Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : META-CHIP (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Materials Engineering
Entité participante : University College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499884.0 €

Osteosarcoma is a highly aggressive bone cancer that primarily affects children. Secondary lung metastasis is the most critical clinical factor, with 70% of those who develop lung metastasis succumbing to the disease within 3 years. Despite the resonating clinical urgency for newer, more effective treatment options, there have been no changes in treatment since the introduction of chemotherapy in the 1970s. Furthermore, osteosarcoma is a rare disease making the conduct of large clinical trials investigating novel therapies very challenging. META-CHIP proposes to embark upon frontier research by being the first to develop a lung metastasis-on-a-chip model for osteosarcoma, for use by both the research community and the pharmaceutical industry. This will be realized by first testing the hypothesis that patient derived tumour spheroids (PDTS) generated from patient biopsies will recapitulate the primary tumour and thus be a superior drug development model than traditional cell culture models (Aim 1). An osteosarcoma-on-a-chip device will be developed integrating PDTS, microfluidic technology, and novel biomaterial design to provide a more accurate model of the tumour microenvironment (Aim 2). To validate the device, the ability to predict clinical outcomes on tumour growth following treatment with two anti-angiogenic drugs, which have progressed to Phase II clinical trials will be assessed (Aim 3). Finally, META-CHIP will develop a much-needed platform which mimics key aspects of osteosarcoma metastatic disease progression to the lung. This will be achieved through functional-coupling of the osteosarcoma-on-a-chip device with an established lung-chip to create a medium-throughput, cost-effective, human systemic model of osteosarcoma metastasis (Aim 4). META-CHIP has the potential to revolutionise drug development and treatment of osteosarcoma patients by being the first ex vivo testing platform capable of predicting a patient’s response to therapies in real-time.

Mots-clés : osteosarcoma organ on a chip devices lung metastasis cell communication,microphysiological systems cancer models biomimetic materials
Projet ERC : SurFSUP (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : University College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Wave-driven propulsion (WDP) is a little-known type of locomotion in which a floating body generates surface waves to push itself forwards. Some animals have evolved to use WDP when moving on the water surface, such as water striders and water snakes. Meanwhile, WDP technologies have the potential to revolutionise engineering applications, such as the cleanup oil spills, the automation of hydroponic agriculture, and the reduction of fuel consumption of ships. Despite the great potential of WDP, it remains in a state of scientific and technological infancy. The only examples in the literature are ad hoc, untested and un-optimised. The challenge is that WDP is not fully understood i.e. the dominant controls on the propulsion force and the efficiency have not yet been determined. Without addressing this challenge, the powerful technologies mentioned above cannot be developed. In this proposal we seek to rectify the knowledge gap with a suite of work packages that will ultimately open up a new paradigm in the field where surface waves are thought of as a means of propulsion in their own right rather than just a consequence of motion. Our research design is centred on 3 aspects of WDP: Acceleration (how the WDP mechanism changes with velocity), Vorticity (the ratio of vortex- & wave-driven propulsion), and Optimisation (maximising the efficiency of WDP towards useful application). We will explore three canonical “surfer” geometries via experiments in a purpose-built hydrodynamics tank fitted with high-speed cameras to measure the 3D velocities and free surface. A modelling campaign will run in tandem, using a combination of hi-fidelity simulations, simple models to gain physical insight, and numerical optimisation to maximise WDP efficiency. By doing so, we will uncover breakthrough knowledge on the propulsive power of waves, critical resonances, and wave-vortex interactions - knowledge that will unlock applications across Transport, Sustainability and the Environment.

