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

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders, yet current treatments fail to prevent seizures in more than a third of cases (~37%). Most drug targets focus on seizure suppression; however, these are symptoms of abnormal developmental changes in the neural network. The processes that give rise to epileptic brain regions are summarized by the concept of epileptogenesis. Therefore, preventing epileptogenesis is critical for long-lasting seizure freedom. Studying epileptogenesis is challenging, as the developmental processes involved in it occur before birth during neurodevelopment itself. Recent progress in stem cell models, however, has the potential to change this. The Knoblich Lab pioneered the use of human cerebral organoids to model disease in-vitro, such as Tuberous Sclerosis (TSC). Cortical tubers are the source of drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE) in TSC, which our recent study (Eichmüller et al., Science 2022) uncovered to originate from a specific precursor cell type; CLIP cells. Strong preliminary evidence shows that pathological processes are occurring in TSC organoids which recapitulate epileptogenic electrical biomarkers called high frequency oscillations (HFOs).  In this proposal I will utilise our brain organoid model to understand human circuit-level dysfunction in epilepsy and identify evidence-based causal treatment for epileptogenesis prevention. Therefore, I plan to classify stages of epileptogenesis in human brain TSC organoids using large-scale signal features and in-depth molecular characterizations to identify biomarkers for abnormal circuit initiation and progression. I will reveal stage-specific druggable targets for epileptogenesis and then test novel anti-epileptogenic compounds on pathological network activity prevention. Together, this project marks a change in the approach towards epileptic drug discovery to combat the significant socioeconomic burden of drug-resistant epilepsy.

Mots clés : organoids high frequency oscillations epileptogenesis electrophysiology neural networks optogenetics multi electrode array mea epilepsy tsc

Participants :
- Institut für Molekulare Biotechnologie (Autriche) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 183600.96 €
Projet TEvsRNA (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The germline is the only immortal lineage in animals, making it a target for transposable elements (TEs) to perpetuate themselves at the host's expense. To counter these threats, animals utilize Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) to suppress TEs and maintain germline integrity. Despite the crucial role of piRNAs, the diversity of mechanisms organisms use to repress parasitic elements remains largely unexplored. To address this, I propose studying an emerging model system, the nematode Caenorhabditis plicata; one of the few Caenorhabditis species that lost the piRNA pathway. Notably, our preliminary results indicate that C. plicata employs novel small RNA (sRNA) classes to silence TEs. My first aim is to dissect the molecular basis of this sRNA pathway and elucidate its evolutionary origins. To do so, I will screen for the underlying molecular component controlling this pathway; firstly by targeting homologs of proteins involved in C. elegans sRNA silencing, and secondly, via EMS mutagenesis to identify mutations that suppress silencing of transgenic reporters. I will then investigate whether the novel sRNA populations are ancestral or a recent innovation by examining independent piRNA loss events across different Caenorhabditis species. Motivated by the natural loss of piRNAs and the widespread transfer of TEs between species, my second aim is to develop an experimental model to study foreign TE invasions in nematodes through heterologous insertions of TEs into mutant worms that are unable to defend against these elements. I will then examine the subsequent impact on genome architecture and explore whether they contribute to genome size expansion. This comprehensive approach will not only teach us how animals protect their germline but also deepen understanding of how biological novelty can arise from the ancient evolutionary arms race between invasive elements and silencing pathways.

