Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet PEARS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Streptococcus pneumoniae (the pneumococcus) is a bacterial species generally commensal to humans, but which occasionally causes infections responsible for the death of 800, 000 infants each year worldwide. Multiple genotypes exhibiting resistance to antibiotics have emerged in past years. Intriguingly, despite extensive antibiotic consumption operating strong selection for resistance, the latter remains at a stable frequency, 15% on average over the last 20 years in Europe. This is paradoxical, as robust coexistence of resistant and sensitive strains is unexpected under the simplest epidemiological models. In this project, I will investigate the possibility that coexistence is instead maintained by a more complex mechanism, relying on local adaptation to several niches characterized by different rates of antibiotic administration. I will develop a series of novel models with increasing realism and relevance to the context of S. pneumoniae, drawing from the often separate fields of population genetics and epidemiology. Starting with simple but general two- and multiple-niches models that allow for analytical solutions to provide initial insights, I will then build a more complex simulation model parameterized with biologically realistic contact and treatment structures. Output of this model will be confronted to large-scale patterns of spatial variation in resistance observed in epidemiological datasets. The analysis of these models will help us understand what factors facilitate the maintenance of coexistence in S. pneumoniae. This work may lead to better treatment policies to manage antibiotic resistance in this major pathogen.

Mots clés : streptococcus pneumoniae, antibiotics, heterogeneous environment, local adaptation, age structure

Participants :
- Imperial College London (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 195454.8 €
Projet aMUST (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Stress conditions threaten the organism’s homeostasis triggering adaptative responses. One of them is the increased energy demand from the brain. When stress becomes chronic, it leads to behavioural changes that range from adaptation to psychopathology. aMUST project aims to understand the neurobiological mechanisms underlying stress response. Considering that nowadays chronic stress is a risk factor for psychopathologies, such as anxiety and depression, with 25% of incidence in the population and an economical burden of €170 billion/year in EU, the aMUST project is extremely relevant and timely. Mitochondria and bioenergetics are emerging as important key players in stress-related pathologies. Whereas the energy-related impact of stress has received considerable attention in the past few years, the critical importance of the specialized cellular hubs called mitochondrial-endoplasmic reticulum (ER) associated membranes (MAMs) in stress responses, remains to be elucidated. Combining cutting-edge approaches, the aMUST project will shed light on this crucial biological question. Accordingly, intracranial lenses insertion of the mini endoscope in stress-vulnerable brain regions will be used to allow the study of in vivo mitochondrial calcium dynamics during behavioral experiments. 3D electron microscopy, protein ligase assay and BioID in vivo proteomics will allow to determine composition in MAMs structures and which protein interactions are altered during stress. The use of transgenic animals, compounds that change MAMs proteins function and alleviate ER-stress will be used to prevent possible modifications that cause vulnerability to stress. Therefore, aMUST project outcomes will unveil the MAMs-related mechanisms needed to open new therapeutic avenues to promote resilience to stress.

Mots clés : stress, anxiety, mfn2, mams, mitochondria

Participants :
- Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (Suisse) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 191149.44 €
Projet PepDNA-4D (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Structural organisation in living systems is both dynamic (varies with time), and emergent (more than the sum of its parts). Different blends of these aspects can be said to contribute to all the uniquely impressive processes of cellular biology. In contrast, synthetic self-assembled chemical systems rarely express each of these properties, being largely based on single self-assembly systems (e.g. DNA hybridisation or metal coordination), and static (i.e. observed at its thermodynamic minimum). This Fellowship will combine the Fellow's skills in chemoenzymatic peptide synthesis with those of the Supervisor in combining complementary self-assembly systems to obtain emergent superstructures. These studies will result in the first instances of dynamic and emergent self-assembly in synthetic chemical systems. To achieve this aim, we will perform chemoenzymatic polymerisation of peptides from the end of DNA backbones. Both units are capable of their own self-assembly - DNA through hybridisation, and peptides via secondary structures. In any 'static' snapshot of the system, the indirect interplay of DNA and peptide assembly will lead to highly unusual nanostructures. However, this work will go beyond, to measure the type and extent of self-assembly during the enzymatic polymerisation process using cutting edge techniques such as liquid-cell electron microscopy. The resultant systems will recapitulate the properties of living matter in these respects. In the course of these studies, the Fellow's professional skills will be honed through mentorship, the practice of taking a leading role in research, and through training courses offered by the Host Institution. At the end of the Fellowship, he will be ideally placed to assume an independent academic position.

