Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : SuperSOC (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
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 : 1499893.0 €

Superconductors with spin-orbit coupling exhibit many fascinating properties, including abnormally high upper critical fields and possible topological excitations. These effects are recognized as originating from the impact of spin-orbit coupling on the Cooper pair wave function. In contrast, how spin-orbit coupling affects the superconducting pairing interactions – the glue that binds electrons together in Cooper pairs – remains an open question. This is particularly relevant in unconventional superconductors as the interplay between spin-orbit coupling and electronically mediated superconducting pairing interactions may give rise to novel feedback effects that boost the efficacy of the pairing interactions.  In this project, I will adopt a dual-pronged approach to study the interplay between spin-orbit coupling and interactions: (1) Develop a generalized Eliashberg theory to account for feedback effects in spin-orbit coupled systems and (2) implement fermionic renormalization group methods and determinant Quantum Monte Carlo simulations to map out the interplay between electronic correlations and spin-orbit coupling.  The main results of SuperSOC will be: - Establishing how spin-orbit coupling may fundamentally reshape the pairing interactions and modify the associated superconducting instabilities of unconventional superconductors. - Developing a framework for studying these feedback effects in material-specific models and employing this to understand the phase diagrams of unconventional spin-orbit coupled superconductors. - Demonstrating how the interplay between electronic correlations and spin-orbit coupling leads to anisotropic interactions that alter the shape of the electronic phase diagram and may enhance pairing.  These achievements pave the way for identifying the nature and origin of unconventional superconductivity in spin-orbit coupled systems and enable a determination of the electronic phase diagrams in such systems.
Projet ERC : AUTODIAL (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Université de médecine de Vienne — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1477458.0 €

The continuous and overwhelming increase in the amount of data in health and science, including image collections, textbooks and scientific literature, renders it difficult to meaningfully understand, validate and query the available body of knowledge. Modern developments in artificial intelligence hold promise to solve these shortcomings by enabling the collection, understanding, curation, use of, as well as interaction with, large bodies of data. The goal of this project is to make this case in the explicit context of a highly specialized scientific field, dermatopathology, which is in charge of obtaining reliable diagnoses of skin diseases. We aspire to improve understanding in four different settings: 1) Unstructured real-life data: To obtain population-scale structured knowledge on the real-life burden of skin disease beyond cancer, we will use modern language models to automatically map historic unstructured pathology reports to disease entities. 2) Scientific corpora: Guidance of general-purpose language-models will be used to transform medical scientific corpora towards an open knowledge graph. 3) Cross-modality entity representation: Training a long-tail multi-modal and multi-task foundation model with enable to objectively define diagnostic grey zones and narrow them. 4) Interaction with large image data: Retrieval-, annotation-, and language-based interaction modalities will be developed into a digital microscopy viewing interface to find the most efficient avenues in human-computer interaction for the analysis of large-size medical image data. In sum, this project employs a multifaceted approach to standardize pathways to understand large, multi-modal open-set data, and further explore further the field of human-computer interaction in highly specialized imaging professions. Results will be transferable to other medical specialties, and vision-based scientific fields in general.
Projet ERC : FrogWY (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Vrije Universiteit Brussel — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1437450.0 €