Mots clés : transposable elements, pirna pathway, invasive elements, genomics, silencing pathways, nematodes, caenorhabditis elegans, evolutionary biology, horizontal gene transfer

Participants :
- Institut für Molekulare Biotechnologie (Autriche) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 214344.72 €
Projet REHUM (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The idea behind the REHUM project is that institutionalized practices of care are being replaced by emergency humanitarian aid, forming an ambivalent concept of humanitarian care. By using a participative ethnographic approach in two humanitarian settings – post-earthquake displacement and irregularized migration – the project will explore how and if the expansion of humanitarian initiatives in different emergencies points to the same problem of the erosion of institutionalized care while shedding light on ambivalent transformations of grassroots organizations and its employees/volunteers in their attempts to replace such systems. While previous research pointed out different aspects of social inequalities enhanced in and by humanitarian programs, the emphasis on the entanglements between humanitarianism and care in the context of migration/displacement in Croatia, especially regarding the phenomenon that political theorist Nancy Fraser termed “crisis of care”, has not been quite touched upon. In order to expand the critique of humanitarian care in Croatia, but also in a wider sense of the European (semi)peripheries, REHUM will theoretically and empirically explore the intersection between social reproduction, humanitarianism, and displacement. Starting from the assumption that care, understood as an essential part of life and a practice inevitable for human development, is structurally devalued and externalized to the area of household and informal aid initiatives, REHUM will aim to identify the ways in which humanitarianism in Croatia underpins that process while situating scarce state responses and their replacement with temporary humanitarian solutions in a broader political framework.

Mots clés : humanitarianism, care, social reproduction, displacement, aid

Participants :
- Université Johannes-Gutenberg de Mayence (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 189687.36 €
- Université d'Europe centrale (Hongrie) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet PLATOCHRON (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

High-standing orogenic plateaus are key features of most mountainous regions, and typically have profound regional, and in many cases global, impacts on atmospheric circulation and precipitation patterns. The Colorado Plateau is characterized by a low-relief surface at high elevation and deep canyon incision at the plateau margins. Although these canyons are key features of ecosystems and water resources, the chronology of the uplift and subsequent canyon incision remains debated. In addition, the relative importance of deep-seated processes, changes in paleogeography and climate, on the late geomorphologic evolution of the plateau remains controversial. Two endmember models of Grand Canyon incision have been proposed: a 80-60 Ma incision or a 6-5 Ma incision, the discrepancy between these models is partly related to limitations in conventional thermochronology techniques. This project will provide new constraints on the incision history of the canyons carved across the Colorado Plateau using an innovative set of thermochronometers. I will combine apatite (U-Th-Sm)/He and fission-track data to document the thermal history of rocks in Zion Canyon which has never been explored and infer the respective effects of erosion and regional magmatism on the thermal evolution of the lithosphere. Electron spin resonance (ESR) thermochronometry, a new thermochronometer sensitive to temperature ranging from 50 to 20˚C will be performed on the same samples and combined with thermo-kinematic modelling to decipher the timing and rate of canyon incision in Zion. Finally, I will apply ESR thermochronometry in selected canyons to decipher the timing of incision across the Colorado Plateau. Low-temperature thermochronology data, including ESR, will be integrated in a numerical model of the landscape evolution to test different processes (change in base level versus mantellic process) and associated scenarios for the Colorado Plateau uplift and incision.


Participants :
- Université Grenoble Alpes (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 308746.56 €
- Université de Lausanne (Suisse) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet MOM2CHILD (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : TERMINATED

Both overnutrition and undernutrition shape the capacities of the body to process food (double burden of malnutrition), and are thus important determinants of metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions including high blood sugar or excess body fat, and diet-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes or heart diseases. The first 1000 years of life (from conception to second birthday) are considered a key period of life where the metabolic capacities are adjusted. We hypothesize that during this period, exposures such as the nutritional and metabolic status of the pregnant mother, her gut and vaginal microbiota, the child’s gut microbiota and other clinical parameters linked to pregnancy, delivery and early life, have an impact on how the metabolism develops. The objective of the proposed research is to study the contribution of prenatal/early life exposures on the anthropometric and metabolic development of the child, and whether these effects could be mediated by epigenetic changes. For this, I will spend 24 months in the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, for the outgoing phase (Prof. Pascale Vonaesch) followed by a returning phase of 12 months in FISABIO, Spain (Dr. Pilar Francino). This collaboration gives me the unique opportunity to work on samples and data from two birth cohorts of under-, normally and over-nourished pregnant mothers and their offspring, both in a low and a high-income country (Lao PDR and Spain). I will bring my expertise in epidemiology and clinical research, as well as specific knowledge and skills in analysing vaginal microbiota data, to the host and associated partner. In return, I will dig into new concepts and acquire advanced skills in genomics (from bench work to bioinformatics), community analysis, epigenetics, nutrition-related diseases, as well as transferable and complementary skills, in order to enhance my career’s perspectives. This interdisciplinary research will generate new insights in both basic science and public health.

