Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet VITAL (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Electrolysis technologies are pivotal in accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Among them, proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzers, currently stand at an installed capacity of 0.92 GW and continue to grow, in view of their desirable performance traits such as high operating currents and fast response. However, their reliance on perfluorinated materials such as Poly(Trifluoroethenesulfonyl Fluoride) (C2F4O2S)n for core parts (membrane and catalyst binder), and critical raw materials (iridium and platinum for catalysts), raises environmental concerns due to the recycling challenges of forever chemicals –the EU weighs a complete ban for forever chemicals such as Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), and cost. The reliance on noble metal catalysts, especially iridium, does not contribute to high capital costs, but poses scalability concerns due to the extremely limited availability of iridium. Overall, these hinder the sustainability prospects of PEM technologies at scale, and their widespread commercialization. These underscore the pressing need for innovative strategies to realize sustainable and efficient electrolyzers.  VITAL (Cost-effectiVe materIals for susTainAble eLectrolyzers) addresses these challenges through the development of novel, fluorine-free membranes, integrated with cost-effective, non-critical raw materials. VITAL aims to demonstrate electrolyzer systems for H2 generation which combine sustainable scalability and performance. VITAL innovation relies on the development of fluorine-free membrane electrode assemblies, implemented through a recyclable olefin polymer membrane paired with in situ grown catalysts; free of platinum group metals (PGMs), and designed to achieve competitive performance for H2 electrosynthesis. This project addresses the need for scalable and sustainable electrolysis, vital in the shift towards renewable energy sources, and reducing fossil fuel dependency.

Mots clés : fluorine free membrane pgm free catalyst proton exchange membrane electrolyzers water electrolysis

Participants :
- Institute of Photonic Sciences (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 181152.96 €
Projet MechanoSecret (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Membrane trafficking is fundamental to cellular homeostasis, controlling essential processes ranging from signalling to adaptation to the environment. By regulating secretion, eukaryotic cells modulate plasma membrane composition and the extracellular matrix. Human cells are typically embedded in tissues and constantly experience external forces. While the molecular details of the secretory pathway are well-established in 2D cultures, their response to mechanical cues remains largely unexplored.  This project aims to fill this knowledge gap by investigating how the Golgi complex, the central hub of the secretory pathway, responds to external mechanical forces. Using cutting-edge microscopy, biomaterials, and advanced cell biology, our study will adopt a bottom-up approach. First, we will explore the fundamental biology of the secretory pathway mechanotransduction in 2D polarized and non-polarized cells. Employing super-resolution microscopy and single-particle tracking, we will analyse how external mechanical forces influence Golgi dynamics with unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution. Our second aim extends this research to 3D systems, hypothesizing that inherent forces in these environments affect the secretory pathway. By leveraging colorectal cancer patient-derived organoids, we aim to uncover changes in secretion under mechanostimulation. This project will pioneer single-particle tracking in 3D imaging, integrating expertise from cell biology, optics, and photonics—a synergy uniquely supported by the host institution.  Colorectal cancer, a prevalent and deadly malignancy, suffers from limited therapeutic options due to cellular heterogeneity. By bridging cell biology and biophysics with cancer research, this project holds the potential to identify novel vulnerabilities in colorectal cancer. This study will not only provide fundamental insights into the secretory pathway but also lay the groundwork for future therapeutic strategies against colorectal cancer.

Mots clés : golgi apparatus, protein secretion, super resolution microscopy, membrane trafficking

Participants :
- Institute of Photonic Sciences (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 194074.56 €
Projet SPECIFIC (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The rising demand for complex computing in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data processing, presents a major energy challenge. In this regard, traditional silicon-based computing systems, based on the Von Neumann architecture, are becoming increasingly inefficient in terms of energy consumption. This makes it inevitable to find alternative solutions for developing noble energy efficient computing devices. Neuromorphic device which emulates the brain’s neural activities, offers a path to low energy computation. However, state-of-the-art neuromorphic devices mimic only first-order synaptic behavior, such as simple time-dependent plasticity. While the advancements are impressive, but these devices lack the ability to emulate more complex higher-order synaptic functions, such as multi-synaptic plasticity or history-dependent memory. These advanced functions are crucial for handling intricate tasks for example, decision-making, pattern recognition, and reasoning in AI. SPECIFIC aims to overcome this barrier by leveraging the properties of vacancy-ordered perovskites, which will positively contribute to the development of next-generation high-order memristors. To do so, we will exploit the tunability of perovskite materials to modulate defects, transport, and interfaces, which will be tailored to achieve second-order logic in potentially scalable bio-realistic devices. SPECIFIC seeks to establish guidelines for designing second-order memristors, integrating timing- and rate-based correlations for advanced neuromorphic computing tasks. These goals align with the European Green Deal’s goal of reducing carbon emissions, as the energy-efficient devices developed will contribute to the EU’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050. Additionally, this cutting-edge project will significantly enhance the fellow's expertise in materials science, device physics and neuromorphic technology, positioning her at the forefront of next-generation computing research.

