Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : BrainScape (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1527125.0 €

BrainScape constitutes a timely approach to study a widely unexplored aspect in the neurosciences, namely whether and how the physical environment that surrounds us day in, day out impacts our brain, well-being and mental health. BrainScape aims to spearhead the emerging field of Environmental Neuroscience and will make an impact by building a knowledge base for evidence-based urban planning to promote healthy living environments with significant practical implications. Given that our environment is undergoing rapid changes (urbanization, climate change), understanding how these changes may impact humanity is a crucial challenge of our time. First evidence suggests that long-term as well as day-to-day variations in exposure to solitary environmental factors (e.g. air pollution) may be relevant. The goal of BrainScape is twofold: (1) to identify the “active ingredients” of the environment by introducing a more holistic understanding of the environment, as a multi-layered complex phenomenon and (2) to gain insight into the pathways and mechanisms by which the environment affects the brain and mental health. To accomplish this, BrainScape will utilize existing large-scale cross-sectional and longitudinal neuroimaging data sets (UK Biobank, NAKO, HCHS, IMAGEN) to identify the most important features of the physical environment. These features will be at the core of prospective controlled studies, including a discordant monozygotic twin study. Here we will combine the assessment of objectively experienced (e.g., wearable sensors) and subjectively perceived environment with brain plasticity measured using 7 T MRI. The identification of the most influential environmental salutogenic features will inform a targeted intervention study and experiments in highly controlled lab environments using innovative VR technology combined with fMRI and fNIRS. The results will unravel the “active ingredients” of nature and the neural mechanisms by which they affect human beings.

Mots-clés : brain plasticity,environmental psychology,environmental neuroscience
Projet ERC : COSMIC-KEY (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1997500.0 €

Observational programs aimed at mapping the large-scale structure of the Universe, such as eROSITA and Euclid, are ushering in the era of Precision Cosmology. Our knowledge will soon transition from being limited by statistical errors, to being hindered by systematic uncertainties. These systematics arise from the theoretical modeling adopted to fit the data and the complex physics of galaxy formation, whose effects are often neglected. In fact, powerful feedback processes from supermassive black holes (SMBHs) affect the phase-space and thermodynamical properties of the gas within haloes and beyond, in turn modifying the expectations for the cosmological observables and the large-scale matter distribution. In order to fulfill the potential of observational cosmology, we must take a far-reaching step forward by a) designing novel types of large-scale simulations that model gaseous haloes and the effects of SMBH feedback to unprecedented levels of realism and by b) providing quantitative and trustworthy — that is, physically-motivated and observationally-validated — prescriptions for cosmological analyses. Starting from the well-validated IllustrisTNG hydrodynamical simulations, we will extend their scope to more massive systems with a new suite, TNG-Cluster. We will provide a library of baryon-informed formulae for cosmological constraints with galaxies, groups, and clusters as well as design novel observational tests for SMBH feedback models. Going beyond the state-of-the-art, we will develop numerical models that account for the effects of the multi-phase structure of the gas, of radiation, and of more sophisticated SMBH physics by using new simulation techniques and by complementing the AREPO code with on-the-fly machine learning-based methods. These will enable groundbreaking large-scale simulations, new types of comparisons to observations of both the hot and cold halo gas, and, ultimately, novel and independent analyses of available cosmological data.