In sharp contrast to model organisms with degenerated Y/W chromosomes, many reptiles, fish and amphibians have mostly undifferentiated sex chromosomes and exhibit dynamics of birth and death of sex chromosomes. Why and how early-stage sex chromosomes and frequent turnovers are so prevalent across eukaryotes remain mysterious. This also raises pressing questions on alternative mechanisms leading to sex chromosome recombination arrest, their dynamics and stability. Frogs are ideal systems because they have mostly early-stage sex chromosomes and frequent turnovers. In this project, I will use the robber frogs to study unconventional sex chromosome evolution, challenging the paradigm predicted by the canonical model of ?degenerate Y/W?: 1. Does genome-wide reduced recombination always associate with the heterogametic sex? I will study an alternative mechanism driving sex chromosome recombination arrest, sex-specific telomere-restricted recombination, in 12 robber frogs with XY, ZW systems in a phylogenetic framework. 2. Do sex-determination turnovers repeatedly occur in frogs with heteromorphic sex chromosomes? I will identify sex chromosomes for each species and analyse the rate of turnovers in XY and ZW systems in a phylogenetic framework. I anticipate several independent transitions between sex-determination mechanisms, and more transitions within the XY or ZW system. 3. What are the genomic consequences of giant Ys and Ws, how do they form and differ? I will perform chromosome-level genome assembly to identify gene content on the Ys/Ws. I will detect inversions, evolutionary strata, compare transposable elements dynamics and dosage compensation mechanisms between XY and ZW systems.  If successful, this project will uncover alternative mechanisms driving sex chromosome recombination arrest, their dynamics and genomic features. It will reveal the mysterious formation of giant Ys/Ws. Together, this will conceptually extend boundaries of the canonical model.

Mots-clés : sex chromosomes,sexual selection,recombination
Projet ERC : VERITRACE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Vrije Universiteit Brussel — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1472349.0 €

VERITRACE addresses the influence of ancient wisdom writings on the development of early modern natural philosophy. During the Renaissance, works such as the Chaldean Oracles, the Sibylline Oracles, the Corpus Hermeticum and the Orphic Hymns were rediscovered and reappropriated into a prisca sapientia, a perennial tradition that considered these writings to contain truths about God, mankind, and the cosmos. Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Isaac Newton, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, foundational for the development of modern science, all ascribed to this tradition, and with them many others; yet so far no comprehensive account exist of exactly what they took from these ancient wisdom writings and how the idea of a perennial truth influenced their knowledge-making. This project focuses on the influence of the Renaissance prisca on early modern natural philosophy in its broadest sense by deploying existing yet bespoke techniques for distant reading on a large corpus of early modern printed works. It traces how the most prominent ancient wisdom writings returned in the natural philosophical discourse, what exactly natural philosophers took from these writings, and how these writings functioned in the economy of early modern science. It also traces the debate surrounding these ancient wisdom texts and the supposed truths contained therein throughout early modern Europe, differentiating between the various sentiments with which these texts were perceived, read, and discussed. As such, VERITRACE fills in a major lacuna in our understanding of the emergence and development of early modern science, focussing not on isolated events but on the movement as a whole, whilst making use of state-of-the-art digital techniques adapted for an early modern environment.

Mots-clés : natural philosophy,ancient wisdom,distant reading
Projet ERC : INEQNEWS (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Vrije Universiteit Brussel — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1154834.76 €

This project’s vision is to understand and develop strategies to mitigate inequalities in digital news consumption, the acquisition of political knowledge and vulnerability to misinformation. While inequalities in digital news access have been lowered with very high levels of internet access in many countries, there are indications that inequalities in digital news use and the benefits of being exposed to it, like the acquisition of political knowledge, are increasing. Academic literature has been instrumental in describing how digital intermediaries (e.g. social media or search engines) and different modes (mobile devices) have changed the way people consume news, however little attention has been given to how these changes manifest against the backdrop of pre-existing social inequalities in news use and the acquisition of political information. Thus, the project will a) reliably identify digital inequalities in news use, the acquisition of political knowledge, and vulnerability in online misinformation in countries of the Global North and the Global South. In its examination it will focus on b) long-standing informational inequalities related to social class, gender, and age and c) the role of new information technologies like digital intermediaries and mobile devices. Apart from identifying people with low levels of news use, this project will d) explore the ways that parts of the population navigate and face disadvantages in a complex digital media environment. Last, this project, will for the first time, e) test digital public health style interventions that could reduce inequalities in digital news use, political knowledge, and exposure to as well as belief in online misinformation. To achieve these objectives, this project will employ a novel set of methods. Overall, this project will be the first to examine and to find ways to alleviate inequalities in digital news use, using a holistic mixed-methods approach in a Global North/South comparative framework.

