Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : RESPIRNA (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Ghent University — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UGent
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1985828.0 €

RESPIRNA aims to repurpose lung surfactant protein B (SP-B) to promote the cytosolic delivery of RNA in lung-related target cells. RNA therapeutics, including small interfering RNA (siRNA) and messenger RNA (mRNA), are poised to revolutionize medicine. However, despite a clear unmet medical need in many lung diseases, no RNA formulations are currently available for pulmonary administration. To unlock the full therapeutic potential of RNA drugs, safe and efficient nanomedicines that can deliver them inside target cells are required. SP-B is a key component of pulmonary surfactant, essential for mammalian breathing. In contrast to the general belief that pulmonary surfactant constitutes an important extracellular barrier for macromolecular drug delivery in the lung, I recently discovered a previously unknown property of SP-B in its ability to promote transmembrane delivery of RNA inside cells. Here, I aim to repurpose this biomaterial for intracellular RNA delivery, (1) by exploring SP-B's cellular mode-of-action towards improved cytosolic delivery of RNA, (2) by designing multifunctional and multicomponent lung surfactant nanocarriers and (3) by applying these nanocarriers for RNA delivery in the lung, using models of obstructive lung disease. Gaining mechanistic insight into how an endogenous membrane-active protein like SP-B can mediate cytosolic RNA delivery will allow me to maximize SP-B mediated delivery of promising RNA therapeutics and will fuel rational design of lung surfactant inspired nanocarriers for inhalation therapy. Beyond RESPIRNA, I anticipate that such nanocarriers will be more generically applicable for a wider variety of membrane-impermeable drugs, nanomedicines and pathologies.

Mots-clés : nanomedicine,rna therapeutics,inhalation therapy,endosomal escape,membrane fusion
Projet ERC : REWILDING (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
Entité participante : University of Cologne — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2490285.0 €

REWILDING is an environmental anthropological project contributing to the budding field of environmental humanities. It focuses on the shifting entanglements between people, flora, and fauna in the world’s largest conservation landscape, the southern African Kavango-Zambezi Transboundary Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA). Inaugurated in 2011, KAZA TFCA is a working landscape of conservation par excellence. Its green future is broadcast globally, but simultaneously bears marks of colonial and post-colonial pasts. REWILDING is a unique attempt to grasp changing socio-ecological relations among humans and other species. It consists of six field studies, each of which will have a comparative component and an in-depth focus on one particular multi-species assemblage. The comparative approach examines how human livelihoods, institutions, social imaginaries, and attitudes change under – and give rise to – new socio-ecological conditions. The second part focuses on six multi-species assemblages (e.g. an elephant assemblage, a Glossina/Trypanosome assemblage, a rosewood assemblage). Each assemblage is comprised of a loose multi-scalar network consisting of different species populations, environmental infrastructures and technologies, and human actors, organizations and social institutions. By pursuing a two-pronged comparative and in-depth approach, REWILDING will advance scholarly knowledge on refaunation and biodiversity in contexts of large-scale conservation. The project is tied into networks of interdisciplinary research on the effects of recent population rebounds among megaherbivores, vectors of epidemic diseases tied to such refaunation, and the socio-economic ramifications of rapidly commodifying diverse flora and fauna. REWILDING is uniquely positioned and purposefully designed to contribute to a better understanding of the complexities of recent large-scale refaunation efforts, and will thereby offer new, empirical insight for the future planning of conservation.

Mots-clés : conservation,landscapes,sub saharan africa
Projet ERC : RICA (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : University of Exeter — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