Mots-clés : cosmological magneto hydrodynamical simulations galaxy formation and evolution groups and clusters of galaxies feedback from supermassive black holes gaseous haloes circumgalactic medium,intra group and intra cluster medium cosmology with groups and clusters erosita
Projet ERC : WILD-ROOTS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IRTA
Type d'entité : Autres
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999141.0 €

Crop domestication revolutionised human life. This process induced changes in plant traits that produced plants that grew faster and generated higher yields. However, remarkably little is known about how plant roots have changed throughout the domestication process. Climate change is causing increasing droughts in many parts of the world. Given that roots are the way that water enters the plant, they are key for understanding drought tolerance. Root traits from crop ancestors could offer a route to increasing drought tolerance of modern crops. To do this, we need to focus our efforts on the impact of domestication on roots and the rhizosphere (the zone around the root including microbes), rather than only aboveground traits as traditionally done. WILD-ROOTS will therefore test the overall hypothesis that crop domestication led to changes in root and rhizosphere traits which decreased the drought tolerance of crops compared to their wild relatives. WILD-ROOTS will make a holistic study of the roots and rhizospheres of a wide range of crops from diverse origins. There will be a focus on root exudation and volatile organic compound (VOC) emission, which are vital root processes that are crucial for many types of interactions with plants, animals, microbes and the soil itself. Changes in root exudates and VOCs have been observed during drought conditions, but their roles in the drought tolerance of plants remains unclear. WILD-ROOTS will (1) evaluate domestication effects on the roots and rhizosphere, then (2) elucidate the mechanisms relating belowground traits to drought tolerance, and finally (3) use this knowledge to modernise crop models and identify belowground traits to be exploited for drought-proofing current crops. The results will reshape our fundamental knowledge of both the crop domestication process and how root exudation influences drought tolerance, as well as offering new approaches to boost the food security of current and future agricultural systems.

Mots-clés : root exudates,rhizosphere,crop wild relatives,drought,microbes,vocs,roots
Projet ERC : UNI PROB (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université autonome de Barcelone — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1669575.16 €

Is the human mind an evolutionary one-off? Or does it reflect a ‘universal mind’ in which similar cognitive mechanisms repeatedly evolve via convergent evolution? Avian cognition offers a powerful model system for answering this fundamental question about the nature of our mind, because birds last shared a common ancestor with humans 312 million years ago and have evolved brains with a very different structure. However, to unlock the potential of this model system we need to robustly test whether mechanistic convergence has occurred between the minds of birds and humans (the convergent mind hypothesis) and rule out cognitive similarities between birds and humans due to shared ancestry (the ancestral mind hypothesis). UNI PROB takes advantage of decades of research on probabilistic inference, a central, but imperfect aspect of human cognition, to overcome these challenges. To test for mechanistic convergence, UNI PROB will use the cognitive biases and errors humans show in their probabilistic inferences (e.g. the conjunction fallacy, base rate neglect and the hot hand fallacy) as diagnostic signatures for the presence of a similar cognitive system in a species demonstrating the best performances on probabilistic inference tasks of any animal tested to date: the kea parrot. To test for shared ancestry, UNI PROB will present novel, non-verbal probabilistic inference problems not only to humans and kea, but also to a phylogenetic control for shared ancestry: rats. If convergent evolution has occurred, then only humans and kea will solve these problems while showing the same cognitive biases and errors. By testing for the convergent evolution of this cognitive system, UNI PROB can generate conclusive evidence that probabilistic biases are adaptive features of the human mind and discover if there is a new frontier in cognitive science, namely a universal mind that evolves repeatedly via convergent evolution.

Mots-clés : comparative cognition,intelligence,probabilistic inference,evolution
Projet ERC : DIGINEQ (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université autonome de Barcelone — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1746579.7 €

In our highly unequal and digitalised world, understanding how adolescents’ digital lives intersect with social inequalities is critical. Research has consistently shown that adolescents from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds are advantaged in their academic, health and socioemotional outcomes. However, how adolescents’ digital engagement relates to social inequalities in well-being is poorly understood. DIGINEQ significantly contributes to close this major scientific gap. The project applies an innovative 24-hour time-use approach that brings a complex understanding of how exactly adolescents’ digital time use shapes social inequalities in well-being in daily life. DIGINEQ has three main objectives:  1. To understand how changes in digital engagement from childhood to late adolescence explain socioeconomic disparities in well-being outcomes. 2. To disentangle how exactly adolescents’ digital time use forms social inequalities in their well-being in everyday life. 3. To establish if digital interventions can promote adolescents’ healthy digital engagement and improve well-being outcomes, while reducing socioeconomic gaps in these areas. By adopting a novel approach that combines multiple disciplines and methodologies, this project brings three major scientific innovations: (1) it creates an innovative method based on mobile-app data to accurately track adolescents’ exact digital time use and measure socioeconomic gaps in well-being in real time; (2) it implements a novel mixed-method digital intervention to show if digital self-efficacy programmes can promote adolescents’ healthy digital engagement and improve well-being outcomes, while reducing related socioeconomic gaps; (3) it merges existing high-quality longitudinal time-diary data from three largescale surveys in Australia, Ireland, and the United States to illustrate how adolescents’ digital time use explains socioeconomic gaps in well-being from childhood to late adolescence.

Mots-clés : time use social inequalities adolescent well being screen time quantitative sociology
Projet ERC : 3POLE2SEA (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Wageningen University & Research — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : WUR
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999689.0 €

The high mountains of South Asia, often called ‘the Third Pole’, store large volumes of water in their glaciers and snowpacks. Twelve large river basins, fed with meltwater from these mountains, are home to almost 2 billion people. In their floodplains, a significant fraction of the global food is produced (34% and 23% of the global rice and wheat production respectively). This makes the ‘Third Pole’ by far the most important region globally in terms of water reserves on which both water- and food security for a huge population heavily depend.  The water supply from the Third Pole mountains faces many threats. Glaciers and snowpacks are melting at unprecedented rates, and large parts of these reservoirs are likely to disappear by the end of the 21st century. The dependence of downstream populations on mountain water resources is however increasing, mainly due to increasing water needs, continuing groundwater depletion and changes in (monsoon) precipitation.  There is still limited scientific understanding of the impacts of melting glaciers and snowpacks on food and water security of people living downstream. 3POLE2SEA aims to quantify the links between the water stored in the High Mountains of Asia and the water- and food security of the people living downstream, evaluate how those links will change in the future, and use this understanding to support adaptation design. I hypothesize that the 12 river basins have very different upstream-downstream dependencies, resulting in different, cascading risks for water and food security, and therefore need different responses for effective adaptation.  I will develop new models and methods to quantify upstream-downstream links and associated risks for all river basins that are fed by glacier- and snowmelt from the Third Pole. The results will advance science and inform policy makers and water managers on how to make agriculture in one of the largest food producing areas in the world more resilient to changes in the mountains.

Mots-clés : glacier melt,snow melt,climate change,high mountain asia,hydrology,food security,upstream downstream linkages
Projet ERC : DEMODRIVERS (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université autonome de Barcelone — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2765537.0 €

This project aims to reconstruct the human demography of SW Amazonia during the Holocene and to reveal the role of environmental and cultural changes in shaping it. Despite decades of research, the relative importance of environmental vs cultural factors in determining prehistoric population growth is still one of archaeology’s greatest scientific challenges. Reaching an agreement about the drivers of demographic dynamics is very difficult because of the fragmentary, incomplete and biased nature of archaeological records. DEMODRIVERS is designed to overcome this problem. This five-year interdisciplinary project will investigate the patterns and drivers of human demographic dynamics by focusing on a regional case study, the Llanos de Moxos (LM) in the Bolivian Amazon, that has a potentially unparalleled explanatory power. This region at the southwestern end of the Amazon hosts a recently discovered, almost complete archaeological record, made up of 4700 sites spanning 8300 years and distributed over 100,000 km2. This area is unique in the world, offering us the first opportunity to quantify how far demographic trends and patterns responded to exogenous (climate, landscape) and endogenous (culture, technology) variables. This project will exploit the full potential of the LM archaeological record by taking an unconventional approach: the density of the occupation and its spatial and temporal boundaries will be measured by studying 150 stratigraphic cores extracted from 100 evenly distributed archaeological sites. The approach is interdisciplinary, integrating conventional archaeology with state-of-art geoarchaeology, biomarkers, paleoclimatology, palaeoecology and artificial intelligence. The results of the project will provide a very thoroughly documented case study against which other models and reconstructions based on incomplete, fragmented and often biased datasets can be compared. The results of the project have broad implications across several disciplines.

