Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ThreatValPun (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In modern societies, the criminal justice system is entrusted to punish norm violators in a fair and impartial way. Yet, punishment judgments are subject to biases, and are sometimes shaped by extralegal factors, as illustrated for example by the over-representation of African-Americans in inmates in the US. This project investigates one such factor, namely perceived threats to one’s personal values. We argue that even when unrelated to the wrongdoing, value-violations represent a threat to one’s personal values and to one’s identity. As such, value-violations trigger a motivation to restore the threatened values and identity, leading to differential punishment judgments as a function of the target’s fit or misfit with the perceiver’s values. We test this crucial role of perceptions of threat to personal values in two lines of research, using a combination of traditional experimental research methods, and modern measurement methods. In the line of research A, we aim to identify moderators of the effect of personal value on punishment judgments. Experimentally increasing or removing threat to values will allow us to gain a clearer understanding of the causal processes at play. In the line of research B, we aim to identify the neural processes underlying the effects of perceptions of threat to personal values on punishment judgments. Using fMRI, lesion patients and cardiovascular indices, we will gain complementary perspectives on the dynamics at play. As a result, the present proposal will enhance knowledge in the fields of values, social justice and morality, but also offer applicable strategies to reduce the impact of threat to values on real-life potentially consequential judgments, for example in the legal system.

Mots clés : social psychology

Participants :
- New York University (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Leiden University (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 242929.8 €
Projet ENDYVE (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In native tissues, the extracellular matrix (ECM) provides not only physical scaffolding to cells, but also biochemical and biomechanical cues affecting cell behaviour. ECM mechanical properties are critical in the regulation of cell behaviour during tissue development, homeostasis and disease via mechano-transduction. Albeit biological tissues generally exhibit a time variant (i.e. dynamic) viscoelastic behaviour that changes during development, ageing and disease, to date most of mechano-transduction studies have focused on static elastic properties only. The ENDYVE project aims at engineering tissue dynamic viscoelasticity typical of pathophysiological processes in-vivo to investigate its role on cell behaviour. Focusing on cardiomyocyte maturation, the viscoelastic properties of foetal, neonatal, aged and infarcted cardiac tissue will be characterised and used to design cell culture substrates with temporally tuneable mechanical properties that initially mimic foetal viscoelasticity and then can be made more stiff and less viscoelastic during cell culture via a second-step biocompatible enzymatic crosslinking to recapitulate dynamic changes of cardiac viscoelasticity in-vitro. First, stem cell cardiomyocyte behaviour will be investigated at discrete levels of constant viscoelasticity by seeding human induced pluripotent stem cells on substrates prior to and after enzyme-mediated crosslinking. Then the effect of dynamic changes in substrate viscoelasticity will be characterised during culture. Engineering dynamic viscoelasticity is a critical step towards a better understating of cell-ECM interactions and mechano-transduction, and could lead to the development of new strategies to finely control cell behaviour, with numerous potential societal and clinical implication, such as obtaining mature differentiated cells from stem cells for drug screening in vitro, or limiting, if not preventing, fibrosis and tumour progression.

Mots clés : mechanical characterisation, dynamic viscoelasticity, nano indentation, in vitro models, temporally tuneable viscoelastic materials, hydrogels, stem cells, mechano transduction, cardiomyocyte maturation

Participants :
- Optics11 bv (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 137999.0 €
Projet FOCUSIS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In optics, one of the important fundamental challenges is the quest for new methods to increase the spatial resolution over the natural diffraction limit of the optical system. Typically, in most of the laser-based micromachining techniques, the spatial resolution is improved by using high numerical aperture lenses in combination with short wavelengths, relying on multiphoton absorption, and working near to the modification threshold to decrease effectively the focal volume and therefore the minimum feature size. Thus, the control of the focal volume dimensions will strongly influence the limits of the system resolution, constituting a demanding and non-trivial task. Near-field optical methods presents promising approaches for this aim. The interest lies in the near-field properties; in this extremely small scale, the optical field is evanescent rather than propagating, so it is not subject of the same diffraction limit and can therefore be concentrated to smaller volumes. Considering this, the present proposal main objective will focus on the evaluation and implementation of the necessary conditions to modify and control the focal volume dimensions in an optical system combining the near-field phenomena induced with different illumination methods. The project will include the development of experiments and simulations for the understanding of the propagation of shaped beams in a particular optical system. The obtained results will be then applied for the nanoprocessing of materials with femtosecond laser pulses. This proposal emphasize in both the transfer of knowledge to the host institutions and the training of the candidate in well-stablished advanced techniques towards the development of the candidate’s career in optics. The multidisciplinary nature of this proposal will strengthen international cooperation, a key initiative of the Innovation Union. This kind of project design is in line with the European strategy for Research and Innovation.