RICA will fundamentally challenge, reconceptualise and redefine core foundational assumptions of the regulatory state. Arm’s length governance and regulatory independence have become the cornerstone normative and institutional design principles of the European regulatory state. Regulatory credibility is premised on agency insulation from politics with major systemic implications in the form of a rise in non-majoritarianism and a parallel devaluation of the political process. Efforts to compensate through alternative sources of input legitimacy have proven challenging. Conceptualised in a rational-choice tradition, accountability is seen to be in a zero-sum relationship with regulatory autonomy. Bolstering accountability is said to threaten autonomy, undermining the system’s normative foundations. Informed by insights from the political science literature on reputation, RICA profoundly questions these assumptions. It does so in two separate and interlocking tracks. Module 1 theorises about, and tests, the established wisdom of a wholesale positive relation between agency insulation and credibility. To the contrary, from a reputational perspective, a strategy of insulation is expected to have a negative effect on regulatory credibility, with overall delegitimising effects. Similarly informed by reputation insights, Module 2 challenges dominant understandings of accountability and puts forward the building blocks of a new theory of public accountability. The module draws out and studies empirically how reputation shapes the accountability behaviour of regulatory actors, both account-holders and account-givers, and their interactions. It will re-conceptualise the role played by accountability in the regulatory state as well as its relationship with autonomy. In contrast to dominant understandings, as a mechanism of reputation-building, accountability can reinforce autonomy with sweeping implications for regulatory control strategies and institutional design choices.

Mots-clés : regulation,agencies,accountability,independence,reputation,control,agencification,credible commitment,regulatory credibility,regulatory state,voluntary accountability
Projet ERC : RIVERHOOD (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Wageningen University & Research — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : WUR
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998717.0 €

RIVERHOOD will study, conceptualize and support evolving water justice movements that struggle for enlivening rivers. Notwithstanding rivers’ fundamental importance for social and natural well-being, around the world, mega-damming, pollution, and multiple forms of domesticating are putting riverine systems under great stress. Expert ontologies and epistemologies have become cornerstones of powerful hydraulic-bureaucratic administrations (‘hydrocracies’). Recently, worldwide, a large variety of ‘new water justice movements’ (NWJMs) have proliferated. These are rooted, transdisciplinary, multi-actor and multi-scalar coalitions. They deploy alternative river-society ontologies and practices, challenging hydrocracies’ paradigms to foster environmental justice. They translate global notions into local ones and vice versa. New, exciting strategies range from organizing river-health clinics, dam removal, socio-ecological flow projects, to mobilizing New Water Culture and Rights of Nature notions. European NWJMs co-learn with peers in Ecuador and Colombia were rivers are legal and political subjects. NWJMs hold immense potential for contributing to a radically new, equitable and nature-rooted water governance, but are undertheorized, largely unnoticed by natural and social sciences, and excluded from policy-making. Science and policies lack approaches to engage with rivers as arenas of co-production among humans and nature. RIVERHOOD will develop a new analytical framework to study NWJMs and ‘riverhoods’. Socio-natural river complexes will be approached from 3 interrelated ontologies: ‘river-as-territory’; ‘river-as-subject’; and ‘river-as-movement’. Through 4 cross-cultural PhD studies, 8 cases in Ecuador, Colombia, Spain and the Netherlands are investigated. At each site ‘Environmental Justice Labs’ will be organized: a novel approach to comprehend pluriversal water worlds and foster knowledge co-creation and democratization: bottom-up, dialoguing and transdisciplinary.”

Mots-clés : environmental justice,water governance,transdisciplinarity,hydrosocial territories,rights of nature,water politics,governmentality
Projet ERC : RIVERS (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Carlos III University of Madrid — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498446.0 €

RIVERS’s main challenge is to produce ground-breaking knowledge, from an empirical, interdisciplinary and dialoguing perspective, about the contentions and challenges intrinsic to reconceptualising human rights with different ways of understanding and relating to water. Worldwide, indigenous peoples are mobilising against the neoliberalisation of nature, demonstrating radically different ways of knowing, being and living. At the same time, in 2010 the UN acknowledged water as a human right, while in 2017 New Zealand, India and Colombia established ground-breaking legal precedents by granting rivers human rights. RIVERS’s overarching research question is: To what extent can international human rights law come to grips with plurilegal water realities? This project engages with one of the most pressing questions of this century: the relationship between humans and nature. RIVERS tackles two intertwined core objectives: 1) analysing different ways of knowing and relating to water and life among indigenous peoples and their understanding of its (potential) violation by extractive projects; 2) discussing the contributions, challenges and pitfalls of interlegal translation of differing water natures in plurilegal encounters at domestic and international levels. RIVERS will develop a multi-sited analysis and empirical case-studies in three contexts: Colombia, Nepal and the UN human rights protection system. Through the lens of legal pluralism, this will foreground competing political and legal water realities that interrogate dominant understandings of the modern world. RIVERS will address two interrelated research challenges: 1) indigenous visions/practices: beyond water as a natural resource and human right; 2) the UN human rights system: towards counter-hegemonic water knowledge production. This project will pioneer new ways of thinking about water beyond the modern divides of nature/culture, providing clues about future paths towards reconceptualising human rights.