Mots-clés : water waves,wave structure interactions,bioinspired propulsion
Projet ERC : GRComPaS (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : Université Aristote de Thessalonique — Pays : Grèce — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1265125.0 €

The main objective of the proposal is to develop novel methods for the study of the quasiconformal geometry of metric surfaces and of subsets of the complex plane.  Geometry of metric surfaces: The uniformization problem asks for conditions on a fractal metric space so that it can be transformed to a smooth space with a well-behaved transformation that preserves the geometry. In joint work with Romney the PI has resolved a major open problem and proved a general quasiconformal uniformization result for 2-dimensional spheres of finite area. The current project expects to exploit this recent breakthrough and develop an analytic theory for 2-dimensional surfaces of locally finite area under no other assumption; the classical approaches in the field require instead several geometric assumptions. In particular, the PI proposes the study of the following problems on fractal surfaces: quasiconformal classification, embedding in Euclidean space, uniformization of surfaces of infinite area, and connections between quasiconformal geometry and rectifiability. Uniformization and rigidity in the plane: A long-standing conjecture of Koebe asserts that every domain in the plane can be conformally transformed to a circle domain. This proposal introduces a wide class of domains to test the conjecture, using techniques recently developed by the PI and collaborators, in combination with the transboundary modulus of Schramm. The PI will also study the problem of uniqueness of this conformal transformation and connections to the problem of conformal removability. The latter is a rigidity problem asking whether a given set in the plane is negligible from the domain of a conformal map. The PI has recently displayed several examples of (non)removable sets and has identified a new general class of sets that are conjectured to provide a characterization of removable sets. The PI will study this conjecture and several related deep open problems.

Mots-clés : metric surfaces,uniformization,quasiconformal geometry,quasisymmety,rectifiability,complex analysis,conformal removability,complex dynamics,conformal rigidity,circle domains,koebe s conjecture
Projet ERC : Gender in finance (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : École de commerce de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499130.0 €

The financial gender gap, i.e., the well-established gender differences in financial decisions, has been the subject of much recent discussion and debate. We know little about what drives this gap though. Because the financial decisions of individuals play an extensive role in determining welfare in all stages of life, the identification of the contributing factors is of crucial importance. This is the pioneering goal of Gender-in-Finance. The overall concept and central contributions of Gender-in-Finance are the following: (1) the project innovates by creating a unique panel data set, comprised of a rich set of experimental measures, including beliefs, expectations, preferences, and the decision-making abilities of individuals, merged with a panel of detailed high-frequency transaction-level bank data, capturing both real-world financial decisions and constraints of individuals. No comparable data set exists and it enables the identification of the factors that contribute the most to the financial gender gap in reality; (2) using this data set, the project offers ground-breaking, evidence-based understanding of the gender differences in financial-choices along several dimensions that contribute to financial well-being; (3) by identifying the factors that contribute to the gender gap in financial choices the project informs the development of models of financial decision making. Ultimately, this research agenda will shed light on what drives gender differences in financial decision making as well as which policies may be effective in narrowing these gaps. Specifically, the novel insights I aim to provide is expected to lead to substantial improvements in the methods used to fight the financial gender gap as the better understanding of the forces behind the financial gender gap will inform the current debate on this issue and provide important lessons to policy makers who have gender equality on their agenda.

Mots-clés : household finance,behavioral finance,gender finance,transaction level bank data,big finance data,individual financial decision making,experience effect,gender identity,experience effects
Projet ERC : CSAReps (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : University College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a critical issue facing contemporary societies, and one which inspires many fictional representations in creative cultural works. Despite CSA's prevalence and potentially serious consequences, it remains relatively taboo and stakeholders refer to a societal 'flinch', or aversion, from engaging with the issue, which hinders survivors' wellbeing. This avoidant response seems to have been inadvertently replicated in literary and cultural studies, in which CSA as a theme is almost completely overlooked, meaning that its full cultural implications are currently unknown. The CSAReps project will address this by exploring the culturally significant but neglected body of works which depict CSA, examining not only their representational strategies but also their potential role in shaping people's understandings of CSA. The objectives are: 1. To analyse the themes, form and emotional cues in CSA fictions from key genres (crime, horror, young adult, popular general) in the culturally prevalent forms of literature, film and television, providing a foundational mapping of these representations and opening a new and long-overdue research horizon in literary and cultural studies. 2. To explore how CSA fiction may inform social attitudes by performing the first ever empirical investigation of audience responses to it (including the general public and CSA survivors). Identifying influence will be challenging, but could transform our understanding of how public views on abuse are formed, impacting disciplines like psychology and social work for which such knowledge is key. 3. To develop a new conceptual framework which interlinks thematic and empirical approaches to cultural scholarship to allow the mapping of CSA fictions to be related to the audience response findings, ultimately yielding a model suggesting the relationship between CSA fictions and their effects. This transferrable framework will support explorations of abuse representations across cultures and media.