Mots clés : neuromorphic device, memristors, halide perovskites, energy efficient computing

Participants :
- Institute of Photonic Sciences (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 209914.56 €
Projet TEAMS (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Electrosynthesis, powered by renewable energy, has the potential to remap existing industries like energy, transport, and manufacturing, by generating clean fuels and chemicals. Examples include water electrolysis to produce green hydrogen and the emerging CO2 electrolysis to synthesize important carbon chemicals such as ethylene. One challenge in these reactions is reactant and product management – gas, both as a reactant and product, brings solubility barriers (e.g., limited solubility of CO2) and strong fluctuations due to the formation of bubbles (H2 in the cathode, and O2 in the anode). Inefficient reactant supply and complex interfacial phenomena are often addressed in these systems at the atomic scale and in a static fashion (i.e., catalyst and environment design). TEAMS (MuTi-modulE smArt systeM for selective electroSynthesis) seeks to address this problem through the nano-macroscopic scale and in a dynamic way. It proposed to do so by integrating three key modules in a modular and smart, self-driven architecture: a nanobubble generator to increase gas availability, an interface reaction module to enhance efficiency and selectivity, and a feedback optimization module for continuous real-time system adjustments. TEAMS targets the application of this system into two reactions limited by gas availability and interface bubble formation, such as CO2 electrolysis into ethylene (cathode) and ethylene oxidation into ethylene oxide (anode). By combining nanobubble engineering, fluid dynamics, and electrochemical methodologies, TEAMS aims to create a next-generation, scalable, and automated electrosynthesis system.

Mots clés : nanobubble engineering, multiphysics simulation, smart system engineering, gas liquid interface engineering, power to x

Participants :
- Institute of Photonic Sciences (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 209914.56 €
Projet WILDCAT (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The global climate and energy crisis demands decisive actions to implement sustainable energy production and utilization processes. Catalysis has demonstrated its importance down this route by enabling the transformation of abundant recyclable resources such as water and CO2 into widely utilized fuels and chemical feedstock. Customizing catalysts to improve the performance of these processes is one of the main pursuits of catalytic chemistry. A class of materials with atomically thin constituents, labelled 2D materials (2DM), exhibit widely tunable properties of interest for catalytic applications. On top of their high surface area, extraordinary mechanical properties, and great conductivity (thermal and electrical), they allow a precise control over their electronic properties beyond conventional metals and semiconductors. The tunable electronic properties of 2DM can be exploited to a great extent in order to tailor catalytic performance. In particular, it has been shown that perturbations such as dislocations, vacancies, edges, impurities and functional groups, readily modify the density of states in graphene and promote its catalytic properties. Although, mastering and translating these properties into catalytic specific applications is not an easy task. The present project will venture into the often overlooked and challenging front of nanoscale engineering of 2DM for catalysis. WILDCAT will employ morphological alterations in 2DM, such as wrinkles, for the facilitation of catalytic applications. By precisely engineering the geometry of these deformations, we can reversibly tune selectivity and susceptibility of chemical reactions, without inducing any structural defects. The catalytic responses will be assessed with advanced in-situ nanoscale characterization tools in order to probe the contribution of wrinkle engineering. WILDCAT has the ambition to expand our understanding of reaction engineering and pave the way for selective catalysts on-demand.

