinary ballistic transport properties of which the physics is still not well understood. This knowledge will then be transferred to Grenoble where electronic spin and quantum coherence properties will be demonstrated in intercalated heterostructures that can be incorporated in advanced SEG devices. These properties, including edge state properties will be investigated using a variety of transport and local probe techniques to provide a solid foundation for SEG nanoelectronics. This proposal has a critical scientific impact especially in elucidating the nature of the graphene edge state with quantum coherent properties easily assessable cryogenic temperatures (≈10K) and 10 micron device length scales that are relevant for practical quantum computing. The development of epigraphene nanoelectronics will revolutionize electronics, and as was successfully argued in the 1B€ European Graphene Flagship program, it will have a huge societal and economic impact for Europe. It will stimulate a worldwide SEG effort and put me at the forefront of this emerging field.

Mots clés : graphene, semiconductors, 2 dimensional materials, tunnel field effect transistor, epitaxial growth

Participants :
- Institut polytechnique de Grenoble (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 413379.72 €
- Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (France) — Partner, associated partner, Recherche, subvention : 0.0 €
- Georgia Institute of Technology (Etats-Unis) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet IWandTNYinMID20thC (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

This project explores Irish writers’ connections with The New Yorker, shedding new light on the literary transactions between the US and Ireland in the mid-twentieth century. I investigate how Irish writers engaged with the American metropolitan magazine’s post-war liberalism; I also consider the extent to which the connection with TNY can help us redefine Ireland’s “isolated” literary environment in relation to global modernity. Many important Irish writers contributed regularly to TNY. While it is well known that the magazine enhanced Irish writers’ international standings, some critics have voiced concerns that the magazine’s scrupulous editorial process limited the writers’ experimentalism and capitalized upon their stories’ Irishness in order to appeal to a largely American readership. This criticism, however, risks overstating the popular magazine’s supposed “conservatism.” As a middlebrow publication that aimed to inform and entertain at the same time, TNY navigated the liminal—yet richly evocative—space between highbrow culture and lowbrow humour, revealing an ambivalent attitude towards both radical reforms and middleclass complacency. Drawing on periodical studies and theories of middlebrow culture to establish my theoretical framework, I consider this metropolitan magazine’s fraught relationships with the experimental arts and its intimate involvement in the experience of modernity. I argue that it was not TNY’s “conservatism,” but its ambivalences towards modernity that resonated with mid-twentieth-century Irish writers. Re-inserting the fictional works of the Irish writers into the textual space of TNY—alongside the cartoons, advertisements, and journalistic reports—this project advances our understanding of the Irish short story in relation to metropolitan and transatlantic modernity. It offers the first fully contextualized literary–biographical account of the relationships between the TNY editors, the Irish writers, and their American peers.

Mots clés : modern irish literature, the new yorker, middlebrow, periodical studies, the new modernist studies

Participants :
- KU Leuven (Belgique) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 175920.0 €
- Université de New York (Etats-Unis) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet SINOCA (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : TERMINATED

Abiotic stress is a major challenge for plants, especially as extreme conditions like heat and drought are becoming more frequent due to global climate change. Unlike animals, plants cannot move to escape harsh environments and must instead adapt their metabolism, physiology, and growth to survive. These adaptive responses rely on specialized sensors and signaling hubs within the plant, including organelles, which have been identified as key players in stress responses. While much research has focused on how individual organelles respond to stress, there is still a lack of understanding of how these organelles communicate with one another to coordinate stress signals and maintain cellular balance. This project aims to bridge that knowledge gap by exploring the communication between two key organelles, the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and chloroplasts, and their role in helping plants cope with heat and drought—two of the most significant challenges plants face. Under stress, organelles like the ER and chloroplasts send retrograde signals to the nucleus and other parts of the cell to trigger adaptive responses. However, the specific mechanisms of this inter-organelle communication remain largely unknown. By combining traditional molecular genetics with advanced transcriptomics, physiological profiling, and AI-assisted data analysis, we aim to identify and characterize novel signals and further study known players that mediate this vital organelle crosstalk. Ultimately, our research could pave the way for developing crops with enhanced resilience to environmental stress, addressing some of agriculture's most urgent challenges in the face of climate change.

Mots clés : ecophysiology, abiotic stress, plants, global change, signal transduction

Participants :
- Université de Barcelone (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 194074.56 €
Projet BIG (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Combining nutrients that act synergistically and have potential to lower postprandial glycaemia is an important dietary strategy that can reduce the risk of developing non-communicable diseases. Within a starch-based food matrix, like bread, the presence of bioactive compounds (polyphenols and carotenoids) can lower or delay starch digestion, and therefore the postprandial glycaemic response. This shows potential for development of bioactive-rich starchy foods, as an alternative to conventional high-glycaemic foods. Variations in dose, form and processing can result in bioactive-rich functional foods with different glycaemic potencies, thus further studies are needed to determine the role of polyphenols and carotenoids from tomato during digestion. The aim of this project is to determine the impact of polyphenols and carotenoids from tomato (naringenin and lycopene, respectively) on nutrient accessibility and impact on glycaemia. I will investigate the interaction of naringenin and lycopene from an organically grown tomato paste enriched with tomato skin, previously developed by the host group, with starch and starchy foods. Nutrient release from a food matrix and digestion will be measured in vitro at a micro- and macrostructural level, using a single-enzyme digestion system and the INFOGEST standardised static digestion model. To determine the effect of naringenin and lycopene on glycaemia, I will use biological samples from healthy study participants collected before and after 4-week intake of tomato enriched paste, from an ongoing dietary intervention study in the host group. The use of tomato by-products (skin) is a sustainable option to fortify foods, providing added value to scraps without post-harvest extraction of bioactive compounds. Results from this study will provide new mechanistic insight into how tomato bioactive compounds modulate starch digestion and new fundamental evidence on their influence on glycaemia.