Mots-clés : amazonia,archaeology,sedentism,paleoenvironment,paleoclimate,geochemistry,biomarkers,phytoliths,isotopes
Projet ERC : HybridExpress (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Université de Lund — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Hybridization has been documented to the extent where its importance for generating evolutionary novelty can no longer be questioned. In spite of this, we lack an understanding of the evolution of regulation of gene expression in hybrids, and its role in hybridization derived novelty. Gene expression evolves in a stabilizing manner where cis(local)- and trans(distal) regulatory elements co-evolve. As hybridization breaks up co-inheritance of regulatory elements transgressive hybrid expression patterns, transcending the ranges of both parent species, may arise in spite of intermediate genome composition. I propose to leverage my finding of transgressive gene expression in a wild hybrid species and address how hybridization produces transgressive gene expression. This research will give insights into how hybridization can contribute to the arrival of the fittest, by producing novel variation that selection can act on.  Objectives: 1. To determine how regulation of gene expression in hybrids can produce evolutionary novelty 2. To unravel the roles of hybridization induced transposable element-releases, alterations of methylation and larger structural variants in hybrid specific gene expression 3. To uncover the role of gene expression in avian hybrid sterility. I will use four independent hybrid lineages of the Italian sparrow and experimental F1 hybrids to achieve these ambitious goals. HybridExpress will i) Uncover how hybrid gene expression can transcend parental ranges, producing evolutionary novelty, ii) Contribute insights into how the variation selection acts on arises, iii) Increase our understanding of hybrid genotype-phenotype maps, and iv) Reveal the role of hybrid misexpression in reproductive isolation.  Interdisciplinary character: This proposal will make extensive use of genomic methods and hence overlaps to some degree with the LS2 panel, but as the question addressed is evolutionary I deem the proposal best suited for evaluation by the LS8 panel.

Mots-clés : hybridization,transgressive variation,evolution of gene expression,novel variation,transposable elements,chromosomal inversions,cpg methylation,hybrid sterility,reproductive isolation
Projet ERC : QPHOTON (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Université de Lund — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2533247.5 €

With the proposed research programme we plan to pioneer a platform that provides experimental access to the statistics of the microwave photons, thus opening up single-photon experiments in solid-state quantum devices.  Microwave photons play a major role throughout all solid-state quantum technology architectures, including superconducting qubits as well as charge and spin qubits in semiconductors, where they are used for control, coupling and readout. However, the particle nature of the photons and in particular their statistical properties remain unexplored. The main roadblock here is the lack of suitable microwave photodetectors for performing continuous photon counting at high quantum conversion efficiency.  We will create sensors probing the timing between two photons with time resolution better than the time–uncertainty Heisenberg limit of the individual photons. Thereby we will create novel measurement tools applicable throughout the quantum technology field. In particular, the photon counting developed in this research programme will open up the avenue to implement quantum computing based on so-called boson sampling with superconducting circuits, combining two key requirements for practical quantum computing: the programmability of the superconducting circuits and the stronger quantum advantage of quantum processors based on boson sampling.  Beyond enabling these new measurement capabilities, on the fundamental side we generate unique experimental insights. The interplay between correlated bosonic and fermionic states — e.g., on how the bosonic particle statistics of the photons map onto the fermionic ones of the electrons — is likely to spur new experimental activities around many-body physics. Furthermore, the detection timing resolution beyond the Heisenberg limit will also shed light on the still unknown physics question on how measurements really work and act in the quantum physics domain.