Mots clés : peptide, nanotechnology

Participants :
- University of Kent (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 224933.76 €
Projet CriticalBoseBox (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Studies of homogeneous quantum gases, trapped in uniform optical-box potentials, bridge the fields of ultracold atoms and condensed matter physics. Being versatile and well-isolated systems, ultracold atoms offer an outstanding platform for engineering quantum many-body systems. Due to the variety of high precision measurement techniques from atomic physics, they can be used as analogue quantum simulators for addressing open questions in the physics of strongly correlated systems. This proposal suggests using ultracold bosons with tuneable interactions and trapped in uniform box potentials to experimentally study the critical behaviour of a Bose gas near its condensation temperature Tc. The project focuses on problems in beyond-mean-field physics that cannot be effectively tackled using the traditionally studied harmonically trapped gas. One key objective is the first measurement of the long-debated non-perturbative Tc shift due to interactions, which is a sensitive probe of the critical behaviour happening on all length scales. In addition, the project addresses critical scalings near Tc, which will be investigated through equilibrium and non-equilibrium measurements. In particular, experimental access to the critical slowing down of equilibration near Tc should allow a direct measurement of the dynamical critical exponent z, which is not possible with liquid helium. The proposed experiments will cover the full range of interaction strengths from non-interacting atoms to the largely unexplored unitary regime, where the interactions are as strong as allowed by quantum mechanics. This will also allow a study of the effect of the interaction strength on the size of the critical region and on the robustness of the universal critical behaviour. This proposal stands at the forefront of the field of quantum simulation and its results should have an impact beyond the atomic physics and quantum optics communities, strongly reinforcing European excellence in physics.

Mots clés : quantum simulations, uniform gases

Participants :
- University of Cambridge (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 212933.76 €
Projet BILINGUALPLAS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Studies reported that bilingualism strengths executive functions in elderly and delays the Alzheimer’s disease (AD) onset for five years. These findings suggest that bilingualism enhances the cognitive reserve (CR). CR is a construct that includes a set of cognitively stimulating experiences (e.g. high education level, high occupational status) that enhance brain functional connectivity, leading to better cognitive functioning and delayed clinical AD onset. Since brain functional modulations maintained for a long period of time result in structural changes, studies suggested that enhanced functional and structural connectivity provide to persons with high CR greater resilience against changes related to physiological and pathological ageing. Considering the European population ageing, study of variables related to CR is crucial to prevent the cognitive decline in elderly and for the maintenance of public health systems. The aim of this project is studying the specific cognitive processes related to bilingual advantage in executive functions and the underlying neural correlates. Studies often failed to find a relationship between bilingualism and better executive functions. These studies often focused on cognitive control to inhibit irrelevant information but recent research suggested that bilingualism is mainly related to better attentional switching abilities. Also, high CR of the participants or low difficulty of the performed task could mask a bilingual advantage due to a ceiling effect in cognitive performance. Four samples of healthy elderly (monolinguals and bilinguals with low and high CR) will perform two cognitive tasks during an electroencephalogram (EEG) recording. Neural correlates of cognitive processes occurring during the tasks performance will be studied by using event-related potentials. Functional connectivity will be studied through EEG coherence and graph theory whereas structural connectivity will be studied by using diffusion weighted imaging.

