Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : NeurAlarm (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1917188.0 €

“Watch out!” - is the term we use to inform somebody about a potentially dangerous situation. “Take cover!” - we shout when the threat is imminent. Not only humans but also animals use alarm calls to warn conspecifics about danger, and the value of these signals for increasing the chance of survival in the receiver is without controversary. But, alarm calls often harm the sender through their production and are therefore considered an evolutionary paradox, which has fascinated scientists for many decades. While the function, development and evolution of alarm calls have extensively been studied, the proximate mechanisms relating to how the brain controls alarm call production or the reactions to alarm calls are unknown. Uncovering the brain’s role in antipredator behaviour, such as alarm calling, is fundamentally important for understanding how neural systems facilitate decision-making in life-threatening situations. My project will be first in studying the neural basis of alarm calling behaviour and will exploit a unique and completely natural approach. Brain activity at the cellular level will be wirelessly recorded in parallel to individual vocal activity in groups of free-ranging, wild songbirds while they emit, listen and react to alarm calls in their natural habitat. In 2017, we pioneered the application of extracellular neurophysiology during field research, and are currently the only researchers worldwide who conduct neurophysiological experiments with wild animals outside a laboratory. Brain regions belonging to three different neural circuits will be targeted within my project: the vocal control system, the hearing system and the fear system. The new knowledge produced by my project will help us to understand the computations the brain has to perform when we warn others about danger or when we get warned, and will elucidate how different neural circuits naturally work together to flexibly adjust fear reactions to the threat level signalled by alarm calls.

Mots-clés : vocal communication,birds,predator avoidance behavior,social interaction,natural neuroscience,auditory system,vocal control system,fear system,telemetric neural recording,extracellular neurophysiology,bioacoustics,field research
Projet ERC : XBEND (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2957160.0 €

The ground state of correlated materials is controlled by tuning parameters such as pressure or strain, which are usually applied homogeneously to crystals. Here we aim for strong yet controlled strain gradient fields in microstructured correlated crystals that selectively transform parts of the structure into different electronic ground states. XBENDs ambition is to open a new field of research into gradient quantum matter, defined as a highly non-linear regime in which gradients lead to qualitatively new behavior as compared to simple spatial distributions of bulk phases.  The concrete goal is a rational design of new electronic properties at interfaces between different correlated ground states within a single crystal – akin to the interface states between different materials in heterostructures. Specifically, we aim to frustrate interactions and/or competing orders in unconventional superconductors at this interface, with the goal to enhance the transition temperature Tc. We will create interfaces between (1) ferro-polar and paraelectric phases in crystals of doped SrTiO3; (2) oppositely detwinned domains in underdoped Ba(Fe,Co)2As2 crystals; (3) hidden-order and magnetic phases in URu2Si2. Contrasting their nature and physical responses to those expected from trivial phase mixtures will signal that XBEND has entered a non-linear gradient-driven regime. Technically, we will fabricate free-standing single crystal cantilevers from as-grown crystals using Focused Ion Beam (FIB) machining. The cantilevers will be functionalized to allow cryogenic measurements of magnetoresistance while applying bending strain by pushing them with a piezoelectric motor. XBEND aims for extreme strain gradients in the 10%/micron range, yet our proof-of-concept already demonstrated 2%/micron. The induced microscopic strain/domain pattern will be probed by X-Ray microdiffraction at DESY/PETRA III, and a complete finite-element-model will capture the elasto-resistive response.

Mots-clés : gradients in correlated electron systems focused ion beam
Projet ERC : MentalTravel (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1994360.0 €

