Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : CarbonDIOs (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université de St Andrews — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2497282.0 €

CO2 is an important greenhouse gas and building block for life. It plays a major role in regulating Earth's environment, maintaining planetary habitability, and influencing both ocean acidity and global climate. Anthropogenic carbon emissions have raised CO2 levels to their current concentration of 420 ppm, last seen 3 million years ago. Is this high? Was Pre-Industrial CO2 low? If we want to place CO2 changes in context and understand how Earth’s environment and climate will respond to changing CO2, we need to look into Earth’s geological past. My project provides a novel way to reconstruct ocean pH and atmospheric CO2 over the last 500 million years, from the dawn of complex multi-cellular life. This will permit us to quantify pH and CO2 during key periods of Earth's history, providing fundamental insights into CO2’s past and future role in driving climate, environment and life on our planet. The CO2 molecule is acidic and freely exchanges between the ocean and atmosphere, resulting in a close coupling of ocean pH and atmospheric CO2. If ocean pH is known, atmospheric CO2 can be reconstructed. Recent advances in geochemistry make it possible to constrain pH from the boron isotope composition (δ11B) of fossil shells. The principles of this pH-meter are well-understood and rooted in the laws of thermodynamics. However, to calculate pH from fossil δ11B, two parameters are needed: (i) knowledge of boron isotope composition of seawater (δ11Bsw) and (ii) organisms’ biological imprint on δ11B (‘vital effects’). Here, I propose novel approaches to reconstruct past δ11Bsw from fluid inclusions and apatite, and to calibrate vital effects on ‘living fossils’. Armed with this knowledge, and aided by advanced robotics and computation, I will create an iconic 500-million-year record of ocean pH and atmospheric CO2 from fossil brachiopods. This will provide a step change in our understanding of CO2 and its role in Earth’s climate and habitability, past, present and future.

Mots-clés : co2,boron,palaeoceanography,seawater chemistry,biominerals,brachiopods
Projet ERC : TIMELIGHT (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Université autonome de Madrid — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Controlling light and its interaction with matter at the nanoscale is one of the major aims of current Science with applications ranging from energy-efficient photonic-based communications, quantum information processing, or high precision sensors. Owing to the hybrid light-matter modes supported by nanophotonic structures, from THz and IR polaritons in 2D materials to optical plasmonic resonances, nanophotonics offers an ideal platform for an exquisite control of light-matter interactions even at room temperature. Light concentrated at the nanoscale is a natural playground for quantum electro-dynamical (QED) processes, whereby light-matter interactions reveal their quantum nature. However, conventional approaches to nanophotonics-based QED are limited by two fundamental principles: energy conservation and reciprocity. Overcoming these limitations would enable non-photon conserving devices and one-way channels, opening the door to a compact route to quantum photonic circuits. TIMELIGHT proposes the use of time-modulated media, whose optical parameters (e.g., permittivity) are dynamically modulated by an external actuation, to realise fundamentally new non-Hermitian and non-reciprocal QED effects. This theoretical project roots in recent experimental advances that have shown unprecedentedly large and fast modulations of nanophotonic structures. TIMELIGHT will deliver advances in the following areas: (1) tuning of spontaneous emission and collective interactions of quantum emitters, (2) new forms of free electron radiation, (3) novel mechanisms for enhancing spontaneous photon generation, and (4) synthetic-motion based fluctuation-induced forces. TIMELIGHT will open the door to time-varying nanophotonics as a new paradigm to tailoring light-matter interactions at room temperature with non-Hermitian and non-reciprocal effects. This will shed light in the understanding of fundamental QED processes and ultimately be of interest to quantum photonic technologies.

Mots-clés : nanophotonics,light matter interactions,time varying media,temporal metamaterials,macroscopic quantum electrodynamics,polaritons
Projet ERC : IMMUNAGENOMICS (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Luxembourg Institute of Health — Pays : Luxembourg — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LIH
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499980.0 €