Mots-clés : cultural studies literature film television child sexual abuse
Projet ERC : MottSwitch (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Materials Engineering
Entité participante : Technion - Institut de technologie d'Israël — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

The pressing need for beyond-von-Neumann computing paradigms has triggered intensive efforts into understanding and controlling various resistive switching (RS) mechanisms. This switching, in which the two terminal resistance of a device is controlled by current is at the heart of emerging technologies such as resistive random access memory and neuromorphic computation. These technologies promise to revolutionize artificial neural networks and mimic the behavior of biological brains, triggering a race the for optimal RS materials.  In Mott insulators electrical currents can change resistance by orders-of-magnitude due to an insulator-metal phase transition. The volatility of switching in Mott insulators can be adjusted by several tuning parameters, enabling both memory devices and neuron-like functionalities. Moreover, in terms of fundamental switching timescales and energy efficiency, Mott insulators may have very significant advantages over other RS mechanisms. These unique properties have made Mott insulators prominent candidate materials for RS. However, the physical mechanisms behind RS in these materials are not well understood and often uncontrollable, hampering realization of their full potential. We suggest two main routes towards Mott-insulator-based RS with ultrahigh energy efficiency. The first is by switching purely in the electronic sector while minimizing structural distortions. Thus, the low heat capacity of electrons may enable switching with a fraction of the energy required in an insulator-metal transition coupled to a structural transition. The second is absorption of latent heat and/or elastic energy from the surroundings of the switching volume, thus reducing the externally supplied power consumption. Our aim is to use defects, doping and strain engineering to understand and tune RS mechanisms, and develop novel functionalities with ultra-low energy consumption.

Mots-clés : mott insulator,metal insulator transition,resistive switching,neuromorphic computation,threshold switching,strain engineering,defect engineering
Projet ERC : TRANS-3 (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: B iological  Mechanisms , Structures  and Functions
Entité participante : Université de Turin — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1769998.0 €

In TRANS-3 we will develop the theoretical and experimental framework to understand inter-chromosomal genome structure and activity. Despite advances in sequencing chromosomes and mapping their three dimensional (3D) organization, a full picture of 3D genome structure that details how the borders of various chromosome territories functionally interface one another is still missing. As an analogy, our world map does not indicate most natural corridors or manmade infrastructure that connect countries to one another. Worse, we barely understand how such connections function. My recent work has identified one of the few functional inter-chromosomal (trans) DNA interactions known to date: a splicing factory involving over ten chromosomes and orchestrated by the muscle-specific protein RBM20 around its key target, the TTN pre-mRNA. I hypothesize that this exemplifies how mRNA biogenesis instructs the formation of trans-interacting chromatin domains (TIDs) around mRNA factories, nuclear compartments that facilitate gene regulation. We will test this general hypothesis by dissecting the mechanisms and function of a specific, disease-relevant model: the RBM20 mRNA splicing factory. We will then explore the global impact of these regulations. First (WP1) we will mechanistically assess how mRNA factories form and act through live imaging of the nuclear positioning and alternative splicing dynamics of an RBM20-regulated locus. Secondly (WP2) we will examine the physiological role of mRNA factories by studying the effects of disease-associated mutations in RBM20 and the TTN regulator GATA4, and of genetic variability in TTN regulatory regions. Finally (WP3) we will develop and deploy a novel pipeline to identify, validate, and study new TIDs and mRNA factories through the combination of molecular biology, bioinformatics, biochemistry, and single cell biology. In all, TRANS-3 will venture beyond the chromosome frontier towards a deeper understanding of nuclear structure-function.