Mots-clés : news social media search engines digital inequalities digital intermediaries mixed methods
Projet ERC : CODE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, 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 : 1437497.5 €

The Competition in the Digital Era (CODE) project investigates the competition between China, Europe and the United States (US) for access and control of three critical technological sectors: semiconductors, cloud computing and space. These sectors are, respectively, the backbone, the brain and the legs of the current wave of technological innovation and they have a fundamental impact on economic, military and geopolitical hierarchies.  CODE proposes a multidisciplinary theoretical framework and an original mixed-method approach to study technology competition in these sectors. The main hypothesis of the project is that the very technological characteristics of the industrial sectors are key to explain when and why China, Europe and the US succeed in some sectors and struggle in others. Specifically, different combinations of cycle of technological change (the speed at which technologies evolve in each industrial sector) and the degree of modularity (the possibility to divide complex technical systems into components and outsource them to external suppliers) generate different hypotheses on the ability of China and Europe to compete with the US in semiconductors, cloud and space.  CODE is a high-risk project because investigates technologically complex and highly politicized sectors. Yet, it is also a high-gain project as simultaneously advances the debate on international relations (US-China geopolitical transition, Europe’s role in the world), political economy (role of the state in technology innovation, role of global value chains) and management and innovation (how technology competition unfolds in highly politicized sectors).

Mots-clés : geopolitics technology china europe political economy semiconductors cloud computing space competition
Projet ERC : CoRe Defense (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Vrije Universiteit Brussel — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1922876.12 €

Currently, we rely on antibiotics to combat potentially life-threatening gastrointestinal (GI) bacterial infections. However, the susceptibility to infection and the severity of symptoms can vary significantly among individuals exposed to the same pathogen.1–3 If we could unravel the factors responsible for differences in infection susceptibility, we could formulate strategies to reduce the incidence of symptomatic infections, ultimately saving lives and reducing the need for antibiotics. Traditionally, researchers have approached this puzzle from two main perspectives: a human-centered view, delving into the intricacies of the host immune system, or a pathogen-centered view, scrutinizing variations in bacterial strains. With CoRe defense, I advocate for a paradigm shift by adopting a microbiota-centered perspective. This approach is grounded in the concept of colonization resistance, the mechanism whereby the intestinal microbiota protects itself against incursion by new microorganisms. Despite their tremendous potential to prevent and treat bacterial infections, microbial alternatives to antibiotics are still spread thin as we currently lack adequate methods to select potential candidates. My aim is to develop a method for the selection of personalized bacterial consortia capable of preventing Campylobacteriosis. I will do so by investigating its ecological niche and competitors through metabolic modelling, screen for growth reducing bacterial strains or consortia using a newly developed in vitro co-culturing platform, and test colonization resistance predictions of a simple model based on these in silico and in vitro results in human-microbiome associated mice. By investigating the protective function of the microbiota, I will generate ground-breaking findings that will transform our understanding on factors governing bacterial infection susceptibility. It will usher in an era where we view bacteria not only as the problem but also as part of the solution.

Mots-clés : genome scale metabolic reconstruction of human microorganisms,community scale metabolic modelling,campylobacter,synthetic gut bacterial consortia,microbiota mediated colonization resistance
Projet ERC : CAGED (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Vrije Universiteit Brussel — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 765000.0 €

The worldwide increase in the number of individuals that are ageing behind bars sparks heightened concerns about the extent to which carceral environments can foster the foundational conditions for ageing individuals to lead meaningful lives. However, the underdevelopment of research on carceral ageing is one of the most significant contemporary challenges in the social scientific study of criminal behaviour and society’s response to it. Scholarship is particularly lagging behind in Europe. The CAGED project addresses this critical need by understanding how existential psychosocial changes induced by human ageing intersect with effects of incarceration. It is designed to bridge two distinct academic realms: gerontology, which encompasses the multidisciplinary study of ageing, and penology, which is the study of punishment and incarceration. The project will push disciplinary boundaries, both methodologically and theoretically, by applying an interactive mixed-methods and interdisciplinary approach that is guided by three objectives: First, it will delve into the existential dimensions woven into the narratives of incarcerated ageing individuals, by employing multi and novel interviewing methods. Secondly, the project will develop a novel instrument for measuring existential meaning among diverse regimes and groups of ageing individuals. The measurement will encompass all carceral environments in Belgium. Renowned for its diverse approaches to the integration and segregation of older individuals in carceral settings, it makes an excellent case study with broad relevance across European jurisdictions. The measuring study will also extend to an age-segregated facility for older adults in Germany, unique in Europe. In bringing these insights together, the project will finally culminate in a ground-breaking interdisciplinary theoretical framework. In its pursuit, CAGED will propel the field of carceral ageing studies forward and launch a new field of geronto-penology.