Cancer represents a critical public health issue, with 2.74 million new cases diagnosed in Europe in 2022. Most cancer-related deaths are attributed to metastatic spread and it is estimated that 20-40% of all cancer patients will develop metastases to the brain (BrM), facing a dismal prognosis. Novel immunotherapies have shown promising outcomes in BrM patients, although a substantial proportion remain unresponsive. This reflects the heterogeneous nature of the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) and emphasizes the need for a better understanding of its role driving pro- or anti-tumoral responses. My postdoctoral research suggested an important role for genetic variation in human BrM cancer cells regulating the composition and function of the TIME. Likewise, ageing has a major impact in the ability of the immune system to fight cancer. However, how these two key factors interact and influence responses to therapy remains unknown.  IMMUNAGENOMICS aims to transform personalized care for BrM patients by offering a multidisciplinary view on the dynamic regulation of the TIME by ageing and genetic variation. Specifically, we will: (i) characterize changes in baseline immunity along ageing;(ii) evaluate responses to radio- and immunotherapy in young and aged mouse models of BrM bearing different somatic mutations; (iii) analyze the TIME of BrM tumors from young and aged mice, pre and post-treatment by complementary orthogonal approaches including: flow cytometry, hyperplexed immunofluorescence imaging, scRNA-Seq and spatial transcriptomics; (iv) examine the link between ageing, genetic variation, TIME phenotypes and responses to therapy in collections of banked human BrM samples.  Overall, I envision that IMMUNAGENOMICS will help decipher the complex interplay between ageing and genomic variation shaping immune responses against BrM tumors, ultimately opening new perspectives for the development of more effective personalized therapies for this devastating form of cancer

Mots-clés : brain metastasis,tumor immune microenvironment,immunogenomics,ageing,immunotherapy
Projet ERC : NewGenH2Steel (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Materials Engineering
Entité participante : Université d'Oulu — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499820.0 €

Developing a new depth of understanding to control highly refined, complex, multiphase microstructures of modern steels has the potential to create radically new generation of steels. Currently, there is a gap in knowledge on how to control/tailor the microstructures at nanometre level. To bridge this gap, I propose integrating novel science-based approaches such as swift partitioning, chemical heterogeneity engineering, accelerated bainitizing, linear complexions and nanomechanical engineering. These methods enable innovative processes for creating tough, ultra-strong hydrogen resistance steels (NewGenH2Steel) based on nanoscaled martensite/bainite-austenite structures. The novel concept of swift partitioning, based on spike induction heating, is to enrich the finely divided austenite with C and/or Mn for stabilization down to room temperature, thus enabling transformation induced plasticity to maximize the strength-ductility combination. Due to innate versatility, the designed processes will have strong potential in numerous key applications including energy, construction and transportation sectors. The emphasis in these approaches is to adopt short-time accelerated partitioning via high frequency induction heating. This environment-friendly process is attractive, because of low CO2 emissions, clean environment and energy conservation. These approaches will enable realization of a material with nanoscaled multiphase metastable microstructure (N3M). The control of the fraction, stability and morphology of retained austenite is quite puzzling and requires multidisciplinary approach to comprehend its role in deformation behaviour. Another objective is to gain a deep understanding of microstructural heterogeneities such as C-content, size and nature of the phases surrounding the austenite grains with a special emphasis on chemical heterogeneities and linear complexions. Further, the project aims to explore industrial feasibility of N3M-based NewGenH2Steel.

Mots-clés : advanced high strength steels,quenching and partitioning,medium mn steel,nano structured bainite,ultrafast induction heating,accelerated partitioning,chemical heterogeneity engineering,linear complexions,nano engineering,irreversible hydrogen traps
Projet ERC : COUNTS (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cell Biology, Development, Stem Cells and R egeneration
Entité participante : Université d'Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1906138.0 €

One of the fundamental and most longstanding questions in biology is how phenotypes evolve to generate the incredible diversity of forms that surround us in the natural world. Vertebrate body shape is a good example of this, with species’ forms ranging from the rounded ocean sunfish to elongated snakes, and everything in between. The evolution of vertebrate body shapes has been accompanied by significant variation to the axial skeleton and the vertebrae that compose it, which can vary in size and morphology, but crucially also in number, ranging from less than 10 to several hundred. In COUNTS I propose an inter-disciplinary approach to uncover the developmental drivers of phenotypic diversity in vertebrates by using Lake Malawi cichlid fishes as a model system to investigate the evolution of increased vertebral counts.  The diverse morphology, conserved genomes, close-relatedness, and ability to hybridise of these fishes makes them the ideal system in which to study how the evolutionary modification of developmental mechanisms has led to phenotypic diversity, in this case by evolving increased vertebral counts. The COUNTS project will combine state-of-the-art experimental embryology, single cell technologies, microscopy, and mathematical modelling to ask how developmental processes differ in three Lake Malawi cichlid species that have convergently evolved increased vertebral counts, and two that retain ancestral numbers. Specifically, we will characterise differences in two developmental processes known to play important roles determining total vertebral counts - gastrulation and somitogenesis - and use data-driven mathematical modelling to ask how these differences might have evolved. COUNTS will increase our fundamental understanding of how phenotypic diversity is generated, informing how phenotypes might evolve when faced with a rapidly changing climate and potentially contributing to practical applications such as organoid design for regenerative medicine.