Mots-clés : human rights,legal anthropology,human right to water,indigenous peoples,legal pluralism,extractivism,natural resources,ontological turn,decolonial theories
Projet ERC : RadiCool (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : University of Liverpool — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1850888.69 €

Radicals are paramagnetic species – atoms or molecules with an unpaired electron – and they are prevalent in gas-phase environments such as the atmosphere, combustion systems and the interstellar medium. In spite of their real-world importance, very few experimental methods can be applied to the precise study of gas-phase radical reactions. This is primarily due to the significant challenges associated with such studies; there are no established methods for generating a pure beam of atomic or molecular gas-phase radicals with tuneable properties. In this proposal, I provide a solution. I will develop a versatile and innovative “magnetic guide”, for the generation of a pure and state-selected beam of radicals. The magnetic guide will feature a series of specially-designed permanent magnets (Halbach arrays) and skimming blades. It will act as a stand-alone device, producing a pure beam of radicals with continuously tuneable velocity from an effusive mixture (containing radicals, precursor molecules and seed gases). The magnetic guide will be combined with two existing experiments – an ion trap and a liquid-surface set-up – and will enable us to study ion-radical and radical-liquid surface interactions with unprecedented control and precision. We will examine important gas-phase reactions involving radicals in isolation (i.e. without competing side reactions) for the first time. Our measurements will provide the missing experimental data needed to improve the accuracy of (for example) complex atmospheric chemistry models – replacing untested predictions from capture theory calculations.

Mots-clés : magnetic guide,ion radical reactions,ion liquid surface collisions,instrument development,theoretical method development
Projet ERC : TWORAINS (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Cambridge — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. Cambridge
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999439.0 €

Rainfall systems are complex and inherently variable, yet they are of fundamental importance due to their impact on food security. Given that human populations can adapt their behaviour to a wide range of climatic and environmental conditions, it is essential that we understand the degree to which human choices in the past, present and future are resilient and sustainable in the face of variable weather conditions, and when confronted with abrupt events of climate change. TWORAINS will investigate the resilience and sustainability of South Asia’s first complex society, the Indus Civilisation (c.2500-1900 BC), which developed across a range of distinctive environmental contexts where westerly winter rainfall overlapped with the summer rainfall of the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM). It is now clear that there was an abrupt weakening of the ISM that directly impacted NW India c.2100 BC, and coincided with the start of the decline of Indus cities, but the degree of connection between the two is elusive. Archaeologists have a unique role to play in understanding the ways that societies respond to climate change as they can investigate past instances of success or failure, and the Indus Civilisation provides an ideal laboratory in which to explore how societies can respond to variable and changing rain systems. TWORAINS will combine cutting edge approaches from Archaeology, Earth Sciences and Geography to reconstruct climate, model rain patterns, and explore societal adaptations and responses to change by combining data on settlement distribution, food production and consumption, and water stress. The data will then be integrated and assessed using agent-based modelling. By adopting an integrated interdisciplinary approach, it will be possible to ask “Does climate change really cause collapse?”, elucidate how particular communities perceived weather and landscape changes, hypothesise why they made the decisions they did, and explore the consequences of those decisions.

Mots-clés : archaeological science,bioarchaeology,isotope analysis,residue analysis,agent based modelling
Projet ERC : LogCorRM (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1388878.86 €