Mots clés : focal volume dimensions control, near field, structured laser illumination, bessel beams, optical, microbeads, ultrashort laser pulses

Participants :
- Princeton University (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Spanish National Research Council (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 245732.16 €
Projet IMPED (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

In order to adapt treatment to the multicity of cancer types, cancer patient management has been revolutionized in the past decades by personalized medicine. As part of this strategy, liquid biopsy has emerged as a non-invasive approach for personalized diagnostics and treatment. So far, this approach has focused on circulating tumor cells and circulating tumor DNA. However, extracellular vesicles termed exosomes, which are implicated in cellular communication and molecule transfer, have risen as promising biomarkers for earlier and more accurate detection. The IMPED project aims at developing a next-generation technology able to extract and analyse single exosomes or sub-groups of exosomes on both the proteomic and genomic level. This platform will offer beyond state-of-the-art information on the involvement of exosomes in cancer development. It has the potential to increase the precision of liquid biopsy analysis and provide clinically relevant insight for personalized cancer management. Toward this goal, the IMPED project will gather three technologies allowing low-cost extraction and analysis of exosomes from human plasma: (1) Continuous label-free extraction of exosomes from complex matrices (plasma) using thermophoresis (2) Proteomic profiling of single exosomes immobilized on a nanoarray with possibility of release (3) Droplet-based reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) of exosomes for RNA content analysis To our knowledge, this would be the first technology to couple intra- and extra-vesicle detection on a single/subpopulation exosome level within a single platform. The IMPED project is interdisciplinary, connecting physics, microfluidics and bioassay development for biomedical applications.

Mots clés : microfluidics, exosomes, bioassay, rt pcr, liquid biopsy, thermophoresis

Participants :
- Institut Curie (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 225381.36 €
- McGill University (Canada) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet Trans-Plant (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In order to address the challenge of undernourishment we need to understand better how plants grow, how they interact with their environment, and how to increase plants’ productivity. During the past decades important progress has been made in plant biology due to the development of genetic and genomic tools. Still many questions remain unanswered highlighting the need for the development of complementary technologies to genetic methods. Plants’ growth and productivity are determined by photosynthesis and the way its products, such as sucrose, are distributed and utilized during the growth and development of the plant. The goal of Trans-Plant is the development of a complementary technology based on organic bioelectronics that will allow in-vivo sucrose monitoring in the vascular tissue of the plant from source to sink and give new insight to the transport mechanism of sucrose. This project will focus on interfacing organic bioelectronics with plants and developing the devices in-vivo where the plant’s complex structure consists of an integral part of the device. It will open up new possibilities for monitoring and controlling physiology in plants and result in the development of a state of the art device concept and technique for organic bioelectronics and plant science. During the fellowship Eleni Stavrinidou will be trained to develop a unique set of expertise, she will gain new knowledge and skills in more than one discipline, she will acquire transferable skills and she will expand her scientific and industrial network through collaborations and meetings. Therefore this fellowship will accelerate her scientific and professional development.