Mots-clés : evodevo,emergent model systems,data driven mathematical models,next gen comparative embryology
Projet ERC : EUVORAM (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université technique de Graz — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TU Graz
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1792309.0 €

Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light sources have matured, both in brightness, as well as in producing ever shorter attosecond light pulses. Contrary, transmissive EUV optics remain sparse due to material absorption. Thus, EUV microscopy today focuses mainly on lensless techniques or secondary observables such as photoelectrons. EUVORAM (Extreme-Ultraviolet Meta-Optics for Attosecond Microscopy) will experimentally demonstrate that meta-optical devices are realizable in the EUV using a novel design approach and that they can solve the current lack of transmissive EUV optics. By emulating the spatial phase profiles of aspheric lenses, we will fabricate focusing meta-optics yielding near-diffraction limited microfoci in the EUV. In combination with contemporary attosecond pulse sources based on laser-driven high-harmonic generation, these meta-lenses will enable high-numerical-aperture EUV focusing that maintains attosecond pulse durations. EUVORAM will exploit this capacity to build a light microscope that unifies attosecond time and nanometer spatial resolution. After its demonstration, we will apply this microscope to isolate the ultrafast hot electron dynamics and sub-nanometer charge transfers in individual plasmonic core@shell nanoparticles using spatially resolved attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy. EUVORAM will be one of the first projects connecting attosecond science and dielectric meta-surfaces. The planned EUV meta-optics and their novel design will undercut the current short-wavelength limit of meta-surface optics by a factor of four and thus directly redefine the state-of-the-art. The project will push lens-based microscopy to unprecedented time resolutions and at the same time allow hyperspectral attosecond imaging. The latter will free attosecond experiments from observing ensemble averages and provide spatially resolved insight in the light-matter-interaction of photonic nanodevices.
Projet ERC : PaleoEvoMed (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Université d'Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1449315.0 €

Common diseases, such as cancer, dementia and heart disease, are the leading causes of death globally. In the UK, it is estimated that 1 in 2 people will develop cancer in their lifetime, 1 in 3 will develop dementia, and 1 in 4 will die from cardiovascular disease. However, the risks of developing common diseases are not shared equally between individuals or populations. Genetic susceptibility to disease is a major contributor to disease prevalence, alongside diet, lifestyle and other environmental factors. Understanding the genetic component of disease risk is a critical issue in epidemiology, as it directly informs public health policy, disease prevention and the development of vaccines and novel therapeutics. Most of the existing research in this area has focused on the underlying genetics of risk, while relatively little is known about the evolutionary origins of common diseases. This is a major omission, as understanding the origins of genetic risk can improve health outcomes in the present.  In this ERC Starting Grant, I will use ancient DNA to model the evolutionary origins of genetic susceptibility to the leading causes of death and ill health worldwide, including cancer, dementia, cardiovascular, metabolic, autoimmune, respiratory and infectious diseases. I will build and apply state-of-the-art computational tools to (i) model the effects of natural selection on disease risk in the human genome; to (ii) reconstruct the evolutionary history of human and zoonotic pathogens; and to (iii) model the effects of pathogens, and other environmental factors, on the evolution of human disease susceptibility.

Mots-clés : evolutionary medicine ancient dna complex traits polygenic adaptation infectious disease
Projet ERC : CReativeLipid (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and I mmunotherapy
Entité participante : Université d'Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1491316.0 €