Mots-clés : ageing,incarceration,existential dimensions,meaning,mixed methods,interdisciplinary
Projet ERC : SharedSeas (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Université rhénane Frédéric-Guillaume de Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1494688.0 €

The ocean economy has exponentially expanded since the early 2000s, revealing how business-as-usual governance in the form of privatization and fragmented state strategies are insufficient for ensuring social justice and sustainability. Common property rights models – or commons - offer promising and transformative solutions for radically reforming ocean governance around shared rights, responsibilities and benefits to align stewardship and use. However, what remains unknown, is the viability, desirability and feasibility of commons as a scalable strategy. Answering these questions is urgent at all levels. Globally, the United Nations High Seas Treaty (adopted March 2023) mandates governing the high seas as a global commons, but with no clear governance pathways. Regionally, over 191 fragmented governance arrangements address transboundary issues but lack coordination and integration. Nationally, Blue Economy agendas are boosting growth without clear frameworks to deal with trade-offs, justice or sustainability. Locally, capacities are lacking for collective action, risk sharing and adaptation to climate and market changes.  SharedSeas examines the viability, desirability and feasibility of using common property rights as a sustainable and scalable ocean governance model. It builds the conceptual and theoretical foundations of how a commons-based Blue Economy can realistically function and scale (WP1). Empirical social-ecological analysis will extract lessons, challenges and best practices across multi-level cases (WP2). Transdisciplinary participatory methods with diverse stakeholders will be developed to co-create future scenarios and pathways to address trade-offs (WP3). To scale impact, SharedSeas has the ambitious goal to theoretically develop and empirically test eight pathways from amplification theory (stabilizing, speeding up, growing, spreading, transferring, replicating, scaling up, scaling deep) as avenues to mainstream commons in the Blue Economy (WP4).

Mots-clés : oceans,commons,governance,justice,scaling
Projet ERC : NINSERT (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Université Johannes-Gutenberg de Mayence — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : JGU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1462500.0 €

NINSERT constitutes a program to embark on selective and mild nitrogen insertions, both within and beyond carbonyl chemistry. Reagent development, catalyst design, and synergistic effects will be evaluated to provide a platform for late-stage skeletal editing, an area that has been recently brought to the forefront of organic chemistry. With a primary emphasis on heterocyclic motifs, commonly encountered in natural products and drug candidates, NINSERT offers a powerful tool to streamline future syntheses of nitrogen containing compounds. Notably, approximately 59% of all small-molecule drugs feature nitrogen heterocycles, underscoring the profound impact this program will have on pharmaceutical research. Adjusting physico¬chemical properties by late-stage nitrogen insertion will enable medicinal chemists to tailor the overall compound profile on its way to candidate-nomination and ultimately clinical studies. Furthermore, asymmetric methods, as elucidated in this proposal, will give rise to molecular complexity within the 3D chemical space. Guided by the principles of strain-release and molecular recognition, we will utilize our expertise on asymmetric ring expansion and atom insertion reactions to deliver highly selective methods applicable to both academic and industrial research. Despite the pioneering work of Beckmann and Schmidt over a century ago, nitrogen insertions have remained significantly constrained over the years, largely due to their substrate limitations, harsh reaction conditions, and unselective outcomes. The progression to selective and widely applicable nitrogen insertions has been long overdue and marks a major driving force behind the development of NINSERT.

Mots-clés : asymmetric catalysis,stereochemistry,molecular editing,e z isomerization,radical polar crossover