Mots clés : atomic force microscopy afm , tip enhanced raman scattering ters , wrinkle engineering, selectivity

Participants :
- ASML (Netherlands) (Pays-Bas) — Partner, associated partner, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 0.0 €
- Institute of Photonic Sciences (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 206641.2 €
Projet ALTOS (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

As one of the most fascinating phenomena in physics, strong correlation exists across a wide range of scales from planet to electron. Researchers have been pursuing a thorough understanding of strong-correlation phenomena for decades. In addition to the equilibrium correlated states detected by electric methods, nonequilibrium correlated dynamics that reveals more fingerprints of many-body interaction at a transient timescale is also significant. The emergence of two-dimensional (2D) moiré superlattices provides an excellent platform to probe localized nonequilibrium correlation phenomena by ultrafast laser excitation and spectroscopic detection with high resolution in both space and time. The combination of large moiré lattices in space and femtosecond-scale resolution in time will offer us a powerful tool to unravel the signature of unconventional dynamics of strong-correlated states, which not only deepens our understanding of complex quantum systems but also holds promise for the development of advanced technologies with transformative applications in fields like quantum computing and energy transmission. This interdisciplinary training scheme aims to enhance Dr. Shang’s expertise in photonics, strengthening his skills and helping him establish a research career in Europe. The program covers component design and implementation, theoretical analysis and photonics experiments. To assist Shang in reaching professional maturity and increase his exposure to academic and industrial collaborations, he will receive training on intellectual property management, funding and proposal writing, commercialization, business and finance management, supervision, and teaching. Additionally, Shang will have the opportunity to establish cooperation with Prof. Abajo (ICFO, Spain) as part of an academic secondment. This will maximize his learning experience, expand his network in Europe, and maximize the impact of research and training on EU society and industry.

Mots clés : ultrafast dynamics, strong correlation, two dimensional materials, ultrafast spectroscopy, nonlinear optics

Participants :
- Université Aalto (Finlande) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 215534.4 €
- Institute of Photonic Sciences (Espagne) — Partner, associated partner, Recherche, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet MACLEA-ENDO (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Endothelial cells form the lining of the blood vessels of the entire vascular system, from the heart to the smallest capillary, regulating vascular tone, immune response and exchange of materials in and out the blood stream among others. Endothelial damage has been observed in the early stages of most cardiovascular diseases, atherosclerosis or in patients with iflammatory and infectious diseases (e.g. COVID-19, septic shock). Typically endothelial damage is measured by means of blood test analysis and provocative tests either invasive, performed by using pharmacological agents, or non-invasive, such as flow mediated dilation that on the other hand, suffer from high operator-independency and no-automatization. This proposal revolves around the design, development and validation of a supervised machine learning algorithm (ML) to evaluate endothelial damage and predict adverse outcome in critically ill patients in the ICU. The ML pipeline will use as input data the one from the Horizon 2020 project VASCOVID clinical validation. These data comprises of physiologically relevant variables that can be measured non-invasively with a completely automatized platform. This smart platform combines diffuse optics and an automatized tourniquet for performing a reactive test on peripheral muscle (thenar muscle). By means of this device it is possible to access in an accurate and robust way information about early impairment in perfusion, metabolic rate of oxygen consumption, and microvascular functionality and tissue capability of locally regulate the blood flow. These variables bring an important physiological insight concerning the interpretability of machine learning algorithm from the clinical community who does not fully trust this approaches.

Mots clés : supervised machine learning, diffuse optics, endothelial damage, sepsis, covid 19, endothelial therapies

Participants :
- Institute of Photonic Sciences (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 165312.96 €
Projet BrainCode (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The BrainCode project proposes novel compression techniques for extended reality (XR) data which are energy efficient while ensuring a reconstruction quality that satisfies the human visual semantic perception. There are several challenges concerning the complexity and the power consumption of the latest video compression standards which have not yet taken into account by the signal processing community. We propose that these challenges can be addressed by machine learning based architectures in order to avoid the exhaustive comparisons between sequential frames. We aim at releasing a semantic video compression algorithm that uses Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and drives the bit allocation with respect to the content of the visual scene. Another goal of BrainCode is to mimic the visual system as an intelligent mechanism that processes the visual stimulus. This can be claimed as it consumes low power, it deals with high resolution dynamic signals and the dynamic way it transforms and encodes the visual stimulus is beyond the current compression standards. During the last decades, a lot of effort has been made to understand how the visual system works, what is the structure and role of each layer and individual cell that lies along the visual pathway, and how the huge visual information is propagated and compacted through the nerve cells before it reaches the visual cortex. There are very interesting mathematical models which approximate the neural behaviour and they have been widely used for image processing applications including compression. The BrainCode project searches the latest neuroscience models for the design of a groundbreaking XR video compression architecture. The efficiency of the above approaches is expected to improve several image processing applications like computer vision, virtual reality, and video compression among other, where the real-time processing of the visual scene plays a substantial role.