Mots clés : organic bioelectronics, conducting polymers, plants

Participants :
- Linköping University (Suède) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 173857.2 €
Projet Act-EPR (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In order to keep up with societal challenges of the 21st century, we must devise sustainable ways to efficiently store and retrieve energy from hydrogen. This “hydrogen economy” is one path for the future of clean energy. Nature’s solution to this challenge is a branch of enzymes called hydrogenases which typically use an organometallic active-site to reversibly split molecular hydrogen to hydrogen-ions and energy, in the form of electrons. Here, we choose to focus on [FeFe]-hydrogenase due to its high catalytic behavior. To understand these metallo-enzymes we must be able to study the enzymes grown as a single crystal. Single crystal protein Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) experiments are the ultimate method to study the paramagnetic states of hydrogenases and obtain the full magnetic interactions reflecting the electronic structure of the active site. Ultimately the catalytic activity of the hydrogenase can be understood by relating the information of the magnetic principal axes to the known protein structure of the enzyme. However, the application of single-crystal EPR is severely limited by the small crystals sizes that are usually available (sub-nanoliter to nanoliter volumes). The Key Enabling Technologies outlined in this fellowship have the potential to increase the sensitivity of EPR by a factor of 30 through the application of highly innovative concepts based on planar micro-resonators (PMR). This technology provides the sensitivity needed for the applicant to be the first to study single crystals of the [FeFe]-hydrogenase enzyme with EPR and advance the “hydrogen economy”.

Mots clés : electron paramagnetic resonance, magnetic resonance, resonator probe design, single crystal proteins, structural biology, quantum chemical calculations, hydrogenases, metallo proteins

Participants :
- Max Planck Society (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 171460.8 €
Projet INDECRUST (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In order to monitor trends in global changes and predict their impacts on ecosystems, scientists and policy makers are in a constant search for integrative, cost-effective indicators of ecological change. Functional traits have emerged as practical tools to track environmental changes (response traits) and assess their effects on ecosystem processes (effect traits). Despite the impressive advances in functional diversity research, traits of organisms other than plants; such as soil lichens and mosses (biocrusts), are still largely unexplored. Nevertheless, biocrust traits such as stable isotope ratios, nutrient content and pH are easy to measure, highly sensitive to environmental conditions and integrative; as a set of indicators, they can reflect changes in climate and nutrient sources and availability. Also, due to their response-effect nature, biocrust tissue traits have an anticipatory character; shifts in their values will, in turn, affect other ecosystem processes (e.g., decomposition rates) and components (e.g., plant and microbial communities). To date, biocrusts stable isotope ratios, nutrient content and pH have been reported for a limited set of species in a systematic way and experimental studies are still scarce in the literature. INDECRUST aims to assess the suitability of biocrust tissue traits as integrative indicators of global change and its impact on ecosystem properties and functioning. I will investigate, in a range of biocrust species widely distributed in Europe, how isotopic ratios, nutrient content and pH respond to changes in soil, climate and atmospheric pollution, and how tissue traits affect biocrust decomposition rates, biocrust-plant interaction, microbial abundance and soil functioning. This project involves manipulative experiments, cutting-edge laboratory analyses and advanced statistical analyses. The outputs of INDECRUST will improve and complement the existing tools for environmental monitoring and policy making in Europe.

Mots clés : ecological indicators, functional traits, global change, biocrusts, soil functioning

Participants :
- King Juan Carlos University (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 170121.6 €
Projet TiPS-DNA (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In our cells, DNA is extremely highly compacted to fit within the cell’s nucleus. While being compacted, the DNA still needs to remain accessible to various processes such as gene expression during the cell cycle. So how is DNA spatially organized? How does this compacted DNA interact with enzymes? Does compacted DNA superstructure have a biological role? Answering these daunting biological riddles through a targeted physics approach is the central motive of this proposal. I aim to investigate how supercoiled DNA plectonemes, the basic unit of DNA superstructure found in chromosomes, is linked to its biological functions in gene regulation. Throughout the proposed biophysics experiments in this project, I aim to obtain direct experimental proofs that reveal the mechanism behind the transcription-induced DNA supercoiling. I will co-visualize RNA polymerase interacting with supercoiled DNA in real-time and study the relevant dynamics during complex formation and transcription. To this end I will employ a novel single molecule in-vitro assay, Intercalation-induced Supercoiling of DNA. This assay utilizes intercalating dyes to induce supercoiling as well as to visualize the formation of DNA-plectonemes. The technique is solely based on fluorescence microscopy and allows for tracking DNA plectonemes and labelled enzymes with ease and with high-throughput. This project will provide the first direct evidence on the role of DNA supercoiling – a fundamental yet not-well studied phenomenon in cell biology – in mediating the activity of DNA-binding enzymes as well as on the origins of dynamic DNA supercoiling in the topological domains of the genome. The result of this project will be crucial for the understanding of the physical interactions that couple chromosome organisation to gene regulation.

