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

Neurodegenerative disorders are one of the leading causes of disabilities and death in elderly populations worldwide. To this date, no established treatment can either prevent or slow down the progression of these diseases. Their occurrences and progression are strongly correlated with insoluble biological condensates composed of nucleic acids and proteins, where the latter are multi-domain proteins with both folded and disordered domains. The formation and the existence of biological condensates can be described through a combination of density (e.g., liquid-liquid phase separation) and network (percolation) transitions. These phase transitions are highly context-dependent (pH, temperature, etc.) and composition-dependent, i.e., the presence of other biopolymers, where these system variations can either enhance or suppress transitions or have a profound effect on the material properties of condensates formed. Currently, we lack computational approaches that can account for such system variations and predict the phase behavior of biological condensates. In this project, I will develop for the first time a quantitative computational model that will enable scanning a large chemical space, as well as, be temperature-sensitive. Next, I will use this model to identify the role of folded and disordered domains in the formation of condensates for two protein families related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, frontotemporal dementia, and autism spectrum disorder through large-scale molecular dynamics simulations. Lastly, I will deliver a microscopic understanding of how certain system variations are linked to neurodegenerative diseases, e.g., pH, the presence of other biopolymers, and changes in protein sequence affect the properties of biological condensates. I will carry out this project in the research group of Prof. Kresten Lindorff-Larsen at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH).

Mots clés : multi domain proteins, intrinsically disordered proteins, coarse grained modeling, phase separation

Participants :
- Université de Copenhague (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 230774.4 €
Projet HOLYBIRTH (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

This project is an inquiry into how actors strategically utilize religious repertoires and practices to articulate their political subjectivities. It mainly focuses on alternative mevlid celebrations organized by the rival factions of the Kurdish movement in Turkey, the Sunni Islamist Hizbullah and the secular ethnonationalist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), to commemorate the birth of Prophet Muhammad. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Diyarbakir, the project will investigate how a local Islamic practice has become a contested political arena in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish region, where rival nationalist interests and imaginaries compete for political dominance and legitimacy. Particular attention will be given to the conditions embedded in local power structures and everyday practices, which shape actors’ sense of identity and belonging. Drawing upon Bell’s theoretical exposition on "ritualization" and Connerton’s commemorative ritual theory, this project will offer a new perspective to investigate the intersection between religion and politics by analyzing a politicized ritual environment, in which various public expressions of Kurdish and Muslim identities are produced and disseminated. The methodological novelty of this project lies in its attempt to combine ethnographic inquiry with political science to shift the analytical focus from organizational and structural level explorations to daily human practice and interaction in social contexts.

Mots clés : religion and politics, kurds, turkey, muslim rituals, identity, ethnicity, ethnography

Participants :
- Université de Copenhague (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 214934.4 €
Projet GA-TNG (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Graphs have been used to analyse transport networks for hundreds of years. However, graphs are general structures and many graph algorithms are very slow. Specialised algorithms are much more efficient but can only be applied to restricted graph classes. Transport network graphs suffer from a lack of efficient specialised algorithms, since most graph classes are too restrictive and do not accurately represent real-world transport networks. Recent developments have led to geometric graph classes that are tailored to real-world transport networks. One of these geometric graph classes, phi-low-density graphs, captures the property that there are more connections between geographically nearby nodes than geographically distant ones. Unfortunately, the fundamental properties of phi-low-density graphs are not well understood, which has prevented the development of a wide range of specialised algorithms. My objective is to fill the acute need for a simple and versatile graph class that accurately represents real-world transport networks. My research will allow experts to finally harness the power of specialised algorithms on a wide range of important transport network problems. I will achieve my objectives through two sub-objectives: (1) To build fundamental structures for phi-low-density graphs, and (2) To design provably efficient specialised algorithms for phi-low-density graphs. I will be support by my host institution (University of Copenhagen), my host group (Basic Algorithms Research Copenhagen), my primary supervisor (Mikkel Abrahamsen), and my secondary supervisor (Rasmus Pagh).

Mots clés : geometric algorithms, graph algorithms

Participants :
- Université de Copenhague (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 230774.4 €
Projet LAWS (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The Legal Annotations Within Scandinavia (LAWS) research project will examine medieval legal manuscripts for notes left in the margins by readers; these additions include evidence for the changing understanding of the law across the medieval and post-medieval periods. The marginalia in these texts include reader reflections and erasures and I will examine these marginal annotations for insights into the ongoing reception and interpretation of the laws, including the circumstances of its evolution. This is particularly important because unlike the rest of Continental Europe, medieval Scandinavian legal manuscripts were less influenced by the Bolognian and Parisian law models, and similarly the reader annotations do not follow the customary glossing patterns. This provides an opportunity to examine a unique reading and legal culture that existed literally in the margins, some of which will only be visible and legible now after centuries due my use of the multi-spectral imaging scanner at the Arnamagnæan Institute. The main objectives of my research project are therefore to: 1) To examine the medieval legal texts in the Arnamagnæan Manuscript Collection for evidence of use by medieval and post-medieval readers; 2) To develop a detailed record of the marginalia, both standard and nonstandard, present in the legal texts in order to track the changing understanding of medieval legal terminology; 3) To consider the broader questions of literacy and the Nordic legal cultures as seen through two important 18th-century manuscript collections, which serve as a representative sample of the time; and 4) To produce an exhibition comparing the patterns of use on these medieval Scandinavian manuscripts to those used, read, and annotated in medieval England and Continental Europe. My research will be divided into two distinct Work Packages, corresponding to Year 1 and Year 2; in the course of this, I will submit two articles for publication and curate a major exhibition.