One of the most notable features of the brain is the ability to simulate possible consequences of a behavioural choice that has not even been experienced in the real world. While this ability is likely fundamental for our intelligence and creativity, its neural circuit basis is largely unclear. To tackle this problem, we will focus on the rat’s ability of spatial navigation, finding an optimal path to a remote destination that is located outside the range of sensory perception. This ability is thought to be supported by the brain’s internal map that allows an animal to estimate its future position followed by planned movements. While the hippocampal formation has been the primary focus of research on the brain’s spatial map, it mainly tracks an animal’s position and its nearby trajectories. By contrast, the brain has another internal map in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) that points to an animal’s goal destination throughout navigation. Because this goal coding emerges autonomously in the network without relying on explicit external cues, it can be considered part of the brain’s inner reasoning process for future behaviours. Here we will explore how this internally-set goal can emerge in the OFC network through interactions with its associated regions – thalamus and neuromodulatory systems. We will then explore how this goal coding can be used to plan an optimal goal-directed path by avoiding known obstacles in the environment. Since this process likely requires the cooperation of two internal maps in OFC and the hippocampus, we will elucidate the underlying circuit mechanism that employs multiple map systems in parallel. We will take advantage of state-of-the-art experimental and analysis techniques to decipher neural codes for navigational simulations. The OFC and the hippocampus are the regions often affected by psychiatric disorders, and their role in inner reasoning may provide new insights into their pathophysiology.

Mots-clés : spatial navigation,decision making,navigational simulation
Projet ERC : UPIRI (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : Université de Nottingham Trent — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2999999.0 €

Infra-red (IR) cameras are critical for many applications ranging from medical diagnosis and food quality control to gas and heat leakage and night vision. These applications each rely on cameras designed to work at different IR sub-bands, e.g. near-IR, mid-IR or long-IR. No single camera can detect all IR bands simultaneously. Moreover, unlike charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras that operate in visible range, IR cameras are low in pixel numbers and often require low temperature (down to -200°C) operations, increasing their volume, cost and power consumption. UPIRI is designed to create a paradigm shift in IR visualisation via development of a new technological platform, enabled by a compact nanoscale layer that can be integrated into today’s standard cameras and extend their vision to the full IR band. Specifically, UPIRI will develop a layer of engineered arrays of nanoparticles, i.e. metasurfaces, that will absorb all IR bands and convert them to visible light. To realize such a new technological platform, UPIRI will address three independent challenges in the state-of-the-art: i. Generating operational nonlinear metasurfaces, ii. Stimulating non-coplanar wave mixing on metasurfaces, and iii. Pixelating and independently controlling metasurfaces to turn on/off each IR sub-band. UPIRI addresses them in a synergistic way by pushing the boundaries of scientific and technological innovations via: i. using nonlinear mixing by metasurfaces, optimized by AI to bypass low nonlinear efficiencies, ii. adapting the waveguide concept for confining the transversely propagating waves on metasurfaces, and iii. generating reconfigurable metasurfaces in the nonlinear regime. UPIRI's ambition is nothing less than the capability to visualize visible and all IR sub-bands together in high resolution with one inexpensive device. This new platform will initiate a new direction in research as an ideal alternative to today's expensive and complex semiconductor technology for IR imaging.

Mots-clés : metasurfaces,nonlinear photonics,frequency mixing,tunability
Projet ERC : DREAMNET (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Université autonome de Barcelone — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2603510.0 €

Sleep is universal in mammals, yet the origin, structure and purpose of the neural activity patterns which permeate this state remains highly contentious. This is largely because such activity is internally generated and thus not amenable to most traditional methods of analysis. Here I propose top-down circuits in cortical layer 1 as a key site of production and structuring of neural activity during sleep, and detail novel experimental and analysis approaches to probe layer 1 circuits across sleep states at synaptic resolution.  Layer 1 of the sensory cortex receives long distance signals from higher cortical regions which during wakefulness powerfully modulate sensory processing, and underpin neurocognitive processes such as attention, prediction, and sensorimotor integration. Such top-down circuits are well placed to autonomously generate activity during sleep which is meaningfully structured in the absence of sensory input. I propose that such top-down activations, unconstrained by the sensory environment, but structured by a lifetime of synaptically encoded experience stored in cortical connectivity patterns, could promote the formation of meaningful associations and insights inaccessible and cognitively disruptive if produced in waking states.  I propose to test this mechanism and purpose of sleep activations using in vivo multiphoton imaging in mice: high resolution synaptic imaging will allow measurement of the origin and regulation (Aim 1), content, structure (Aim 2), and development (Aim 3) of top-down signals to layer 1 during different conscious states and will answer fundamental questions regarding the interplay between sleeping and waking activity patterns and their brain-wide propagation. We anticipate the work will lead to a fundamental advance in our understanding of micro and macro architecture of neural activations during sleep and in doing so resolve long running questions as to the mnemonic, creative, and maintenance functions of such activity.

