Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : GRIP-ARM (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Erasmus University Rotterdam — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : EUR
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Our new global political economy is increasingly defined by ‘critical raw materials’ – of which rare earths elements (or ‘rare earths’) are the most significant. The proposed study examines the globalized supply and demand for rare earths – from mining, processing, manufacturing, use and recycling – to have a closer scrutiny of mining both as a strategy for industrialization and as an integral part of contemporary efforts towards a sustainable supply of raw materials. GRIP-ARM interrogates the dynamics in rare earth mining that might lend this particular resource a tool for economic development. The project seeks to answer the following questions: (1) How do state capacity, business power and organizational structure of domestic markets shape the design of industrial policies in resource-rich countries? (2) What explains the success of some countries in generating linkages between resource extraction and manufacturing, and what accounts for their failure? (3) How effective are the responses of importing countries and their manufacturing industries in securing a stable supply while reducing the socio-environmental costs of extraction? The proposed research is one of the first systematic, comparative study on rare earths mining and economic development, which brings political science perspectives in conversation with natural resource geography and international political economy.

Mots-clés : development studies,political economy
Projet ERC : RewardedPerception (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Universitätsmedizin Göttingen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UMG
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1444079.0 €

Our perceptual system needs to maintain a balance between selectivity and sensitivity, so that redundant information is dismissed, but novel and important information does not go unnoticed. Selective attention and reward value are among mechanisms that adjust this balance, by exerting top-down control over bottom-up sensory processing. Excessive reliance on top-down signals has been suggested to underlie pathologic conditions, such as hallucinations. In contrast, controlled boosting of top-down signals is a potential tool to rehabilitate impaired sensory functions. Despite their importance, key aspects of top-down and bottom-up interactions have remained unknown: We do not know how abstract, non-sensory signals, such as reward value, could exert specific sensory effects; it is unclear how they are transmitted across sensory modalities and what the underlying neural mechanisms are. Here, I will try to provide answers to these questions by combining behavioural testing, neuroimaging, and non-invasive brain stimulation techniques in humans. I will use a novel approach, where abstract reward value of a stimulus is linked to a sensory modality label. This enables me to trace how value-driven, top-down signals are communicated to sensory areas and how they impact on different aspects of perception: from detection of external signals to perception of illusory associations. Using brain imaging techniques, I will distinguish between regions where the sensory modality label is represented, and regions where reward value signals are coded, regardless of their sensory modality. Finally, I will test whether non-invasive perturbation of regions containing sensory modality labels impairs perception in the respective modalities, thereby testing if these regions play a causal role in selective top-down interactions. This project will therefore provide a mechanistic understanding of functional circuits that underlie the effects of reward value on sensory perception in humans.

Mots-clés : sensory perception,reward value,top down modulation,brain imaging
Projet ERC : RECENT-TO-REMOTE (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Hebrew University of Jerusalem — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HUJI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1637500.0 €

Our remote memories, weeks to decades long, define who we are and how we experience the world, yet almost nothing is known about the neuronal ensembles encoding them, or the mechanisms underlying the transition from recent to remote memory. I propose a novel hypothesis explaining the selection of the ensembles supporting remote memories based on their activity, connectivity and stability. I further suggest that 'systems consolidation', underlying the transition from recent to remote memory, is implemented by ongoing interactions between brain regions. Finally, I propose a novel role for astrocytes in recent and remote memory. My Specific Objectives are to: 1) Provide multi-dimensional characterization of the neuronal ensembles supporting recent and remote memory, by using activity-based tagging to show how recent and remote recall ensembles differ in activity, connectivity and stability. 2) Perturb the functional connectivity underlying 'systems consolidation' by employing connectivity-based tagging to label specific hippocampal and cortical projection neurons, image their activity during recent and remote memory, and causally demonstrate their functional significance to systems consolidation. 3) Determine the role of astrocytes in recent and remote memory consolidation and retrieval. We will manipulate astrocytes to show their role in recent and remote memory, ensemble allocation, and long-distance communication between neuronal populations. We will image astrocytic activity during a memory task to test if they can independently encode memory features, and how their activity corresponds to that of the neurons around them. This pioneering ERC project, comprised of innovative and ambitious experiments going far and beyond the state of the art in the field, will drive considerable progress to our contemporary understanding of the transition from recent to remote memory, identifying ensemble dynamics and critical projections and how they are modulated by astrocytes.

Mots-clés : remote memory,astrocytes,neuronal ensembles,memory allocation,anterior cingulate cortex  acc,hippocampus
Projet ERC : METASCALE (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : University of Vienna — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Univie
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1483477.0 €

Our understanding of how genomic changes translate into organismal novelties is often confounded by the complexity of the underlying genome architecture. My previous studies revealed a complex interplay between several levels of genomic organization during major metazoan evolutionary transitions, ranging from modifications of regulatory elements to the gene order on the chromosomal scale. A major gap in our understanding is the extent to which those different genomic scales are evolutionarily linked and reflect an inherent functional property or mode of genome evolution. In this proposal, I focus on the emerging model system within the highly advanced clade of cephalopod molluscs, the Hawaiian bobtail squid Euprymna scolopes, to study how changes in the mode of metazoan genome evolution have yielded unique cephalopod innovations (e.g., the largest invertebrate brain). To address this question, I will (1) take a novel global pan-metazoan comparative genomics approach to test and reveal the extent of genomic character co-evolution, identifying, for the first time, modes of genome evolution. I will then (2) test whether co-evolving characters form inherent regulatory units in metazoan genomes by an in-depth characterization using emerging and available regulatory genomic data. Finally, using latest molecular approaches, I will (3) study the regulatory composition of co-evolving character units associated with cephalopod brain development and functionally test their organismal impact. This proposal will develop a novel and holistic approach to study genome evolution, constituting a departure from the previous analyses based on individual genomic characters. It will link genomic evolutionary units to their function, revealing the genomic changes behind major innovations (cephalopod brain). Finally, this project will develop predictive models that use evolutionary data to identify novel regulatory units aiding both biological and biomedical applications.

Mots-clés : cephalopods,genomics
Projet ERC : PanScales (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 895125.45 €

Over the coming years, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will search for new physics at ever higher energies, firmly establish many facets of the Standard Model that relate to the Higgs boson, and carry out a broad range of precision measurements. A tool that is central to this endeavour is the parton shower. Parton showers are immensely flexible tools, which simulate the strong-interaction physics that occurs between the TeV energy scales that the LHC was designed to probe, and the GeV mass scale of the protons and other hadrons that the LHC collides and detects. They are used in almost every LHC experimental analysis. Of all the first-principles theoretical methods used at the LHC, the parton shower is the only one that has not seen substantial advances in its underlying precision in the past 20 years. As a result, parton showers are becoming the critical weak link in LHC physics. This project will radically transform the way in which parton showers are conceived, by introducing innovative methods that establish the relation with another field of research called resummation, to which the PI has made ground-breaking contributions. The main outcome of the project will be a novel parton shower with accuracies up to an order of magnitude higher than in current approaches. This will be essential for reliably exploiting the information that is present across the full range of energy scales at high-energy colliders.

Mots-clés : higgs physics,quantum chromodynamics  qcd,monte carlo simulation,parton shower
Projet ERC : PALAEOFARM (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems Engineering
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 510744.25 €

Over the last 50 years, chicken production has increased fivefold, chicken growth rate has tripled, and milk production per cow has doubled. Yet, many of the biotechnological tools responsible for this accelerated trend are now under threat of becoming obsolete. While the causes are numerous, one significant driver is a dramatic reduction of genetic diversity in livestock populations. Cycles of agricultural productivity growth and decline have occurred throughout European history, spurred by major historical forces such as the spread of empires and continent-wide epidemics. For example, productivity crashed between the 4th-13th centuries, only to rebound during the Agricultural Revolution of the 13-18th centuries. Fluctuating levels of genetic diversity were likely both cause and remedy to these cycles. Genetic diversity acts as a fuel for selection: the lower it is, the more difficult it is to improve traits, and the more likely that epidemics will develop and spread. Given this importance, maintaining diversity amongst livestock is recognised as one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Despite this, we lack any understanding of how much genetic variability was present, and subsequently lost, before, during, and after either the Green or Agricultural Revolutions, nor do we understand how efficiently it was utilised. PALAEOFARM will assess the long-term sustainability of modern breeding practices by unravelling how genetic variability was leveraged across major agricultural transitions in European history. Using an innovative combination of ancient DNA, archaeozoology, and experimental immunology, I will explore how livestock populations withstood epidemics and selective breeding in a world without antibiotics or quantitative genetic techniques. This will provide a novel perspective on how a multi-billion euro industry, responsible for feeding billions of people, can be sustained in the face of major biotechnological obsolescence.

Mots-clés : livestock genomics,population genomics,ancient dna,immunology
Projet ERC : TKI resistance (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Institut Gustave Roussy — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IGR
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Over the past 10 years, the chemotherapeutic arsenal has been expanded to include molecular-targeted therapies based on the principle that cancer cells become addicted to a single driver oncogene. However, use of these new therapies is limited due to development of acquired resistance. To fully understand how resistance develops, patient-derived models are an absolute pre-requisite, but establishing them remains extremely challenging. Few groups worldwide have successfully implemented a systematic standardized approach to facilitate translational cancer research discovery. My project aims to provide rational therapeutic guidance for combinatorial or adaptive designs to overcome acquired resistance to tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) in patients with oncogene-addiction. By establishing new laboratory models of resistance directly from patient biopsies (patient derived cell lines and xenografts) I will elucidate the molecular mechanisms whereby cancer cells escape targeted treatments. I will then implement innovative approaches to overcome resistance using TKI combinatorial screens, apoptosis sensitizers and by screening for epigenetic modifiers. Additionally, I will scrutinize the emergence of resistance acquisition in vitro. Current working models involve “persistor” cellular populations able to tolerate the TKI and, in a subsequent step, to become fully resistant to the drug. This drug tolerant persistor stage most probably involves epigenetic reprogrammation. An epigenetic inhibitor screen will be performed to identify agents able to interfere with the emergence of persistors and ultimately with the acquisition of TKI resistance. These results should provide an alternative strategy to validate innovative combinatorial drug strategies to avoid emergence of resistance in patients.