Mots clés : medieval law, literary culture, manuscripts

Participants :
- Université de Copenhague (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 230774.4 €
Projet REMOBILISE (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

REMOBILISE will be the first, interdisciplinary study examining the relationship between mobility infrastructures and free movement in West Africa. In bridging legal studies, citizenship studies, and infrastructure studies it aims to unpack how mobility infrastructures impact free movement in West Africa – and with what consequences. Free movement is recognised as a key driver for economic development, poverty reduction, and livelihood strategies. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was among the first organisations to introduce a regional free movement regime in 1979. Yet, immense disparities continue to exist in terms of who can access this seemingly equal right in practice. Although studies have indicated that legal, technological, and physical impediments may result in variegated access to free movement, there remains a lack of knowledge on the impact mobility infrastructures have on free movement. The project seeks to address this knowledge gap through the study of three complementary work packages focusing on the research questions on manifestations, patterns, and consequences of mobility infrastructures. It will use a mixed method approach, innovatively combining ethnographic approaches with legal research and large-scale data analysis. The project contributes to key debates in legal studies, citizenship studies, and infrastructure studies, specifically by improving the emerging scholarship on mobility infrastructures. The findings have direct impact on the lives of over 400 million people living in the region, on the work of ECOWAS policymakers, and on external partners, such as the UN and the EU.

Mots clés : ecowas citizenship mobility infrastructures free movement data analysis

Participants :
- Université de Copenhague (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 230774.4 €
Projet BioPesTY (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Chemical pesticides pose significant threats to human health and biodiversity, causing millions of poisonings and deaths annually, along with a potential 40% decline in insect species. To mitigate these hazards, the European Commission has committed to reduce the use of chemical pesticides by 50% by 2030. Biopesticides, such as pyrethrins, offer a safe and effective alternative towards this direction. Pyrethrins are natural, biodegradable compounds with potent insecticidal properties produced by Tanacetum cinerariifolium plant (Dalmatian chrysanthemum). As they are safe for humans, and rapidly degrade into non-toxic byproducts, they are approved already for organic agriculture. However, pyrethrin industrial production occurs via plant cultivation and extraction, therefore, faces restrictions due to limited availability of land, labor-intensive cultivation, and environmental factors. Scaling up production is challenging, and total chemical synthesis is unsustainable. Biotechnological production of pyrethrins using baker’s yeast offers a sustainable solution. To achieve this, in BioPesTY, I will develop a yeast strain engineered to produce pyrethrins in a scalable and sustainable manner. Using a multidisciplinary approach engaging biochemistry, transcriptomics, and synthetic biology principles, I will identify the only missing step of pyrethrin biosynthesis, and I will reconstruct the whole pathway in yest, able to convert simple sugar into human-safe biopesticides. In BioPesTY I will enrich my current knowledge on plant biochemistry, with the training I will receive in the host lab on metabolic and yeast genetic engineering, and synthetic biology, to acquire unique expertise that will prompt me to develop my own scientific niche. During BioPesTY I will be trained also in fundraising, research management, communication, teaching and academic leadership. These skills will be instrumental in launching my future independent internationally competitive research career.

Mots clés : metabolic engineering, plant specialized metabolism, synthetic biology

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

Designing fair machine learning algorithms is challenging because the training data is often imbalanced and reflects (sometimes subconscious) biases of human annotators, leading to a possible propagation of biases into future decision-making. Besides, enforcing fairness usually leads to an inevitable deterioration of accuracy due to restrictions on the space of classifiers. In this project, I will address this challenge by developing oracle bounds of fairness restraints and a Pareto-dominated trade-off between fairness and accuracy using ensemble classifiers with the majority vote, to cancel out not only errors but also biases. I will also develop illegal bias tracing and long-term fairness capturing to comply with anti-subordination lawfully, using learning theory tools including causality and online learning for moral responsibility. The central objective of this proposal is to gain a theoretical understanding of fairness and to design machine learning algorithms that simultaneously improve both fairness and accuracy. The study is essential both for improved scientific understanding of fairness in machine learning models, and for the development of fairer algorithms for the numerous application domains, such as recruitment, criminal judging, or lending. Moreover, the project also takes interdisciplinary knowledge of economics and law into account to avoid fairness concepts in machine learning from being misaligned with their legal counterparts, enlarging the impact of machine learning applications and giving back to the wider community.