Mots clés : microbiome, nutrition, metabolic development, pregnancy, childhood

Participants :
- École polytechnique fédérale de Zurich (Suisse) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Fundación para el Fomento de la Investigación Sanitaria y Biomédica de la Comunitat Valenciana (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 293445.6 €
- Université de Lausanne (Suisse) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet REVALSEA (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The global commitment to protect 30% of the oceans by 2030 faces several key challenges in preserving nature without exacerbating existing coastal resource conflicts. As ocean protection is rapidly increasing to halt biodiversity loss, we urgently need to understand why people value nature to better address these conflicts. The REVALSEA project will provide a novel theoretical approach and empirical evidence to quantify, predict, and integrate into marine conservation the diverse ways people express why they value their relationship with nature, i.e., relational values, in coastal systems. Relational values (RVs) emerge as a keystone in conservation efforts breaking with the traditional exclusively material valuation of nature and opening a new opportunity to adopt more inclusive and socially relevant strategies for biodiversity conservation. This aspect is rarely explored in marine systems, even when its consideration in conservation is critical to increase equity and reduce resource conflicts. Addressing RVs in marine conservation policies needs overcoming several intergenerational, methodological, and operational challenges. First, it must consider the intergenerational gap between what matters for those who influence decision-making (adults) and for those who have the potential to generate social-ecological changes (youth). Second, it requires the use of innovative interdisciplinary social-ecological research that integrates multidimensional datasets and uses novel machine learning technology to maximise data efficiency while minimising economic costs of data collection and analysis. Finally, it needs transdisciplinary cooperation with stakeholders and decision makers to co-generate specific recommendations for integrating RVs in conservation policies. REVALSEA will focus on the small-scale fisher’s community in Spain as a case study to address all these challenges and develop a cutting-edge and globally scalable approach in other socio-cultural contexts.

Mots clés : human nature relationships machine learning marine conservation nature s contributions to people social ecological systems youth

Participants :
- Université James Cook (Australie) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Université de Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 328722.0 €
- Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Allemagne) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Descubre - fundacion andaluza para la divulgacion de la innovacion y el conocimiento (Espagne) — Partner, associated partner, Autres, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet P3fromASTRO (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Supernovae (SNe) and neutron star mergers (NSMs) host matter in extreme conditions, exhibiting processes, within the Standard Model (SM) and beyond it (BSM), not testable on Earth. The hot, dense cores of these objects are factories of BSM particles, such as axions, sterile neutrinos, and millicharged particles (MCPs). BSM particles emission may alter the duration of the neutrino burst observed from the historical SN 1987A, but the seminal studies are based on outdated SN simulations. BSM particle emission would also have produced a characteristic gamma-ray burst concurrent with the NSM GW 170817, potentially constraining multiple BSM models, including sterile neutrinos and MCPs, for which no investigation exists. Further, self-interactions in the BSM sector, predicted for many dark matter (DM) candidates but neglected in historical studies, can alter the nature of the BSM outflow. This action will provide a unified answer to these shortcomings, reassessing SN bounds on BSM particle emission using updated SN simulations, including the impact of potential self-interactions, and extending the use of NSMs as a probe of BSM particles. Further, the dense neutrino outflows are sizably affected by neutrino self-interactions. Even SM weak interactions trigger collective flavor conversions, whose outcome is only recently being cleared up. Secret neutrino self-interactions, stronger than the weak ones, can alter both the neutrino light curve and flavor conversions. We will consider this impact to potentially draw constraints on secret neutrino interactions.