Mots clés : event related potentials, cognitive reserve, bilingualism, simon task

Participants :
- Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 172932.48 €
Projet CHEMBIOHISTONE (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Studying biomolecules in living cells is an important step towards understanding the cause and development of diseases. However, the existing tools dedicated to the study of biomolecules often lack generality and pose disturbance to the biological systems. Although bioorthogonal chemistry plays an important role in biomolecule studies, there are only a handful of bioorthogonal reactions that can modify these molecules in vivo. In this project, we will develop a novel biocompatible reaction that can be widely used for modifying biomolecules both in vitro and in vivo. We will then employ the reaction to reveal the biological significance of post-translational modifications (PTMs) of histones proteins by using two strategies. First, the histone mimics that are not accessible by the existing methods will be synthesized. These histone mimics can serve as important models for us to understand the interactions between histones and their regulating enzymes. Second, real-time imaging of histone PTMs in living cells will be made possible by using a chemical biology approach. This approach can minimize the disturbance to the three-dimensional structure of the nucleosome, thereby providing a true image of dynamic histone PTMs during cellular processes. In short, this multidisciplinary project lies on the interface of organic chemistry, biochemistry, and cell biology, with an aim to enable the in-depth studies of the unknown aspect of epigenetics.

Mots clés : chemical biology, protein chemistry, post translational modification, free radical reaction

Participants :
- University of Oxford (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183454.8 €
Projet SuPerMan (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Mathematics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

SuPerMan proposes the development and efficient implementation of new structure preserving schemes for conservation laws formulated in an elegant and universal form through covariant derivatives on spacetime manifolds. Indeed, nonlinear systems of hyperbolic PDEs are characterized by invariants, whose preservation at the discrete level is not trivial, but plays a fundamental role in improving the long term predictivity and reducing the computational effort of modern algorithms. Besides mass and linear momentum conservation, typical of any Finite Volume scheme, the preservation of stationary and moving equilibria, asymptotic limits and interfaces still represents an open challenge, especially in astrophysical applications, such as turbulent flows in gas clouds rotating around black holes. In this project, our focus will thus be on General Relativistic Hydrodynamics (GRHD) for which such Well Balanced (WB) Structure Preserving (SP) schemes have never been studied before. In particular, we plan to devise smart methods, independent of the coordinate system. This will be achieved by directly including the metric, implicitly contained in the covariant derivative, as a conserved variable inside the GRHD model. This approach will first be tested on the Euler equations of gasdynamics with Newtonian gravity, extending already existing WB-SP techniques to general coordinate systems. All novel features will be carefully proven theoretically. Next, the new schemes will be incorporated inside a massively parallel high order accurate Arbitrary-Lagrangian-Eulerian Finite Volume (FV) and Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) code, to be released as open source. The feasibility of the project is guaranteed by the strong network surrounding the ER, including experts on WB-SP techniques and mesh adaptation (INRIA France), FV-DG schemes and GRHD (UniTN Italy) and computational astrophysics (MPG Germany). This MSCA project will allow the applicant transition to become an independent researcher.

Mots clés : hyperbolic pde on manifolds, well balanced method, finite volume and discontinuous galerkin schemes, euler equations   gravity, general relativistic hydrodynamics, arbitrary lagrangian eulerian method

Participants :
- Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 184707.84 €
Projet GeoMos (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Subsurface modelling using geoscientific data is essential to understand the Earth and to sustainably manage natural resources. Geology and geophysics are two critical aspects of such modelling. Geological and geophysical models have different resolutions and are sensitive to different features. Considering only geological or geophysical aspects often leads to contradictions as creating an Earth model is a highly non-unique problem. In addition, the sensitivity of the data is limited and many objects cannot be differentiated by a single discipline. The only way to address this is solving the longstanding challenge of integrating of geological data and knowledge (orientation data, contacts and ontologies) and geophysical methods (physical fields). Recent techniques usually focus on features the data is sensitive to and merely use one discipline to falsify hypotheses from the other. Such approach prevents considering the full range of potential outcomes, and fails to exploit the sensitivity of both approaches. This project proposes a different philosophy to solve the challenge of connecting geological and geophysical modelling. It first involves the development of a novel method integrating the two model types in a single framework giving them equal importance. Geological and geophysical data will be modelled simultaneously through an implicit functional mapping one domain into the other by linking their respective models. This will allow the simultaneous recovery of compatible geological and geophysical models. Secondly, this project will use a new hybrid deterministic-stochastic optimisation technique to explore the range of subsurface scenarios to estimate the diversity of features that cannot be differentiated based on the available data. Thirdly, after proof-of-concept, the method will be applied to two cases: imaging of a mantle uplift in the Pyrenees Mountains (France/Spain), and study of potential new subsurface scenarios around the Kevitsa mine (Finland).