Mots clés : fairness, machine learning, majority vote, causality, multi armed bandits

Participants :
- Université de Copenhague (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 214934.4 €
Projet ResQ (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Dramatic biodiversity declines are driving Earth into a Sixth Mass Extinction. Drastic conservation plans such as genetic rescue have been proposed to mitigate the loss of genetic diversity, by introducing variation through admixture with closely related populations. However, the influx of new variation can also lead to an increase in genetic load, which can further compromise the survival of species. Since current studies of genetic rescue are based on few regions of the genome and lack a population genetics model, assessing the impact of these initiatives on the levels of genetic diversity and genetic load remains elusive. I propose to tackle this by studying the natural populations of European gray wolves in a temporal and spatial model, as their recent demographic history (strong bottleneck followed by a recovery in last decades) renders them an ideal case for exploring the dynamics of genetic rescue. In particular, I propose to leverage on an unprecedented dataset including >1,000 wolves genomes sampled across Eurasia at multiple time points (before and after population decline and the subsequent recovery) to generate the most comprehensive catalog of genomic diversity in European wolves to date. Taking advantage of recent developments in population genomics, computational biology, palaeogenomic sequencing and evolutionary modeling, I will reconstruct their recent demographic history, migrations patterns and adaptive potential, and determine the demographic parameters that predict a successful genetic rescue. This predictive modeling tool will be capable of guiding conservation management in wolves and applicable to other endangered populations. The combination of my host’s extensive experience in canid evolution, statistical methods and modeling, together with my background on population genomics ensures the successful implementation of this action and will enhance my set of essential skills on genomics methods for conservation.

Mots clés : conservation genomics conservation evolutionary genomics genetic diversity population genomics genetic rescue genetic load historical dna next generation sequencing

Participants :
- Université de Copenhague (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 230774.4 €
Projet MaPViAH (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

In mammals, the complex anatomical structure connecting pulmonary veins (PVs) with the posterior wall of the left atrium (LA) of the heart, defined as LA-PV junction, is a source of electrical ectopic pulses, which initiate and maintain atrial fibrillation (AF), the most prominent sustained arrhythmia that worsens with tissue remodelling due to ageing and hypertension. PVs’ resident cardiomyocytes generate electrical pulses contributing to arrhythmogenesis within the LA-PV junction. Moreover, “PV myocardium” expresses atrial-specific small conductance calcium-activated potassium (SK) channels, which are involved in AF. Although PVs ectopy is pivotal in AF onset, the pathophysiological space-time dynamic of PV cardiomyocytes’ intermittent firing and the proarrhythmic role of SK-channels in the LA-PV junction have not been investigated in ageing and hypertension. Aim of this project is to define and quantify, for the first time, the intermittent arrhythmogenic pattern of pulses generated by PV cardiomyocytes when challenged by SK-channels antagonists in young adult and aged spontaneously hypertensive rats compared to age-matched healthy rats. Moreover, the three-dimensional electrical heterogeneity of LA-PV spontaneous firing will be described by creating electro-anatomical high-density maps in the aforementioned experimental groups. This project will generate critical knowledge about how LA-PV junction electrically dissociates from sinus rhythm during AF onset and will unveil the role of PVs’ SK-channels in the pathophysiology process of AF. Moreover, this will allow me to acquire new skills to become a successful independent researcher in cardiovascular physiology and electrophysiology of cardiac arrhythmias.

Mots clés : pulmonary veins atrial fibrillation sk channels cardiac arrhythmias electrophysiology ageing hypertension

Participants :
- Université d'Édimbourg (Royaume-Uni) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Université de Copenhague (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 230774.4 €
Projet UltraTopo (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Recent ten years witness great progress on reducing the loss of mechanical resonators by advanced dissipation engineering techniques, which stimulates creation and manipulation of quantum states of mechanical motion for various precise metrology and quantum physics. Furthermore, the mechanical system has shown the potential to enable crucial applications in connecting or mediating separate superconducting qubits and other quantum systems, and distributing information between them. These applications require another mechanical fundamental building block: phononic waveguides, which allow phononic states traveling along confined channels. To date, the loss of the phononic waveguides remains a major limitation preventing them from various applications, especially those in quantum regime. Employing the dissipation engineering techniques to remarkably reduce their propagation loss will greatly enhance their ability for interconnecting or mediating classical and quantum systems, but this have not been investigated yet. In UltraTopo, I will apply the dissipation engineering techniques to topological phononic waveguiding systems to reduce their loss. Topological phononic waveguides are extreme compatible with dissipation engineering due to their crystal structure, and they also provide topologically protected backscattering-immune phonon transport that is crucial for building large phononic networks. I aim to reduce the loss of waveguides to be at least 2 orders of magnitude lower than existing best systems. I will also take this advantage to demonstrate classical and quantum interconnection of two superconducting loop gap resonators separated by centimeters. The project will combine my expertise of topological phononic waveguiding, and expertise of dissipation engineering and quantum electro-/optomechanics from the host group. It will offer new schemes for hybrid quantum systems to many groups and also provide me a unique profile at a new frontier in the field of phononic.

Mots clés : phononics, topological physics, mechanical dissipation engineering, quantum electro optomechanics, phononic waveguides

Participants :
- Université de Copenhague (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 214934.4 €