Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : PIONEER (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: B iological  Mechanisms , Structures  and Functions
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1052761.46 €

Pioneer transcription factors (pTFs) have unique capabilities beyond classical TFs: They can invade and open closed chromatin, initiating cell-fate changes. Their remarkable abilities have been used to steer cell-fate decisions and to induce a pluripotent stem cell state through poorly understood pathways. Like most TFs, pTFs consist of structured DNA-binding domains (DBDs) flanked by long intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs). In attempts to explain their pioneering functions, intense focus has been on how the structured DBDs of pTFs interact with the nucleosome core particle. Yet, the critical interactions with nucleosomes beyond the core particle, the interplay between DBDs and IDRs, and the molecular mechanism of chromatin invading and opening, remain unclear.  The extensive disorder of pTFs places them outside the scope of current structural biology efforts and understanding their functions therefore requires a different approach. Single-molecule spectroscopy offers a powerful toolbox to monitor dynamic molecular systems and measure their conformational distributions. These methods enable quantitative modeling of distances and dynamics in biomolecules over timescales reaching over 15 orders of magnitude. Building on our recent breakthroughs in single-molecule techniques for studying highly disordered proteins in chromatin regulation and our preliminary data on pTF IDRs, we are in a unique position to apply our expertise to the molecular mechanism of pTFs. Using five established pTFs involved in four distinct cell reprogramming pathways, we intend to: 1) map conformational states, 2) decipher kinetic mechanisms, 3) engineer new pTFs, and 4) observe chromatin remodelling, both in vitro and within the complex cellular environment. A molecular-level understanding of pTF functions may break the barrier to fully controlling cell fate, unleashing the enormous medical potential of cell-based therapy.

Mots-clés : chromatin biophysics single molecule spectroscopy intrinsically disordered proteins pioneer transcription factors
Projet ERC : DATAUNION (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Vrije Universiteit Brussel — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499750.0 €

EU policy-makers are constructing a European Data Union. Its ambition is database interoperability with information stored in autonomous databases becoming interconnected and available to authorities across Europe. However, database interoperability is not a mere technical fix, but an inherently political process. In the design of existing and future databases lays the foundations of future European security integration and the redefinition of some of its core dimensions: security practices, institutional governance, and relation to fundamental rights. Despite its political importance, little is known about how database interoperability actually structures and re-arranges modern power relations. The construction of the European Data Union, as one of the largest real-life experiments of database interoperability, represents a fascinating opportunity to unpack this issue. Hence, the DATAUNION project will pursue four objectives: (1) Theorizing the socio-material practices that underpin database interoperability through the innovative notion of security tinkering, defined as the processes through which conflicts and solutions related to database interoperability are addressed, dodged or solved; (2) Developing a ground-breaking multi-modal approach bringing Critical Making Practices to the study of security practices in order to retrace how database interoperability is implemented on the ground; (3) Delivering new empirical knowledge on the processes and challenges of all three main European interoperability initiatives, and how they shape the future of European security integration; and (4) Evaluating the ethico-political implications of the construction of the European Data Union. Overall, the DATAUNION project will transform Critical Security Studies’ conceptual and methodological repertoire and will have a major impact on International Relations’ and EU Studies’ understanding of the role of digital technologies in European security integration.

Mots-clés : critical security studies international political sociology area of freedom,security and justice europol eu lisa
Projet ERC : EWINCOL (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Université rhénane Frédéric-Guillaume de Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1491415.0 €

The seemingly endless diversity of color patterns in the wings of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) is both a marvel and an enigma. On the one hand, it has been long known that the function of color patterns is visual communication, such as sexual signaling and predator deterrence. On the other hand, the fairly recent discovery that color patterns are determined by only a handful of genetic loci and associated regulatory elements, apparent constraints to diversification. The EWINCOL project will reconcile ecological function and variation of the developmental template to provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between the immense phenotypic and taxonomic diversity within the Lepidoptera that we see today. I posit that wing coloration has facilitated evolutionary diversification in Lepidoptera by being both genetically and developmentally conserved but evolutionarily labile, repeatedly generating variation that fuels selection. With the help of an ERC starting grant I will test this hypothesis by implementing a research program that will make innovative use of natural history museum collections and online citizen science platforms. First, I will leverage phenotypic information from large public image databases by using cutting edge artificial intelligence (AI) methods to create a comprehensive database of coloration and shape traits of all major Lineages within Lepidoptera. This database will then allow me to i) map out the evolutionary history of coloration in Lepidoptera and test how variation in coloration relates to diversification in a phylogenetic context, ii) investigate to which degree the evolution of coloration and wing morphology are independent from one another, and iii) ascertain the role of environmental factors like habitat, light and temperature in shaping the distribution of coloration in butterflies across the globe. Overall, EWINCOL will deepen our understanding of the evolutionary dynamics in one of the most diverse groups on earth.