Mots-clés : sleep dreaming rem nrem memory in vivo vision v1 anterior cingulate cortex retrosplenial cortex
Projet ERC : IMBRACE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Université autonome de Barcelone — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1985268.0 €

Climate change, human health and immigration are arguably the most prominent, enduring, and challenging issues of our times, with important implications for justice. Studies on the nexus of these issues have largely focused on climate change as posing challenges to health and thus acting as a push-factor for migration. However, our understanding of how climate is impacting the health of immigrants in places of migration destination is still poor. Further limiting our understanding of potential climate and health injustices, immigrant communities in Europe are far from homogenous, and are often racialized groups of great ethnic diversity. With IMBRACE, I examine what shapes immigrants’ climate health vulnerability and how their situated knowledges and practices can inform both their own response capacities and urban climate adaptation more broadly, towards more effective and just approaches. I focus on two types of climate impacts, chosen as most relevant for urban areas in Europe and with important implications for health: (a) increased and prolonged heat, and (b) intense rainfall and flooding. I employ a pioneering feminist political ecology approach that combines participatory ethnography, critical discourse and policy analysis, and transdisciplinary knowledge production. Focusing on 6 case-study cities in Europe– I systematically explore tangible and intangible factors and structural drivers of immigrants’ climate health vulnerability, centering and engaging with immigrants as expert knowledge-holders. Mobilizing knowledge that comes with and through immigration, I offer an intersectional justice perspective that considers class, gender, race, ethnicity, and other axes of power and oppression when designing and assessing urban climate and health adaptation policy. This novel, comparative, and in-depth study will open new paths for research at the nexus of climate, health, and immigration, leading to a shift in how we conceptualize and research climate justice.

Mots-clés : political ecology,climate justice,climate adaptation,medical anthropology
Projet ERC : POPULAR (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
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 : 2000000.0 €

Existing theory on how residents of urban peripheries engage with the state is largely state-centric. Political anthropology and urban studies have generally conceptualised periphery-state engagements as non-standard citizenship, informal politics, or protest. Such conceptualisations risk contributing to inequality, as they understand the politics of marginalised city residents as ‘less than’ or only as ‘anti’ formal state policies and citizenship regimes.  POPULAR will counter this disparity by developing a theory of politics that reconceptualises periphery-state engagements from the vantage point of the periphery. This reconceptualisation will connect the concepts and practices residents use as part of their political praxis to recent anthropological debates that pluralise and decentre our understandings of politics. It will approach the variety of practices inherent in periphery-state engagements as a politics of the periphery, a diverse politics in its own right and on its own terms that emerges from local modes of agency, subjectivities, and the social configurations of urban populations which are marginalised on a daily basis. POPULAR will ethnographically study the politics of the periphery in three domains: governance, electoral politics, and activism. It will compare these politics in low-income neighbourhoods in three cities in Latin America—Medellín (Colombia), Santiago de Cuba (Cuba), and Recife (Brazil)—a region known for its urban poverty, popular mobilisations, and the diversity of government engagements with marginalised populations. The three city governments can be characterised as, respectively, neoliberal capitalist, socialist and moderately neoliberal with a socialist legacy. Each case represents a distinct approach towards the urban periphery. Through a new theory of politics that centres upon the periphery, POPULAR will move the fields of anthropology and urban studies beyond the inequalities inherent in current theories.

Mots-clés : anthropology of the state ethnography informal politics political anthropology brazil
Projet ERC : SARCOMAkids (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : St. anna kinderkrebsforschung gmbh — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999124.0 €