Mots clés : extended reality, immersive presence, semantic compression, convolutional neural networks, dynamic processing, visual system, biological neural networks, event based processing

Participants :
- Facebook technologies llc (Etats-Unis) — Partner, associated partner, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 0.0 €
- Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (Grèce) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 279227.52 €
Projet MIMECOR (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

MIMECOR aims to develop an artificial and biomimetic cornea to achieve a major improvement in the quality of life of corneal disease patients, reducing their dependence on corneal transplants. This will be reached through the preparation and further modifications of a human-like cornea through the combination of additive manufacturing, stem cell transdifferentiation, and colonisation as an alternative to natural cornea donation. This approach is going to be a major breakthrough in Ophthalmology, as it will overcome the existing limitations of current treatments: it could become a reference in the therapy for specific corneal pathologies. The candidate researcher, Dr. Marć will provide to the project with her broad experience in applied preclinical research, gained in academic and industrial research groups of different European countries. She will learn cutting-edge techniques in Regenerative Medicine applied to Ophthalmology, through the interaction with a multidisciplinary, collaborative, and creative environment with specialists in engineering, medicine, physics, biology, and biochemistry. The candidate will perfect research skills such as experimental design, scientific writing, open science and data analysis. Moreover, through diverse training activities and a non-academic placement at a small-medium enterprise (the largest monographic ophthalmological private hospital in Europe), Dr. Marć will also acquire transferable skills and experience in grant implementation, ethics in Responsible Research and Innovation, time management, and scientific communication and divulgation. Besides, this formative plan accommodates her needs with the capabilities of the hosting group and institution. All this knowledge and skills will be crucial for the career success of the researcher. Due to her knowledge of the local language, Dr. Marć intends to become an established biomedical scientist in Spain after MSCA-PF, applying for Spanish postdoctoral grants and positions.

Mots clés : cornea, 3d printing, biocompatibility, keratoconus

Participants :
- Instituto oftalmologico fernandez-vega sl (Espagne) — Partner, associated partner, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 0.0 €
- Hospital Universitario La Paz (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Autres, subvention : 262393.2 €
- Madrid Health Service (Espagne) — Partner, associated partner, Organismes publics (hors enseignement & recherche), subvention : 0.0 €
Projet MACS (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

One important health issue in Europe, especially with the aging of the population, is bone (tissue) fracture (damage) as a result of high-energy impact or trauma, tumor resection, infection or osteo-degenerative diseases. This problem is currently managed with fixation devices and porous scaffolds made of bio-inert and biocompatible alloys (Ti, Co-Cr, steels). However, the large elastic modulus mismatch between these permanent materials and the bone tissue leads to osteoporosis and secondary fractures. Moreover, secondary surgeries are often necessary to remove these permanent implants. To overcome these limitations, temporary implants from biodegradable and biocompatible metals, such as magnesium (Mg) have been attracted a lot of attention. However, Mg suffers from fast corrosion rates in body fluids, which also impairs cell proliferation and just a few Mg alloys, fabricated by conventional techniques (extrusion and powder metallurgy) have been approved for bone tissue therapies so far. These techniques do not allow to control the porosity (pore shape, size and connectivity), which is necessary to ensure appropriate cell proliferation and tissue growth. Hence, the project MACS aims at developing a new generation of Mg alloys suitable to manufacture by selective laser melting porous scaffolds with optimum porosity, mechanical properties, corrosion resistance and biocompatibility to be used for bone tissue engineering. Particular emphasis will be paid to the engineering of surface coatings to ensure the appropriate rates of corrosion and cell proliferation so the biodegradable scaffold will be gradually replaced by the tissue. Porous scaffolds will be designed and manufactured by selective laser melting with the new alloy and engineered with surface coatings. The mechanical properties, corrosion resistance as well as bioactivity for bone tissue regeneration will be determined by means of in vitro tests.

Mots clés : magnesium alloys additive manufacturing porous scaffold biocompatibility coating

Participants :
- Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 165312.96 €
- École polytechnique de Varsovie (Pologne) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €