Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : CRUSLID (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 53912.5 €

The low density of the Earth’s continental crust has been proposed to be at the origin of plate tectonics. Physical studies on the continental crust have shown that its low density was acquired by differentiation of the crust and loss of dense mafic residues. What is the composition and vertical structure of the crusts of the other terrestrial planets, which do not show plate tectonics? How did they form and what are the modifications they have undergone following their formations? Are they far from being of continental-type? To answer these questions, I propose to study from a physical perspective the crust structure and the processes of crust formation and evolution on terrestrial planets other than Earth using innovative thermal, mechanical and dynamical models combined with new planetary observations. Temperature is a crucial control variable as it dictates phase changes, buoyancy, mechanical properties and stress state. In the crust and stagnant lithosphere of terrestrial planets, temperature is controlled by the distribution of heat producing elements. Lithosphere cooling being the most likely cause of quakes on stagnant-lid planets, we propose to constrain the concentration and distribution of heat producing elements on Mars and the Moon by comparing recorded and predicted seismicity from thermal evolution models. From these thermal evolution models, we will also evaluate the potential for planetary crust differentiation and evolution. From magma ascent models, sensitive to crust density and mechanical state, combined with systematic in quantitative observations of volcanic structures and deposits on terrestrial planets, we will constrain the crust structure and thermal state. Finally, we will develop new models of primitive crust formation in a stagnant lid regime of convection to evaluate the characteristics of primitive crusts on terrestrial bodies.

Mots-clés : crust,structure,dynamics,seismicity,stagnant lithosphere,magma ocean,thermal evolution,magma transport
Projet ERC : Couplet (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : University of Reading — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2127711.0 €

The magnitude and impacts of many aspects of projected climate change due to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are expected to be greater for larger global mean surface temperature change. Although climate models have hugely improved, knowledge has grown and confidence increased, the climate feedback parameter, which determines the amount of global warming that results at equilibrium for a given radiative forcing (the heating due to greenhouse gases and other agents) is still very uncertain; for example, the range of equilibrium warming for a CO2 concentration of twice the pre-industrial level is 1.5-4.5 K, the same as estimated 25 years ago. It is widely assumed that we can evaluate the climate feedback parameter from the observed past or from an idealised model experiment with increased CO2, then use it to estimate global warming for future scenarios. However, research has revealed that, as well as being uncertain, the climate feedback parameter is not constant; it depends on the nature and magnitude of the forcing agent, it changes over time under constant forcing, it does not apply equally to spontaneous unforced climate variability, and it is not the same in the historical record and projections. The hypothesis of this project is that these reflect inadequacies of the global energy balance framework, which relates radiative forcing, climate feedback and ocean heat uptake to transient climate change. The objectives are therefore to develop a new framework for describing the variations of the coupled atmosphere--ocean climate system, by taking into account the relationships between the geographical patterns of change and its time-development in analyses of simulated and observed climate change, and to apply this framework to the analysis of historical climate change, in order to set refined constraints on the processes, pattern and magnitude of future CO2-forced climate change.
Projet ERC : TICTOCGRAV (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : University of Florence — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999011.25 €

The main aim of the TICTOCGRAV is to explore the limits of contemporary physics with a new generation of atomic quantum sensors, namely optical atomic clocks and atomic gravimeters. After 100 years of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, both theories have been tested at an unprecedented level. Direct detection of gravitational waves is a great success and represents another impressive confirmation of the present theory of gravitation GR. Indeed, we are living a “Quantum Revolution”, in which advanced quantum concepts are at the heart of several devices, from precision navigation and location on Earth to secure communication protocols based on entangled photons. Despite all these great success in both areas, unfortunately, we still lack a full comprehension at the fundamental level. As a matter of fact, a full quantum treatment of space-time is still under discussion in the community. While several theoretical attempts have been pursued, a clear solution to the problem does not exist yet. Very likely, an answer to this problem will come from high precision experiments capable of measuring tiny gravitational effects on quantum systems as atomic clocks and quantum inertial sensors. TICTOCGRAV will address this questions experimentally by performing ultimate precision tests of gravity with fountains of alkali-earth metals, namely Cadmium and Strontium atoms. Specifically, TICTOCGRAV will perform the highest precision tests so far of: -the weak equivalence principle (WEP) below 10^-13 with quantum probes, exploring also possible tests of spin-gravity couplings at the same level; - quantum interference of high precision clocks in a gravitational potential; demonstrating for the first time gravity induced decoherence mechanisms, opening the way towards a possible explanation of quantum to classical transition in macroscopically entangled quantum systems.

Mots-clés : optical lattice clocks,atom interferometers,cadmium,strontium
Projet ERC : SUPRAVACC (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1924752.5 €

The main and most important feature of vaccines is the induction of an immunological memory response, which is key to providing long-term protection against pathogens. The current strategies for potent antibacterial and antiviral vaccines employ conjugation of pathogen specific entities onto carrier proteins, and are limited to formulations that suffer from low stability and short shelf-lives, and are thus not viable in developing countries. Strategies for the development of new vaccinations against endogenous diseases like cancer further remain an unmet challenge, since current methodologies suffer from a lack of a modular and tailored vaccine-specific functionalisation. I therefore propose a radically new design approach in the development of fully synthetic molecular vaccines. My team will synthesise carbohydrate and glycopeptide appended epitopes that are grafted onto supramolecular building blocks. These units can be individually designed to attach disease specific antigens and immunostimulants. Due to their self-assembling properties into nanoscaled pathogen mimetic particles, they serve as a supramolecular subunit vaccine toolbox. By developing a universal supramolecular polymer platform, we will construct multipotent vaccines from glycan-decorated peptides, that combine the activity of protein conjugates with the facile handling, precise composition and increased stability of traditional small molecule pharmaceutical compounds. SUPRAVACC will pioneer the design of minimalistic and broadly applicable vaccines, and will evaluate the supramolecular engineering approach for immunisations against antibacterial diseases, as well as for applications as antitumour vaccine candidates. The fundamental insights gained will drive a paradigm shift in the design and preparation of vaccine candidates in academic and industrial research laboratories.

Mots-clés : supramolecular polymers,bioorganic chemistry,glycopeptide,immunotherapy
Projet ERC : CAPTURE-CTC (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Universität Hamburg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UHH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 149750.0 €

The main cause of death in cancer patients is not the primary tumor but rather metastasis, which is initiated by the spread of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in the blood. Therefore, CTCs will become a valuable diagnostic tool, once a reliable, cost-effective method is established. Research in the ongoing ERC Advanced Investigator Grant DISSECT (PI: Klaus Pantel) has revealed clear limitations of existing platforms for the detection of CTCs. The enrichment and identification of CTCs out of a blood sample is still a major challenge, mainly because the ratio between CTCs and blood cells is approximately 1:109. The proposed CAPTURE-CTC project is based on this knowledge and aimed to develop and validate a novel improved platform for CTC detection: Pumping a suspension of blood cells through a microfluidic chip, only labeled CTCs get immobilized on a micro-pattern due to strong biotin-streptavidin interaction. Single cell analysis can be performed after the cells are quantified, optically localized and extracted from the pattern with a micro-capillary. This platform will be validated on cancer patients. The detection of CTCs is a very active field, targeted by several SMEs with approaches in different stages of development and/or clinical application. However, the only FDA-cleared assay for CTC detection is the “CellSearch CTC Test” which will be the benchmark in regard to performance, validity of results and cost per test. The CellSearch system has technical limitations (e.g., EpCAM-negative CTCs are not captured and it is a closed system that allows no easy access to the captured CTCs for subsequent molecular characterization analyses). Our proposed CAPTURE-CTC system will constitute a novel platform that will overcome these important limitations and establish an easy-to-use blood test allows further downstream analyses of CTCs as a “liquid biopsy” relevant to personalized cancer medicine.

Mots-clés : nanotechnology,microfluidic chips,cancer,circulating tumor cells,blood,liquid biopsy,targeted therapy,personalized medicine,oncology
Projet ERC : NovelExperiSENSE (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Hebrew University of Jerusalem — Pays : Israël — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : HUJI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 254381.25 €

The main goal of my research is to understand the origins of brain specialization and its flexibility across the lifespan. In our modern society Novel Sensory Experiences (NSE) and augmenting technologies are increasingly part of our everyday life (e.g. www.pokemongo.com). How does our brain deal with processing these new experiences? How much of its functional specializations and organization principle (e.g. topography in early sensory and motor brain areas) are already predefined by evolution and are locked after critical periods (i.e. early in life)? Our main hypothesis is that computational tasks, cognitive goals and partially innate network connectivity patterns, rather than sensory input per se, drive the emergence of brain specializations even after the critical periods pass. We base this also on our extensive experience with teaching blind to "see" with their ears using sensory substitution devices (SSDs) and the resulting brain specializations (including putative mechanisms). Here, we will extend, generalize and consolidate this theory by tracking in healthy adults the development of NSE (Novel since never experienced it before during life nor evolution). We suggest here to build 5 novel topographic devices (e.g. we developed recently the IRThermoSense for perceiving heat information and beyond walls thermal images without interfering with regular vision). We will also work with providing novel experiences to congenitally sensory deprived populations (e.g. deaf) to promote sensory restoration. In both cases, we aim to characterize the integration of NSEs in the brain using longitudinal self and supervised learning in virtual and real world environments and cutting-edge biologically inspired computational neuroimaging tools, with special emphasis on topography (similar to how natural senses are represented e.g. body homunculus and retinotopy), task-selective specializations, multisensory and sensorimotor binding, and the emergence of distal attribution.

Mots-clés : human brain plasticity,brain specializations,multisensory perception,novel sensory experiences,neural recycling theory,neuroimaging,homunculus,topographical organization,sensory restoration
Projet ERC : ModEv (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : University of Cologne — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1986017.0 €

The main goal of this proposal is to investigate and explain modularity of q-series. Modular forms generalize classical trigonometric functions because they are periodic; however, they have more symmetries. They play a central role in many areas including algebraic topology, arithmetic geometry, combinatorics, mathematical physics, number theory, and representation theory. The situation is complicated by the fact that often modularity is broken; it is however not always a priori clear in which way. We will see several such examples of broken modularity in this proposal. Many areas predict modularity of important functions but fail to provide a full understanding. Any progress made towards answering such questions will imply fundamental results at the frontier of number theory and other areas. The challenge that I am taking in this proposal is to push the boundaries further and to predict, prove, and understand modularity in various settings, particularly in moonshine, combinatorics, vertex algebras, and enumerative geometry. This understanding of modularity has also wide-reaching applications to number theory. I have many years of experience in answering modularity questions and already succeeded in proving many deep conjectures and in building theories, as we will see in this proposal. I will achieve my goal of better understanding modularity by investigating q-series arising in particular in moonshine, combinatorics, vertex algebras, and Gromov-Witten invariants; this makes this project interdisciplinary. For this I will take predictions from these areas as guiding principle and develop new methods along the way. In the past obstructions to modularity have been a stumbling block. I will overcome this problem by a more systematic study of the occurring objects. A successful outcome of the proposed research will open new doors as I will have my newly developed machinery at hand which will apply in other areas as well.

Mots-clés : modular forms,modularity,q series,moonshine,physics,combinatorics,vertex algebras,enumerative geometry,multidisciplinary
Projet ERC : SolarPredict (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CEA
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 149913.0 €

The main idea of the SolarPredict Proof of Concept project is to use physically based dynamo models to make solar 11-yr activity predictions, in particular of Earth impacting events, more robust/reliable and to develop the tools to make them accessible (with the appropriate licencing and IPR) to customers (such as private corporations or governmental agencies) as a service, software or paid/freemium applications. The key advantage of our tools/techniques over current ones is both our deep knowledge of the working of the solar dynamo and magnetism and the implementation in solar physics of state-of-the-art variational data assimilation (DA) techniques used daily in weather forecasting. These variational techniques are known to be more robust and versatile than for instance sequential methods or simple geomagnetic precursors thus allowing us to incorporate the highly complex solar magnetic activity and dynamics into our forecasting tools. Thanks to our advanced 2-D direct and adjoint mean field dynamo codes and modern DA technique, we will assimilate the most relevant solar observational data (sunspots numbers, polar cap magnetic field, surface flows...) into our prediction model hence allowing us to develop an operational prototype. Indeed major solar storms are strongly correlated to the intensity of solar cycle and 80% of them are directly due to the presence of complex active regions that are more frequent as the 11-yr cycle intensifies. Thus being able to anticipate the level and geometry of solar global magnetism give us a competitive edge in predicting major solar storms. We will thus bring with the SolarPredict project, our novel variational DA solar prediction algorithm to a more mature state such as to make it operational and useful to private companies and governmental agencies in order to help them evaluate the economic cost of solar activity and associated storms and protect their assets by anticipating such devastating solar activity.

Mots-clés : solar 11 yr activity and magnetism,societal impact,services,novel data assimilation techniques in solar physics,dynamo
Projet ERC : COINFLIP (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : University of Tübingen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1497375.0 €

The main objective of this project is to design optical switches with a response time < 5 ps, a switching energy < 1 fJ/bit and compatibility with silicon technology to excel in high-speed data processing at low heat dissipation. This will be pursued by combining the chemistry of inorganic, nanocrystalline colloids and organic semiconductor molecules to fabricate thin films of organic-inorganic hybrid nanostructures. Optical switches play a pivotal role in modern data processing based on silicon photonics, where they control the interface between photonic optical fibers used for data transmission and electronic processing units for computing. Data transfer across this interface is slow compared to that in optical interconnects and high-speed silicon transistors, such that faster optical switching accelerates the overall speed of data processing of the system as a whole. By modifying the surface of the inorganic nanocrystals with conductive molecular linkers and self-assembly into macroscopic solid state materials, new electronic and photonic properties arise due to charge transfer at the organic/inorganic interface. The multiple optical resonances in these hybrid materials result in strong optoelectronic interactions with external light beams, which are exploited for converting photonic into electronic signals at unprecedented speed. A key concept here is an activated absorption mechanism, in which the nanocrystals act as sensitizers with short-lived excited states, which are activated by a first optical pump beam. Efficient charge transfer at the organic/inorganic interface temporarily creates additional resonances in the molecular linkers, which may be probed by a second optical beam for as long as the sensitizer is in its excited state. Utilizing nanocrystals with excited state lifetimes < 5ps will reward ultrafast response times to pave the way for novel optical switches and high-speed data processing rates for silicon photonics.
Projet ERC : NATURAL_BAT_NAV (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Weizmann Institute of Science — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

The mammalian hippocampal formation contains place cells, grid cells, head-direction cells and border cells, which collectively represent the animal’s position (‘map’), distance traveled (‘odometer’) and direction (‘compass’), and are thought to underlie navigation. These neurons are typically studied in rodents running on linear tracks or in small empty boxes, ~1×1 m in size. However, real-world navigation differs dramatically from typical laboratory setups, in at least three ways – which we plan to study: (1) The world is not empty, but contains objects and goals. Almost nothing is known about how neural circuits represent goal location – which is essential for navigating towards the goal. We will record single-neuron activity in bats flying towards spatial goals, in search for cells that encode vectorial information about the direction and distance to the goal. Preliminary results support the existence of such cells in the bat hippocampal formation. This new functional cell class of vectorial goal-encoding neurons may underlie goal-directed navigation. (2) The world is not flat, but three-dimensional (3-D). We will train bats to fly in a large flight-room and examine 3-D grid cells and 3-D border cells. (3) The world is not 1-m in size, and both rodents and bats navigate over kilometer-scale distances. Nothing is known about how the brain supports such real-life navigation. We will utilize a 1-km long test facility at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and record place cells and grid cells in bats navigating over biologically relevant spatial scales. Further, we will compare neural codes for space in wild-born bats versus bats born in the lab – which have never experienced a 1-km distance – to illuminate the role of experience in mammalian spatial cognition. Taken together, this set of studies will bridge the gap – a conceptual gap and a gap in spatial scale – between hippocampal laboratory studies and real-world natural navigation.

Mots-clés : place cells,grid cells,border cells,hippocampus,entorhinal cortex,neurophysiology,spatial cognition,navigation,bats