Mots-clés : lepidoptera,phenomics,image analysis,color pattern evolution,
Projet ERC : IRON-BETA (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Vrije Universiteit Brussel — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498000.0 €

Iron is a critical cofactor for proteins and enzymes involved in oxygen and energy metabolism, functions that are especially vital in pancreatic β-cells. In these cells, iron is indispensable for mitochondrial respiration, the process that powers insulin production. However, disruptions in iron homeostasis - whether through deficiency or overload - have been linked to β-cell dysfunction, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. With IRON-BETA, I seek to unravel how iron metabolism regulates β-cell identity, function, and survival, under both normal and stressed conditions, such as type 2 diabetes (T2D) and early post-transplant ischemia. Using cutting-edge techniques and models, including multiplex single-cell RNA-Seq, super-resolution microscopy, ICP-mass spectrometry, novel genetic mouse models, and iPSC-islet cell differentiation, I, together with my team, will comprehensively explore the role of iron in β-cell biology. We will map iron distribution in islet cells, particularly β-cells, to understand its impact on their function and overall islet health. We will investigate how fluctuations in iron availability contribute to β-cell dysfunction in T2D, with the aim of identifying novel therapeutic targets. Additionally, we will optimize iron supply during the maturation of iPSC-derived β-cells to enhance their functional capacity for cell-based therapy. Finally, we will explore the interplay between iron and oxygen homeostasis in β-cell grafts, focusing on hypoxia-inducible factor 1-alpha (HIF-1α) signaling—a crucial regulatory pathway that integrates both iron levels and oxygen availability. By evaluating how iron deficiency and hypoxia impact β-cell survival and graft success during islet transplantation, we aim to improve transplantation outcomes and advance therapeutic strategies. By addressing these critical gaps in understanding iron homeostasis, IRON-BETA will open new avenues for treating T2D and advance β-cell replacement therapies for T1D.

Mots-clés : diabetes,iron metabolism,islet transplantation,cell,pancreas
Projet ERC : EXPULSE (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Vrije Universiteit Brussel — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1433845.0 €

EXPULSE investigates the impact of urban expulsion regimes on the lived experiences of housing insecurity for poor residents in four European cities: Brussels, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Thessaloniki. Amid rising global inequalities, these cities face escalating forms of expulsion, including housing evictions, the displacement of the poor from welfare systems, and the exclusion of migrants. Driven by the financialization and commodification of housing, these cities are experiencing severe housing crises, characterised by unaffordable rents and acute shortages in social housing, leading to widespread housing evictions. This study offers a timely and critical analysis of these urban expulsion regimes, defined as the interplay between state policies, housing market regulations, and moral discourses, alongside the governance practices of street-level bureaucrats and private actors involved in eviction processes across Europe.  EXPULSE provides a comparative analysis of how these regimes influence poor residents’ housing trajectories and their access to urban citizenship. The project’s methodology is groundbreaking in its integration of quantitative data on urban eviction rates with qualitative data from expert interviews and institutional ethnographies within eviction enforcement agencies, as well as biographical interviews and relational ethnographies with urban residents at risk of eviction. It thereby offers an unprecedented, in-depth comparative overview of eviction trends within and across the four cities under study while revealing the lived experiences and processual nature of the eviction process. By merging insights from urban and migration studies, the project aims to develop an innovative interdisciplinary framework that highlights how urban expulsion regimes shape housing and citizenship rights, and exacerbate, alleviate, or generate inequalities within cities.