Mots-clés : tyrosine kinase inhibitor targeted therapy resistance
Projet ERC : 3D MAGiC (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Radboud University Nijmegen — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000242.0 €

Over the past 150 years, many of the greatest questions in physics, spanning astronomical dimensions to quarks, have addressed how particles can emerge in continuous fields. In this highly exploratory project, we will open a window into the behavior and control of some of the least explored and most puzzling objects in nanomagnetism: three-dimensional (3D) magnetic solitons (MSs). These are spatially localized stable magnetization textures that have particle-like properties and are expected to move and interact in 3D in magnetic crystals and heterostructures in a similar manner to ordinary particles. Until now, their theoretical study has been restricted to simple models, while the experimental study of individual 3D MSs is nearly unexplored as a result of their deep-sub-micron size and a current lack of suitable characterization techniques. We bring together four complementary research groups with expertise in theoretical descriptions of magnetism, device physics and magnetic characterization with high spatial and temporal resolution. Methodological breakthroughs by the partners will enable new fundamental theoretical and experimental insights into the nucleation, stability, dynamics and transport of 3D MSs, which are predicted to be influenced strongly by their nontrivial topology. Particular attention will be paid to the manner in which 3D MSs can be controlled and manipulated dynamically. This project will open the field of 3D magnetization textures at the nanoscale to fundamental science,with a view to enabling disruptive applications. 3D MSs are foreseen to play the role of information carriers that can move freely in any spatial direction and to offer a key advance over conventional 2D magnetization textures. Results from the project will provide guidelines for their use in applications that include magnetic storage technology and neuromorphic information processing systems and enable the realization of pervasive new 3D device concepts.

Mots-clés : transmission electron microscopy,off axis electron holography,skyrmions,hopfions
Projet ERC : N-T-AUTONOMY (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Vienna — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Univie
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1161556.0 €

Over the past 150 years, non-territorial autonomy has been one of three models for dealing with linguistic or ethnic minorities within several European states. Compared with the other two, i.e. the recognition of minority rights as individual rights and territorial self-rule, non-territorial autonomy has received little attention. This project proposes to write the first history of non-territorial autonomy as an applied policy tool in minority protection and as an intellectual concept with a chequered history across Europe. Intellectuals, politicians, and legal scholars across the political spectrum from the far left to the far right supported this idea, although they were aware of the risks of strengthening national differences by promoting such a collective approach to minority protection. The project explores how this idea of granting cultural rights to a national group as a corporate body within a state, as a means of integrating diverse nationalities, travelled and transformed throughout the Habsburg Empire from 1850 to the present. We propose to 1) trace the development/circulation of theoretical conceptions and political applications of non-territorial autonomy within the Habsburg Empire, by mapping the networks of scholars as well as politicians who advocated for it; 2) explain the continuities in the development of the idea, and its manifestations in policies adopted by interwar Central and Eastern European nation states, where communists, socialists, liberals and fascists alike were able to translate elements of non-territorial autonomy into their ideologies and programs; 3) analyse the treatment of non-territorial autonomy, which was advocated by minority lobby groups, in international minority protection in the 20th century despite strong opposition to practices based on it by international organisations. We rely on a mixture of historiographical methods developed in nationalism studies to analyse the idea’s translation in entangled transnational spaces.

Mots-clés : minority protection,habsburg empire,central and eastern europe,interwar europe,international minority rights,intellectual history,nationalism studies
Projet ERC : TransCause (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : Natural History Museum — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Organismes publics (hors enseignement & recherche)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 282731.25 €

Over the past 25 years, knowledge of the origins, evolution and diversity of our species has increased dramatically. Yet, the behavioural mechanisms enabling their global expansion and ability to cope with ever-increasing ecological diversity are still not fully explored. Armenia, a little studied biodiversity hotspot of Eurasia, is an ideal natural laboratory for testing models of climatic impact on hominin settlement patterns and population dynamics due to its location at the crossroads of the Pleistocene hominin world. TransCause aims to expand the framework of population dynamics by building an intra-regional comparative database of Paleolithic occupations incorporating biological evolution of macro-and micro mammals using ancient DNA, as well as establishing refined environmental frameworks. The TransCause project focuses on two main research questions, what are the impacts of long-term climatic and environmental changes on hominin behavioural repertoire and population dynamics? And what are the adaptations of Pleistocene hominins to changing seasonal resource availability in the landscapes of Armenia? Past hunter-gatherer’s social networks would be studied as a possible solution for populations coping with such terrains. The results of the project will test the presence or absence of population resilience over time; moreover, it will evaluate hypotheses on hominin behavioural responses to variation in resource availability using multi-scalar models; ultimately, those results will examine and compare the population dynamics of humans, large mammals and small mammals against the backdrop of paleoenvironmental oscillations. Examining the ecological tipping point of survival in both hominids and mammals will change the way in which we grasp hominin population dynamics. This project will be of pivotal importance for understanding the economic, demographic and social mechanisms behind the behavioural elasticity which enabled our species to expand globally.