Mots clés : polyphenols, carotenoids, starch, digestibility, glycaemia

Participants :
- Université de Barcelone (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 169118.96 €
Projet BraSILL (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

More and more Europeans acquire a second language (L2) during adulthood. However, people greatly differ in their learning success across different learning settings, such as phone apps or in-class. Due to its key role in acquiring our first language during childhood, social interaction might also play an important and underappreciated role in L2 learning. Nevertheless, understanding the role and underlying processes of social interaction in L2 learning has been hindered so far by an enormous technical hurdle: natural social settings have to be translated into the controlled lab environment. With this project, we aim to use a novel approach, combining social cognition, neurolinguistics and ecological valid virtual reality (VR) to tackle this hurdle for the first time. We will design VR environments in which we can control the type of social interaction and the social agent with whom the participant interacts. This will allow us to determine all relevant factors of social interaction that benefit L2 learning success in a natural, yet controlled setting. Furthermore, we will overcome the challenge of combining the VR experience with simultaneous brain measures in the form of electroencephalography (EEG), as well as psychophysical (pupilometry and eye movements) and behavioral measures. This will enable us to measure the effects of social interaction on different cognitive levels and with different temporal resolutions. Our team associates renowned experts in neurolinguistics, L2 learning, social cognition and VR to ensure this project’s success. Furthermore, we will collaborate with a tech company to translate our results to a marketable product, targeted at immigrants who wish to acquire Catalan and Spanish. In sum, our project combines multiple disciplines and state-of-the-art techniques such as VR and EEG to finally gain insight into what is likely one of the most important drivers of language learning: social interaction.

Mots clés : eeg virtual reality second language learning

Participants :
- Minicoders 21, sl (Espagne) — Partner, associated partner, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 0.0 €
- Université de Barcelone (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 226441.2 €
Projet IsWINE (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

In the EU, changing precipitation patterns pose challenges to the wine sector, urging it to adapt to shifting climate conditions. IsWINE aims to quantify the effect of land management practices on the water pool of vineyards, providing valuable information on climate change adaptation. As European winegrowers increasingly recognize the urgency of harmonizing sustainability practices with economic viability and grape quality, New Zealand vineyards stand out as role models, demonstrating their long-standing commitment to sustainability. At the intersection of environmental and agricultural sciences, IsWINE will establish two pilots, one in Northern Spain and another in New Zealand, to empirically test the correlation between different land management practices and soil moisture, grapevine water uptake, and water use efficiency of grapevines using isotope geochemistry. This approach will allow meaningful insights into vineyard resilience and cross-learning between the two regions. EU wine stakeholders will participate in defining adaptive management measures resulting from the pilots, thereby delivering tangible solutions aligned with the sector. By generating actionable knowledge, IsWINE can equip European vineyards with adaptation measures to balance environmental stewardship and agricultural productivity. These efforts align with the European Green Deal and the Common Agricultural Policy, supporting many strategies and two EU Missions of the Member States. IsWINE will be hosted by three highly qualified institutions. The outgoing phase (24 months) will take place at the University of Auckland under the guidance of Asso. Prof. Luitgard Schwendenmann, the return phase (12 months) at the Neiker Technology Center under the supervision of Dr. Ana Aizpurua, and a secondment (3 months) will take place at the University of Barcelona under the guidance of Dr. Adrià Barbeta.

Mots clés : vineyard management practices, water pool, climate change adaptation

Participants :
- Tecnalia (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 257235.36 €
- Université d'Auckland (Nouvelle-Zélande) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Université de Barcelone (Espagne) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet VolcanAI (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

There exists a direct relation between gas emissions and earth’s dynamics and climate: the impact of anthropogenic emissions and volcanic eruptions on the climate are well known and from the opposite, the effect of the climate on the volcano activity remains mainly unexplored. To develop climate-volcano models and improve eruption predictive models, a comprehensive study of volcanic emissions is necessary. Reference measuring systems, which are used by the National civil protection agencies and which one can find in the market, are highly sensitive, complex, bulky, expensive and have a high power-consumption. Consequently, they can only be installed in few specific locations. For an accurate spatial monitor of these complex gas mixture emissions, however, a large number of sensing systems need to be deployed and connected, providing the required ubiquity, something which is possible nowadays thanks to Internet of Things (IoT). Usually, these systems do not need to meet the sensitivity level of the reference instruments. The present project addresses the development, fabrication, and testing of gas sensors for their implementation in IoT systems that will be deployed in the close vicinity of volcanoes. These devices will be made from advanced and harsh-resistant metal oxide (MOX) nanomaterials and will be based on an unexplored dynamic mode (DM) of operation. In opposition to the so-far reported DM systems, based on temperature pulsing, here we propose to use light cycled operation (LCO), in which a single low-power pulsed light-emitting diode photoactivates the MOX, which provides the different gas response patterns required for the correct gas discrimination. This constitutes an electronic-nose and dramatically reduces the number of sensors and power consumption required for gas discrimination. The developed devices will be tested towards gases typically emitted by volcanoes and will be benchmarked against reference measuring systems.

Mots clés : gas sensor, nanomaterials, dynamic mode of operation, volcanic eruptions, electronic nose, internet of things, climate

Participants :
- Université de Barcelone (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 206641.2 €