Mots clés : single molecule, dna supercoiling, plectoneme, transcription, rna polymerase, fluorescence

Participants :
- Delft University of Technology (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 165598.8 €
Projet ML-TEXTSUM (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

In our daily life, we are submerged by huge amounts of text, coming from different sources such as emails, news, reports, and so on. The availability of unprecedented volumes of data represents both a challenge and an opportunity. On one hand, it can lead to information overload, a phenomenon that limits one’s capacity to understand an issue and act in the presence of too much information. On the other hand, the effective harnessing of this information has undeniable economical potential. Furthermore, In the European context, special needs to be put to multilingualism to guarantee global access to high quality information. The objective of this application is to develop ML-TEXTSUM, a system for efficient and accurate multi-lingual text summarization. That is, given as input a text document, the system will output a summary of the document in the same or in a different language. Building on recent breakouts in machine learning and natural language processing, I propose a novel architecture for ML-TEXTSUM that will be able to produce high quality summaries while at same time remain modular enough so that new languages can be added with minimal effort. The availability of such system shall allow citizens, regardless of their language, to better handle the information overload and to gain access to critically distilled information (e.g., what is a certain newspaper’s opinion on the same topic this year? Are male/female athletes portrayed differently by the media?). The project is characterized by the interplay of multiple disciplines: the proposed architecture requires to master a combination of natural language processing and machine learning techniques. At the same time, the formidable scale of this system will require the development of novel distributed optimization methods. This interplay will be achieved thanks to my past and future collaborations, my solid background in optimization and machine learning, as well as through the acquisition of new ad-hoc skills.

Mots clés : text summarization, machine learning, natural language processing, optimization, deep learning

Participants :
- University of California System (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (Suisse) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 265840.2 €
Projet MotiVTA (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : TERMINATED

In our daily life, we face many challenges that create stressful situations. Some individuals experience stress as motivational drive, whereas in others, it can reduce motivation and trigger avoidance behavior. Pathological responses to stress, such as depression and anxiety, take an enormous toll on society. Despite the relevance of stress on mental health, little is understood about the neuronal circuit mechanisms that underlie the behavioral differences in stress responsivity and why some individuals are more resilient to the negative impact of stress than others. The mesolimbic dopamine system plays a major role in the stress response. Work in the host lab found that trait anxiety influences how an individual’s motivated behaviors change with stress and that the anxiety level correlates with differences in the response of dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) to the stress-induced neuropeptide CRH. Recently, two parallel pathways from the basal nucleus of stria terminalis (BNST) to the VTA –one glutamatergic and the other GABAergic– have been identified and are thought to influence anxiety and motivated behaviors. However, solid evidence linking activity in these pathways to behavioral outcomes is lacking. The goal of this proposal is to monitor and manipulate the activity of these pathways using a combination of optogenetics, calcium imaging, and behavioral testing. I hypothesize that the glutamatergic and GABAergic BNST-VTA pathways are differentially engaged during stress. The balance between these pathways modulates dopamine release from the VTA, which then determines whether an individual would experience increased or decreased motivation in response to stress. I will first determine the natural activity pattern of VTA-projecting BNST neurons and then investigate the consequences of activation or inhibition of this circuit on motivated behaviors and the role of CRH in the modulation of this circuit using genetic tools and neuropharmacology.

Mots clés : stress, motivation, mesolimbic dopamine, anxiety, behavioral adaptation

Participants :
- Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (Suisse) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 191149.44 €