Mots-clés : housing studies,housing evictions,housing market inclusion and exclusion
Projet ERC : DELEGATION (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université rhénane Frédéric-Guillaume de Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498269.0 €

Modern societies are tormented by warfare, crime, corruption, and environmental exploitation. If many people have prosocial goals and desire to see themselves and to be seen by others as moral, how do immoral acts like these continue to happen? Economic research suggests a critical role of delegation: Decision-makers can delegate unethical, yet profitable decisions to delegates, which increases resource inequality, and at the same time averts punishment of delegators. Yet, such indirect immorality, as an inherently elusive, inconspicuous phenomenon, is not only overlooked by observers, but also by psychological research. Who delegates immoral behaviors, when, and why? What determines observers’ reactions to delegators? I propose the new 3R framework of delegation and test it in three empirical work packages spanning diverse methodology from social, moral and cognitive psychology and behavioral economics: People employ delegation strategically to reap the benefits of immoral acts while effectively avoiding responsibility and protecting their moral reputation in the eyes of others. Basic social-cognitive mechanisms explain these intra- and interpersonal benefits of delegation. Whereas previous work often focused on the few callous individuals who do not care about moral norms, the 3R framework assumes that precisely those who are morally motivated delegate immoral decisions to minimize their guilt and escape social blame. Moreover, I predict and test an important asymmetry in how observers assign blame and praise for delegated immoral versus moral behaviors. Given the fundamental psychological nature of immoral delegation, it should be frequent in people’s everyday lives and should already be observable in children. Taken together, the project aims to comprehensively study delegation under a unifying framework. It will contribute a groundbreaking new perspective to the study of immoral behavior, and thereby illuminate the complex social nature of human morality.

Mots-clés : moral judgment,immoral behavior,moral blame,moral praise,hypocrisy,self serving morality,prosociality
Projet ERC : SATURN (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : Université rhénane Frédéric-Guillaume de Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1207875.0 €

Group rings are key objects in many fields of mathematics including algebra, topology, operator algebras and representation theory. Fundamental questions about them remain unanswered, in particular several conjectures attributed to Kaplansky. For torsion-free groups and field coefficients, the zero divisor conjecture predicts the absence of zero divisors and the idempotent conjecture predicts that 0 and 1 are the only idempotents in the group ring. The direct finiteness conjecture says that left-invertible elements are invertible in group rings of arbitrary groups over fields. These conjectures have a history spanning more than 80 years. Although special cases are known, resolving any of the conjectures in full generality seemed intractable until the recent disproof of the closely related unit conjecture.  The goal of this project is to construct counterexamples to the zero divisor and direct finiteness conjectures. The latter will give the first example of a non-sofic group. We also seek to resolve the unit conjecture in characteristic zero. Key to our approach is the application of modern solvers for Boolean satisfiability. This paradigm shift, which was successful against the unit conjecture, shows that these problems are substantially more vulnerable to computational techniques than previously thought. Constructing our counterexamples will require both developing our understanding of candidate groups and their properties and building a toolkit for the effective application of existing computational machinery. The unique product property obstructs the existence of counterexamples to these conjectures and is thus of great interest. We will answer fundamental questions about this property.  Although we focus on the positive characteristic case, this project will lay serious groundwork towards the construction of counterexamples in characteristic zero to the zero divisor and idempotent conjectures and thus to the Atiyah, Baum-Connes and Farrell-Jones conjectures.

Mots-clés : group rings,geometric group theory,unit conjecture,zero divisor conjecture,sofic groups,boolean satisfiability
Projet ERC : 2ND-CHANCE (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : Université Koç — Pays : Turquie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death globally. Monitoring heart functions and ischemia is critical for survival after cardiac surgery. Standard monitoring methods such as echocardiogram and ELISA blood test provide single-time measurements. They are available only in hospitals, and there is no continuous monitoring method after patients are discharged, leading to a high rate of recurrent heart failures and rehospitalization. Implantable medical devices are used for treatment of various disorders. However, their non-resorbable nature necessitates an implant removal surgery that puts additional risk of infection and stress on patients and limits their use in postoperative monitoring. Bioresorbable implants may soon revolutionize postoperative monitoring methods. The surgeon will implant a small patch onto the heart during surgery, enabling continuous cardiac monitoring and early alerts for heart failure. This will reduce sudden attacks, rehospitalizations, and financial burden of health care. Then, once the monitoring period ends, triggering with a light source will dissolve the implant; thus, providing a significant second chance for the survivors of cardiac failure without the burden of secondary surgery. The technological advancements to bring this vision to the clinic are not available yet. 2ND-CHANCE will facilitate this vision by building components of next-generation wireless implants with triggered bioresorption for cardiac surgery through ground-breaking approaches. This interdisciplinary project aims to develop 1) bioresorbable sensors compatible with the in-body environment, 2) battery-free ultrasonic communication, and 3) encapsulation layer with triggered bioresorption, followed by 4) integration and animal tests. The versatility of the 2ND-CHANCE will also yield potential breakthroughs in fields where monitoring of tissues and biomarkers is crucial such as neurology and ophthalmology, and open new research perspectives.