Mots-clés : chromatin organization splicing transcription dilated cardiomyopathy congenital heart disease human induced pluripotent stem cells genome editing single cell genomics
Projet ERC : TOHR (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de Turin — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 72930.0 €

Humans are particularly rhythmic animals. Why did the human sense of rhythm develop? Many hypotheses try to explain the origins of our acoustic rhythm capacities, but few are empirically tested, compared, and comparatively investigated. This project searches for the evolutionary roots of human rhythmicity, breaking new ground through three concerted approaches. First, I zoom in on key rhythmic properties: isochrony, an even occurrence of events in time, and meter, a relative accentuation of events. Second, I compare hypotheses on rhythm origins, selecting the most relevant ones to music and speech and testing them against each other. Third, I target rhythm precursors in other species as predicted by these alternative hypotheses. I test four hypotheses, which propose that 1) gait or 2) breathing control, and the ability to 3) learn new sounds or 4) sing in a chorus are evolutionary precursors to human rhythm. I will use different measures including behavior, electrophysiology, gait tracking, breathing, and computational modeling to test whether the four features above predict rhythmic capacities. Comparative animal work is needed to test whether similar evolutionary pressures lead to similar rhythmic traits. I will collect data from humans and four more species. I will test seals, displaying vocal learning, and porpoises; both mammals have developed breathing control. I will also test siamangs, displaying rhythmic locomotion, and indris; both primates naturally sing in choruses, a rare trait in non-human mammals. Finding rhythm in other species will provide a test bench to reconstruct the origins of human rhythm. Resting on my background in bioacoustics and mathematics, the project expands in new challenging directions, such as neurophysiology of marine mammals, automated gait analyses, and biomusicology. In brief, I will show which species have rhythm, and why humans evolved to be such chatty, rhythmic creatures.

Mots-clés : evolution of music biomusicology evolution of speech timing comparative cognition animal communication
Projet ERC : OPPIWaM (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université de Turin — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1480000.0 €

Oceanic Physics-based Parameterizations of Internal Wave-driven Mixing (OPPIWaM) tackles one of the most pressing open problems in physical oceanography: how energy cascades toward the small scales to fuel turbulent mixing, one of the main drivers of the large-scale overturning circulation with huge impacts on the Earth’s climate. Mixing scales are below the resolution of ocean circulation models, and the current parameterizations are static and empirical, resulting in high uncertainty in model outputs. Internal waves (IWs) represent the crucial conduit of energy from the large-scale forcings, such as winds or tides, down to the mixing scales. A grand challenge to upgrade the models’ quality is to leverage the physical properties of this IW interscale energy hub to reach a quantitative understanding of mixing based on the ocean’s equations instead of on empirical numbers. To do so, OPPIWaM sets up an unprecedented multilevel investigation of the physics of IW-driven mixing, with three main objectives: 1. Develop a first-principle solver for the IW interscale dynamics; 2. Develop reduced-model dynamical approximations to provide interpretation as opposed to a black-box package; 3. Constrain the first-principle and reduced-model dynamics with high-resolution field studies and global observational datasets. Finally, OPPIWaM’s findings will integrate into a dynamical first-principle component ready for implementation in the models. The groundbreaking approach to achieve the objectives hinges upon concurring revolutions in theory (wave turbulence recent breakthroughs), (clustering and equation learning) algorithmic efficiency and availability, and (Argo-led) ocean-observation paradigm change. High stakes for climate and cutting-edge theoretical, numerical and observational challenges make OPPIWaM’s objectives ambitious. Right timing and PI’s key experience and positioning within nonlinear waves and ocean mixing communities make OPPIWaM’s ambitious objectives achievable.

Mots-clés : ocean mixing,oceanic internal waves,wave wave interactions,wave turbulence,internal tides,finescale parameterization