Most T cell immunology knowledge is centered on T cell receptor (TCR) recognition of peptides presented by major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules. MHC class I-like CD1 proteins present lipid antigens to T cells, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the rules of lipid engagement show fundamental divergence from those of peptide recognition. As CD1 proteins are relatively monomorphic, solving the fundamental biology of lipid recognition opens the potential for wide therapeutic benefit.  Group A Streptococcus (GAS) infection is associated with multiple autoimmune sequelae, yet the disease mechanisms are largely unexplained. Recent increases in GAS infection globally have re- emphasized the major unmet medical need, and driven focus on capitalizing on the therapeutic window prior to the onset of post-streptococcal autoimmunity. I hypothesize that lipid antigens derived during GAS infection break immune tolerance through molecular mimicry of self-lipids and contribute to disease.  This proposal harnesses multiple recent technological advances to investigate both CD1c mechanisms and translational implications of lipid-mediated reactivity in humans. I will examine CD1c tissue immunology pathways using human tonsils, a common GAS infection site. GAS- mediated CD1c-relevant cellular and molecular mechanisms will be studied through T cell and lipid antigen discovery and will develop therapeutic targeting approaches. Identified mechanisms will be further studied in patients with post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis (PSGN), informing disease relevant host-pathogen interactions.  Access to patient samples, alongside established experimental platforms and a strong collaboration network places me well to address fundamental immunological mechanisms and facilitate preventive strategies for post-streptococcal disease, as well as enabling the wider field to reach the point of industry engagement to drive patient benefit.

Mots-clés : group a streptococcus
Projet ERC : COMPLEXPOL (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université d'Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499899.0 €

Politics is about solving our world's most complex problems. Solving “wicked problems” like climate change or migration involves myriad actors, contested priorities, uncertain outcomes, and interdependent processes. In the face of such complexity, policymakers sometimes propose simple solutions. US President Donald Trump proposed building a wall to “solve” immigration. British Conservatives proposed cutting all ties with the EU in a “hard Brexit”. Both won elections on these simple narratives. Conversely, the lack of a similarly simple idea to address climate change seems to hinder global progress. Each of these events is a story of a contest between complex and simple ideas. Yet political science lacks clear theories about the nature and strategic uses of complexity, focusing mostly on text complexity measures like readability. Without a theory of idea complexity, scholars cannot explain why Trump proposed a wall, nor why the idea was popular with voters. If we understand political complexity better—if we make it explicit instead of implicit in our theories—we also understand our current moment better.  COMPLEXPOL will build new theories of and evidence for the role of complexity in politics. It does so through three work packages that rely on multiple methods, including quantitative modelling, survey, experimental, and computational methods, and novel data on voters and political leaders in three countries. In WP1, I will develop new, multidimensional measures of complexity, particularly of ideas. In WP2, I will explore the social and psychological determinants of individual attitudes toward complexity. And in WP3, I will investigate the strategic use of complexity by leaders and the public's reactions. In so doing, COMPLEXPOL will provide fresh insights into why some problems get solved with walls while others are left as wicked problems.

Mots-clés : complexity,political psychology,information theory
Projet ERC : FragTuRe (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Université de Linz — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : JKU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Droplets and bubbles are omnipresent in many environmental and industrial applications that involve atomization and emulsification processes, and the ability to control the size of these dispersed elements in turbulent multiphase flows is essential for design and optimization purposes. Despite the importance of the fragmentation of one fluid in another one by turbulent eddies, a universal theory applicable to a majority of the scenarios is still missing. Following the seminal work of Hinze on characterizing the size of the largest stable droplets in turbulence known as Kolmogorov-Hinze theory, I aim to revisit this concept with a novel deterministic approach through theoretical investigation, experimental characterization, and numerical simulation. In my recent contribution, I have presented a novel description for the Hinze scale based on the concept of enstrophy transport across the scales in turbulence, which could serve as the basis for my deterministic approach to studying turbulent emulsification. By providing the theoretical basis for sustained homogenous isotropic turbulent flows, I will measure the spectral rate of enstrophy transport rates by the vortex stretching, surface tension, and other relevant mechanisms in a drop-laden turbulent flow in the lab using tomographic PIV and shape reconstruction. Furthermore, by performing direct numerical simulation (DNS), I will explore the situations where experimentation may be limited such as highly-dense emulsifications and surfactant-laden environments. The simulations will provide a large dataset based on which we could generate a universal theory for emulsification in turbulent drop-laden and bubbly flows. The FragTuRe project revisits the fundamental understanding of turbulent fragmentation by a concept that has not been employed before and aims at generating a novel case-independent universal correlation for the Hinze scale that is essential in many engineering applications.

Mots-clés : turbulence,droplets and bubbles,multiphase flow,interfacial flow,direct numerical simulation dns,fragmentation,drop laden flows,multiphase turbulence,tomographic piv measurement,enstrophy