Mots-clés : implantable medical device,stretchable sensor,ultrasonic transducer,bioresorbable materials,electrochemical sensor,triggered bioresorption,wireless data transmission
Projet ERC : AniMicroSocial (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Université de Bayreuth — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1483126.0 €

Animal social life is widespread and highly diverse, and has been heavily scrutinized due to its crucial impact on the diversity and complexity of life on earth. However, a key ecological driver of social life remains poorly understood: interactions with microbes. Traditionally viewed as an obstacle to social life, microbes are increasingly recognized for the benefits they can provide to their host, and a growing number of studies shows that interactions with microbes can shape key aspects of animal social life, from collective defenses to communication and social nutrition. However, this research mostly focuses on advanced social systems and typically examines effects of and on specific microbes with limited detail. As a result, major questions regarding the interplay of animal-microbe interactions and animal social behaviors and its role in the origin and early evolution of animal social life remain unresolved. The research proposed here tackles these knowledge gaps by studying the role of animal-microbe interactions during the social life of Nicrophorus burying beetles. These beetles breed on carcasses of small vertebrates and are uniquely suited to take on this challenge: they exhibit a facultative (‘ancestral’) form of family life that heavily depends on interactions with symbiotic and environmental microbes, and parental care – the core social behavior of family life – is crucial to managing those interactions. Using methods from behavioral ecology, microbiology and metagenomics, the proposed research will (i) investigate the reciprocal relationship between animal social life and animal-microbe interactions, (ii) examine how interactions with microbes shape the early evolution of social life, and (iii) study the interplay of social evolution and the evolution of animal-microbe symbiosis. This research agenda will provide foundational insights into animal-microbe interactions and their role in the as yet poorly understood early evolution of animal social life.

Mots-clés : social evolution animal microbe interactions insects beetles
Projet ERC : RESTATE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Université Danube de Krems — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

In today’s world, the majority of refugees originate from states plagued by civil war and extreme violence, where the legitimacy of the state as guarantor of protection is unsettled. Furthermore, refugees often find themselves subjected to various forms of violence at the hands of state actors in host states – regardless of whether they seek refuge in authoritarian or democratic ones. Yet, little is known about how refugees perceive and engage with the state throughout their displacement journeys, and how these perceptions shape their roles as political actors: How do they experience and perceive the state, and in the context of state-inflicted violence in particular, before, during and after displacement? How do these perceptions and experiences affect their political participation? Centring refugees’ political agency, the RESTATE project aims to: (1) provide a dynamic understanding of refugees’ experiences and interactions with the state along their displacement journeys; (2) discern which forms of state violence, both within refugees’ origin and host states, erode trust in state institutions and potentially incite political resistance; (3) theorise the conditions of refugees’ political participation throughout their displacement trajectories; and (4) theorise the implications of refugees’ political participation in both origin and host states for processes of ‘state-making’ – attempts to fulfil key government functions such as protection, justice, the provision of basic services and mobility control. Employing a novel comparative mixed-methods and multi-sited approach, the project studies displacement from three civil-war states (Afghanistan, South Sudan and Syria) in four major host states (Iran, Turkey, Uganda, and Germany) for innovative theory-building on refugees’ political agency in state-(re)making. The empirical knowledge gained will critically inform possible avenues for peacebuilding, conflict resolution and political inclusion.

Mots-clés : state making,refugees,state violence,political participation