Random Matrix Theory has been of central importance in Mathematical Physics for over 50 years. It has deep connections with many other areas of Mathematics and a remarkably wide range of applications. In 2012, a new avenue of research was initiated linking Random Matrix Theory to the highly active area of Probability Theory concerned with the extreme values of logarithmically correlated Gaussian fields, such as the branching random walk and the two-dimensional Gaussian Free Field. This connects the extreme value statistics of the characteristic polynomials of random matrices asymptotically to those of the Gaussian fields in question, allowing some important and long-standing open questions to be addressed for the first time. It has led to a flurry of activity and significant progress towards proving some of the main conjectures. A remarkable discovery has been that the characteristic polynomials of random matrices exhibit, asymptotically, a hierarchical branching/tree structure like that of the branching random walk. However, many of the most important questions remain open. My aim is to attack some of these problems using ideas and techniques that have so far not been applied to them: I believe it is possible to compute some important statistical quantities relating to the extreme values of characteristic polynomials exactly, for the first time, by establishing connections with integrable systems, representation theory, and enumerative combinatorics. Such connections have not previously been explored. I anticipate that this will have a significant impact on an area that is currently in a rapid phase of development and that it will settle some of the principal unresolved conjectures. I further believe that ideas exploiting the hierarchical branching structure may have new and unexpected implications for areas connected with Random Matrix Theory, including, in particular, Number Theory, and I plan to explore these too.

Mots-clés : random matrix theory,log correlated gaussian fields,extreme values,matrix integrals,riemann zeta function,function fields
Projet ERC : RMTBEYOND (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : Institute of Science and Technology Austria — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ISTA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1912439.0 €

Random matrix theory (RMT) was created in the 1950's by the pioneering idea of E. Wigner predicting that the distribution of the gaps between energy levels of complex quantum systems is universal in the sense that it is independent of the physical details of the model apart from its basic symmetry type. He proposed to study eigenvalues of large matrices with random entries as the fundamental model for his new universal statistics, later coined Wigner-Dyson-Mehta (WDM) universality. Mathematical research in RMT has largely been inspired by the WDM universality, specifically for Hermitian matrices in the mean-field regime. In physics, however, Wigner's vision has always been viewed from a higher perspective: random matrices are routinely used to model complex Hamilton operators for various observables on all scales. This project explores how this broader physics interpretation of RMT can be rigorously justified. We focus on three new directions. First, we study Hermitian models beyond the conventional universality problem for eigenvalues and, among others, establish that Gaussian fluctuations prevail for most other physically relevant quantities such as multi-point Green functions or generic observables. In turn, these results help establish WDM universality for new ensembles that have previously not been accessible. Second, we develop the universality theory of non-Hermitian random matrices on all scales, leading to Gaussian Free Field on mesoscopic scales, and universality on microscopic scales. Third, we apply rigorous RMT to several key problems in disordered quantum systems, such as scattering theory in quantum dots and wires, fluctuation of density of states detecting the Anderson metal-insulator transition and the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model of fermions with random interactions. The main impact of the project will be to establish the ubiquity of Gaussianity and to develop new mathematical tools to apply RMT to realistic physical models beyond WDM universality.

Mots-clés : random matrices,gaussian free field,random schrodinger operators,anderson phase transition,feynman diagrams
Projet ERC : ROBUSTNET (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cellular, Developmental and Regenerative Biology
Entité participante : Imperial College London — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499745.0 €

Randomness pervades life and biological systems are continuously subject to variation. This variation may be stochastic, due to random fluctuations in the concentration of critical molecules, genetic, due to mutation accumulation, or environmental, because of changes in the environment over time. It is therefore remarkable how biological systems manage to operate with so much precision. The property of a system to produce an invariant output in the presence of considerable noise is called robustness. Development itself is highly robust to noise and this is instrumental for the successful transformation of a fertilised egg into a multi-cellular individual. Developmental robustness ensures the stability of phenotypic traits, including correct cell numbers in a given tissue. While research on developmental robustness has seen a surge over the last 15 years, most studies have remained theoretical, and we still lack appropriate experimental systems to elucidate the mechanisms via which robust outputs are achieved. We propose here to follow a system-wide, integrative approach to study the mechanisms, evolution and consequences of developmental robustness in a multi-cellular model organism. To this end, C. elegans is a very attractive system because developmental patterning is highly stereotypical and animals are isogenic, thereby allowing precise control of the genetic background. Focusing on a new experimental model, the epithelial seam cell number variation, and using comprehensive molecular developmental genetics, genomics and imaging we will derive principles about the contribution of genes to stabilisation of developmental outcomes and will develop a developmental framework for phenotypic buffering. Understanding the fundamental mechanisms underlying developmental robustness is highly relevant to biomedical sciences, as many diseases can be understood in the context of debuffering of normal physiological states.

Mots-clés : robusntess,c  elegans,quantitative development