Pediatric sarcomas account for ~20% of childhood cancers. They have disappointing survival rates, with very little therapeutic progress over the last three decades. We clearly have to rethink the science and find new ways to tackle these devastating tumors. I propose that new cellular models are needed that account for the developmental origins of pediatric sarcoma, in order to accelerate drug discovery and molecular precision medicine.  Focusing on Ewing sarcoma, which is a developmental cancer caused by a (known) fusion oncogene expressed in (unknown) cells-of-origin, we will pursue a “build it to understand it” approach and construct in vitro and in vivo tumor models starting from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs). We will validate these models against our single-cell and spatial maps of Ewing sarcoma tumors, and we will pursue initial applications in academic drug discovery – targeting the regulatory programs of Ewing sarcoma cells, metabolic dependencies of the tumor microenvironment and developmentally programmed tumors in their in vivo context.  To build Ewing sarcoma models in a molecular defined manner, we will map oncogene-competent cell states by inducing EWS-FLI1 expression in hPSC-based models of human development (Aim 1). We will create supportive tumor microenvironments by 3D differentiation and CRISPR screening in stromal cells (Aim 2). Finally, we will evaluate the ability of in vitro models to form tumors in mice, and we will pursue full in vivo modeling of Ewing sarcoma using genetically engineered teratomas (Aim 3). Compared to patient-derived xenografts, organoids or cell lines, our approach captures early events of tumorigenesis, providing complementary in vitro and in vivo models of Ewing sarcoma for biomedical and translational research. This approach will generalize to other tumor types, as it takes the concept of developmental cancers seriously and operationalizes it using cellular programming and high-throughput functional biology.

Mots-clés : pediatric sarcomas,disease modeling,epigenetics,transcription regulation,oncogenic fusion proteins,stem cell biology,crispr screening,single cell sequencing,precision medicine
Projet ERC : DYNALP (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Université de Warwick — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1994106.0 €

This proposal explores the interplay between two key concepts in theoretical computer science.  (I) "Linear programs" (LPs) have historically played a pivotal role in the development of the field of algorithm design. The simple abstraction of an LP, which optimizes a linear function subject to a set of linear constraints, is powerful enough to encode a wide variety of combinatorial optimization problems. Accordingly, LP-based techniques are so ubiquitous today that any textbook on algorithms would be incomplete without a serious discussion on how to use them. (II) "Dynamic algorithms" have emerged as a popular model of computation in the 21st century, motivated by applications involving massive and rapidly evolving data-sets; such as social networks and google maps. Here, the goal is to maintain a good solution to an optimization problem when the underlying input changes over time. This research area has seen exciting advances in the last decade. In spite of this progress, however, we still have little understanding of how far, and extensively, can LP-based techniques be adapted to the world of dynamic algorithms. The proposal will bridge this chasm, by developing a dynamic algorithms centric theory of linear programming. Further, it will show how to use this theory of dynamic LPs to push the frontier of fast static algorithms for fundamental graph problems.  Building a launchpad out of some recent successes obtained by the PI, the proposal will attack outstanding open questions in both static and dynamic algorithms literature. In addition, as a by-product of the versatility of its approach, it will have significant implications for algorithm design in other models of computation as well; such as online and sublinear algorithms.
Projet ERC : PollutedPast (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : USC
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1874716.0 €

Environmental metal pollution threatens us all. While discussions of further prevention continue, the historical dimension is rarely considered. The long history of metal contamination has been well traced in natural archives (e.g. lake sediments and peat). However, there is a need for long-term studies directly on humans remains to fully understand how metal pollution affected the life of our ancestors. PollutedPast will fill this gap by linking new research on skeletal remains from archaeological sites with research done using natural archives. The overall objective is to determine the severity of metal pollution in preindustrial populations. This will be achieved by meeting four prerequisites: 1) availability of high chronological resolution studies in natural archives, 2) periods of contrasting pollution levels, 3) areas with contrasting pollution histories, and 4) availability of well-suited and studied osteological collections. The investigations will concentrate on collections from NW and SE Spain, and SE Sweden, selecting individuals from Roman to Late Medieval times. Individuals at risk (babies, those with chronic infectious diseases) will also be targeted. The methodological approach is based in a revolutionary combination of techniques. Multielemental (>30) and high-resolution (every 200μm) analyses of bones, bioapatite and teeth will provide critical insights into metals incorporation. Lead, copper and mercury, metals different sources and biogeochemical cycles, will be researched in depth and compared with well-reconstructed pollution histories in natural archives from the selected areas. Lead isotopes will be used, aided by mixing models, to trace the sources and estimate the proportion of pollution-lead in skeletons. This project will generate ground-breaking knowledge about the long-term impact of metal contamination – by mining and metallurgy - and explore how differences in resources management may have had consequences regarding human societies.

Mots-clés : osteoarchaeology metal pollution glocalization xrf core scanner lead isotopes lead mercury copper paleopathology physiological stress roman times medieval times