Mots clés : multidisciplinary geoscientific integration

Participants :
- Université de Lorraine (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 184707.84 €
Projet SURE (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Subtitling is part and parcel of today’s world. It is used not only by people who do not know the language of the original soundtrack, but also by those requiring different means of accessing audiovisual content due to sensory impairments, caused by deafness, hearing loss or ageing. While the main goal of subtitling is to foster access to multimedia content, its quality often falls short of users expectations and may be insufficient for them to take full advantage of what they read. Among the most problematic issues in subtitling quality are optimum presentation rates and subtitle layout. Subtitlers are faced with lack of research data to support their current practices with, which results in lack of uniform standards on reading speed, inconsistent layout and poor quality subtitling. The central aim of this project is to experimentally study the subtitling reading process with a view to establishing subtitle quality indicators regarding optimum presentation rates and layout. The study of subtitle processing is of fundamental importance in understanding how people perceive subtitled video materials in a digital society that increasingly relies on the exchange of audiovisual material. The study will be conducted at the Centre for Translation Studies at University College London, the world-leading centre of audiovisual translation, directed by Prof. Jorge Díaz Cintas, the scientist in charge of this project, in cooperation with the Deafness Language and Cognition Research Centre at UCL, directed by Prof. Bencie Woll. London is also the commercial hub of the audiovisual translation industry, which is relevant to this study as it will be conducted with direct links to the industry through secondment. This project is not only directly applicable to current market practices and will benefit end users, but it also addresses EU challenges of multilingualism, accessibility, ageing and education.

Mots clés : subtitling, eyetracking, audiovisual translation, reading, media accessibility, subtitling quality, subtitle presentation rate, subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing, closed captions

Participants :
- University of London (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 195454.8 €
Projet GENESIS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Sudden cardiac death (SCD), a main consequence of malignant ventricular arrhythmias, is a leading cause of cardiovascular mortality in the general population. The early identification of individuals at risk is important. The spatio-temporal dispersion of ventricular repolarization is recognized as one of the major factors modulating the vulnerability to malignant arrhythmias and SCD. The morphology of the T-wave has been proposed to specifically reflect dispersion of ventricular repolarization. As part of my Ph.D, I developed a signal processing method to quantify the single-lead T-wave morphology restitution (TMR) index and I have shown that is strongly associated with SCD risk, but its relationship with intracardiac indices of dispersion of repolarization has never been evaluated. In addition, genome-wide association studies have been successful in identifying genetic variants for ECG indices in the general population, but no previous publications have reported SNPs significantly associated with the T-wave morphology. The main objective of this project is to establish and test a novel effective approach to prevent SCD based on the combination of information derived from cardiac electrophysiological indices and genetic predisposition. The project has three parts: 1) To develop a novel ECG risk marker based on the adaptation of 3D T-wave morphological variations to heart rate changes with strong SCD predictive value. 2) To assess the interaction of non-invasive ECG indices with intra-cardiac electrophysiological indices simultaneously measured during invasive electrophysiological studies. 3) To generate personalized risk scores combining genetics, ECG indices and clinical variables to optimize SCD prediction. This project has the ambition of establishing a new approach to SCD prediction, where genetic screening and advanced cardiac electrophysiological analysis are combined to provide an improved assessment of the predisposition to malignant arrhythmic events.

Mots clés : genetics, electrocardiogram, statistics, sudden cardiac death, arrhythmic risk, personalised prediction, signal processing

Participants :
- University of London (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183454.8 €