Mots clés : light particles beyond the standard model, supernovae, neutron star mergers, axions, dark matter

Participants :
- Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire (Suisse) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 292118.88 €
Projet FascioClim (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Vector-borne diseases (VBDs) pose a major threat to the health of societies around the world, with more than 80% of the global population at risk of at least one major VBD. VBDs are particularly susceptible to the effects of climate change, which will affect the distribution of vectors, the spatial and temporal patterns of the diseases vectors transmit, as well as the efficiency and intensity with which vectors transmit pathogens. A climate-driven phenomenon of outbreaks of VBDs, many of them zoonotic, is occurring worldwide, and Europe is not the exception. In this complex scenario, as climate change accelerates, globalisation spreads vectors and pathogens, and other human-caused disturbances increase, it is urgent to assess and predict impacts on disease transmission. We aim to assess the response of zoonotic VBDs to climate change and the potential threat it entails to Europe by using fascioliasis as a selected model. Fascioliasis, a complex zoonotic snail-borne disease, represents an ideal model as it has a low reservoir specificity, a high number of snail host species, and has already evinced being influenced by climate and global changes. We propose an integrative modelling framework for fascioliasis transmission: we will apply some innovative ideas in the field of ecological niche modelling combined with the use of climatic forecast indices, to identify the overlap between niches of fasciolids and snail hosts, and determine the area under risk of transmission. In addition, we will provide open-source tools accessible to the health sector. We expect this innovative ensemble of modelling approaches could be applied for assessing climate change impact on other zoonotic VBDs (in particular schistosomiasis, other snail-borne disease, but also mosquito- and tick-borne diseases, such as West Nile fever, Dengue, Zika, and Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever), in order to provide tools to guide interventions aimed to reduce and/or mitigate the disease burden in Europe.

Mots clés : vector borne diseases disease biogeography climate change zoonosis fascioliasis

Participants :
- Université de Valence (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 181152.96 €
- Organisation Mondiale de la Santé (Suisse) — Partner, associated partner, Recherche, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet TOPTOP (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The past decade has witnessed dramatic progress related to the emergence of different topological polar textures in oxide nanostructures such as vortices, skyrmions, merons, hopfions, among others. These exotic phases are opening new technological perspectives due to their exotic functional properties like negative capacitance, chirality or ultrafast dynamical response. In addition, the fact that these states are metastable and thus non-volatile, allows to consider them as multiweights, that one can exploit in artificial neuromorphic synapses. The main goal of the collaboration between the researcher and the host group is to perform first-principles based effective atomic potential simulations (retrieving all the structural degrees of freedom) of topological phases interacting with electric pulses from a truly quantum-mechanical point of view to tailor the resulting polar ordering. A key novelty of this proposal and the ambitious objective that it pursues, is to study and characterize, from a fundamental point of view, the phonon modes active in the different topological orderings to figure out the relevant modes to be excited and be able to design concrete pulses that provide a deterministic control of the resulting effect on the polar ordering of the material. Other current approaches to the problem only rely on the coupling between two or three modes with their interactions fitted from DFT. Therefore, a full atomistic view of the problem would be desired. Due to the promising technologically relevant results on the near horizon, a deeper and more advanced theoretical inspection without the omission of atomic degrees of freedom that might be relevant for the description of the material is needed with urgency. This project directly tackles these needs. Although being a theoretical work collaboration with leading experimental groups at UCL and UNIGE will be pursued in order to validate the theoretical model and increase the technology readiness level of the project

Mots clés : ferroelectricity, topological phases, light matter interaction, optical excitation, dynamical responses, second principles simulations, neuromorhpic computing

Participants :
- University College de Londres (Royaume-Uni) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Université de Liège (Belgique) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 175920.0 €
- Université de Genève (Suisse) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €