Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : MICROCRYO (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

This proposal aims to revolutionize time-resolved light and electron cryo-microscopy of fast cellular dynamics using a new class of cryogenic microsystems for the reversible cryofixation of cells and small model organisms by ultra-rapid cooling. This will contribute to our understanding of biological structure and function by revealing the dynamics of specific proteins in the ultrastructural context of a cell at nanometer spatial and millisecond temporal resolution. Despite rapid progress in the field, much of the potential of microscopy at cryogenic temperature today is still untapped due to limitations in methods and instrumentation for sample preparation. First, vitrification technologies for cryo-microscopy have evolved only incrementally since the 1960s and cannot be combined with many of the sophisticated live imaging methods that have emerged over the past decade. Second, while the synergy of light and electron cryo-microscopy is extremely powerful, cryo-microscopy with light is still in its infancy. Finally, new technologies for ultra-rapid heating and cooling of single cells are needed to systematically advance our understanding of reversibility in the cryopreservation of e.g. stem cells, oocytes, or sperm cells. Here I propose to create a microfluidic technology for the direct vitrification of cells in the light microscope by ultra-rapid cooling with millisecond time resolution. The cells will then be imaged at high resolution using electron microscopy and advanced modes of light microscopy combined with new optics adapted to cryogenic conditions. Ultimately, we will elucidate if and under which conditions cryofixation can be reversed by ultra-rapid warming such that dynamic cellular processes resume unperturbed. We expect that the research proposed here will enable breakthroughs in understanding the structural and molecular basis of fast cellular events including transport, membrane trafficking, cell division, and synaptic transmission.

Mots-clés : correlative microscopy,light microscopy,electron microscopy,cryo microscopy,sample preparation,methods and instrumentation development for cell and structural biology
Projet ERC : MaMiLabor (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Goethe University Frankfurt — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1597950.0 €

This proposal analyzes labor markets from both a macro- and a microeconomic perspective. It consists of four subprojects with the common objective to significantly advance our understanding of heterogeneities in labor market behavior and outcomes. The subprojects lead to novel insights regarding the intended and unintended consequences of different public policies, ranging from educational policies over the welfare state to maternal leave policies. The starting point of the first subproject are recently documented patterns of hours worked by productivity on the aggregate and individual level. Based on a macroeconomic model, it analyzes the role of subsistence consumption and the welfare state as driving forces of hours worked differences by level of development. The remaining three subprojects focus on gender. The second subproject investigates whether maternity leave policies have negative consequences for the labor market success of women of child-bearing age by lowering the expected length of a match for employers. It exploits variation in maternal leave policies across German states in an empirical analysis, whose estimates inform a frictional labor market model that allows conducting counterfactual policy experiments. The third subproject asks whether the possibility of experimentation reduces the inclination of women to shy away from competitive settings. Exploiting both within- and cross-country variation, it tests whether the reversibility of choices in secondary school has an effect on the willingness of girls vs. boys to specialize in math-intensive subjects, and thereby ultimately on educational and labor market outcomes. The fourth subproject analyzes whether an increase in the share of women in an occupation leads to lower wages in this occupation due to the devaluation of its prestige. It uses the German reunification as a natural experiment to establish causal effects, relying on the different occupational distributions of East and West German women.

Mots-clés : macro labor,empirical labor,gender differences in labor market outcomes,productivity and hours
Projet ERC : mtDNA-CURE (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

This proposal describes a series of powerful experimental strategies to develop a completely novel treatment for mtDNA mutation disease based on identifying unknown mechanisms controlling mtDNA replication. Several hundred different mtDNA mutations affect tRNA genes and impair mitochondrial translation leading to human disease. There is typically heteroplasmy with a mixture of wild-type and mutated mtDNA, and the mutations are acting in a “recessive” (loss of function) way. Very high levels of mutated mtDNA are needed to cause disease in affected patients whereas maternal relatives with high, but sub-threshold levels of mutated mtDNA are completely healthy. The corollary of these observations is that even a small increase of wild-type mtDNA may efficiently counteract disease in affected patients. This hypothesis will be validated by a series of genetic experiments with mice harbouring single pathogenic mtDNA mutations. Furthermore, novel factors controlling mtDNA replication will be identified. In particular, we will elucidate the formation and function of the mammalian displacement (D) loop, which provides a switch between abortive and genome length mtDNA replication. This very fundamental problem in mammalian mitochondrial biology has remained unsolved for decades, but I feel that the innovative experimental strategies I present in this proposal are very powerful and should have a fair chance of being successful. In any circumstance, the project will provide important molecular insights into novel mechanisms relevant for mammalian mtDNA replication. Over the years I have been strongly convinced that congruent results from in vivo and in vitro studies are needed to obtain reliable mechanistic insights and this project is therefore based on the close integration of biochemistry, advanced proteomics and state-of-the-art mouse and fly genetics. Finally, I describe a powerful large-scale screening approach to develop small molecular stimulators of mtDNA replication.

Mots-clés : mitochondria,mtdna mutation disease,mtdna replication
Projet ERC : EUREC4A (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Météo-France — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 258555.58 €

This proposal focuses on two of climate science’s most fundamental questions: How sensitive is Earth's surface temperature to radiative forcing? and What governs the organization of the atmosphere into rain bands, cloud clusters and storms? These seemingly different questions are central to an ability to assess climate change on regional and global scales, and are in large part tied to a single and critical gap in our knowledge: A poor understanding of how clouds and atmospheric circulations interact. To fill this gap, my goal is to answer three questions, which are critical to an understanding of cloud-circulation coupling and its role in climate: (i) How strongly is the low-clouds response to global warming controlled by atmospheric circulations within the first few kilometres of the atmosphere? (ii) What controls the propensity of the atmosphere to aggregate into clusters or rain bands, and what role does it play in the large-scale atmospheric circulation and in climate sensitivity? (iii) How much do cloud-radiative effects influence the frequency and strength of extreme events? I will address these questions by organising the first airborne field campaign focused on elucidating the interplay between low-level clouds and the small-scale and large-scale circulations in which they are embedded, as this is key for questions (i) and (ii), by analysing data from other field campaigns and satellite observations, and by conducting targeted numerical experiments with a hierarchy of models and configurations. This research stands a very good chance to reduce the primary source of the forty-year uncertainty in climate sensitivity, to demystify long-standing questions of tropical meteorology, and to advance the physical understanding and prediction of extreme events. EUREC4A will also support, motivate and train a team of young scientists to exploit the synergy between observational and modelling approaches to answer pressing questions of atmospheric and climate science.

Mots-clés : clouds,convection,climate,atmospheric circulation,climate sensitivity,cloud feedbacks,tropical meteorology,convective aggregation,storms,extreme events,atmospheric modelling,field campaign
Projet ERC : EUREC4A (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2754778.42 €

This proposal focuses on two of climate science’s most fundamental questions: How sensitive is Earth's surface temperature to radiative forcing? and What governs the organization of the atmosphere into rain bands, cloud clusters and storms? These seemingly different questions are central to an ability to assess climate change on regional and global scales, and are in large part tied to a single and critical gap in our knowledge: A poor understanding of how clouds and atmospheric circulations interact. To fill this gap, my goal is to answer three questions, which are critical to an understanding of cloud-circulation coupling and its role in climate: (i) How strongly is the low-clouds response to global warming controlled by atmospheric circulations within the first few kilometres of the atmosphere? (ii) What controls the propensity of the atmosphere to aggregate into clusters or rain bands, and what role does it play in the large-scale atmospheric circulation and in climate sensitivity? (iii) How much do cloud-radiative effects influence the frequency and strength of extreme events? I will address these questions by organising the first airborne field campaign focused on elucidating the interplay between low-level clouds and the small-scale and large-scale circulations in which they are embedded, as this is key for questions (i) and (ii), by analysing data from other field campaigns and satellite observations, and by conducting targeted numerical experiments with a hierarchy of models and configurations. This research stands a very good chance to reduce the primary source of the forty-year uncertainty in climate sensitivity, to demystify long-standing questions of tropical meteorology, and to advance the physical understanding and prediction of extreme events. EUREC4A will also support, motivate and train a team of young scientists to exploit the synergy between observational and modelling approaches to answer pressing questions of atmospheric and climate science.

Mots-clés : clouds,convection,climate,atmospheric circulation,climate sensitivity,cloud feedbacks,tropical meteorology,convective aggregation,storms,extreme events,atmospheric modelling,field campaign
Projet ERC : IPTheoryUnified (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : University of Jyväskylä — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 920880.0 €

This proposal is concerned with the mathematical theory of inverse problems. This is a vibrant research field at the intersection of pure and applied mathematics, drawing techniques from PDE, geometry, and harmonic analysis as well as generating new research questions inspired by applications. Prominent questions include the Calderón problem related to electrical imaging, the Gel'fand problem related to seismic imaging, and geometric inverse problems such as inversion of the geodesic X-ray transform. Recently, exciting new connections between these different topics have begun to emerge in the work of the PI and others, such as - the explicit appearance of the geodesic X-ray transform in the Calderón problem - an unexpected connection between the Calderón and Gel’fand problems involving control theory - pseudo-linearization as a potential unifying principle for reducing nonlinear problems to linear ones - the introduction of microlocal normal forms in inverse problems for PDE These examples strongly suggest that there is a larger picture behind various different inverse problems, which remains to be fully revealed. This project will explore the possibility of a unified theory for several inverse boundary problems. Particular objectives include: 1. The use of normal forms and pseudo-linearization as a unified point of view, including reductions to questions in integral geometry and control theory 2. The solution of integral geometry problems, including the analysis of convex foliations, invertibility of ray transforms, and a systematic Carleman estimate approach to uniqueness results 3. A theory of inverse problems for nonlocal models based on control theory arguments Such a unified theory could have remarkable consequences even in other fields of mathematics, including controllability methods in transport theory, a solution of the boundary rigidity problem in geometry, or a general pseudo-linearization approach for solving nonlinear operator equations.

Mots-clés : inverse problems,microlocal analysis
Projet ERC : INATTENTION (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Czech Academy of Sciences — Pays : Rép. Tchèque — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : AVČR;CAS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 950424.0 €

This proposal outlines agenda which aims to improve our understanding of policies in environments with cognitively limited agents. It seeks to extend and apply the theory of rational inattention developed in macroeconomics. Citizens are inattentive to details of tax codes, government bureaucrats cannot inspect all data about people in need, and voters are highly uninformed about politicians’ campaign platforms. The agenda is specifically targeted at applications where human inability to digest all available information has strong implications for public policy formation. It falls into three broad parts. First (macroeconomics), the proposed research will develop a new model of risk-sharing in a typical modern-macro setting with heterogeneous agents. Instead of incentive constraints, the imperfections will be driven by the government’s or citizens’ inability to process all available information. What are the properties of the resulting system of redistribution? Why do taxes often take a simple form? Can minorities be left behind because they attract less of the government’s attention? Second (behavioral economics), it will extend the rational inattention theory to model how agents simplify multidimensional features of the environment. Among many applications, the theory is likely to provide an alternative explanation for mental accounting, when people have separate budgets for different types of expenditures (critical to consumption decisions, especially of the poor), and for salience of different elements of the tax code. Third (political economy), it will develop a unified framework to study implications of voters’ rational inattention (selective ignorance) for the outcomes of political processes, such as for popular demand for misguided policies, public good provision, and the complexity of announced platforms. Voters’ information acquisition and fragmented information processing will be studied in a field experiment.

Mots-clés : rational inattention,imperfect information,mental accounting,heterogeneous agents,policy salience,inattentive voters
Projet ERC : Topics in Behavioral (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Central European University — Pays : Hongrie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : CEU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 624500.0 €

This proposal outlines projects that span a diverse set of specific topics in both the foundational and the more applied parts of behavioral-economics theory. In the foundational projects, I will develop broadly applicable models of individual decisionmaking that incorporate psychologically realistic assumptions about individuals, and that can be used by myself and others to study the implications of psychological phenomena for economic outcomes. I will (i) provide an attention-based theory of several central and hitherto unmodeled aspects of mental accounting; (ii) analyze the implications of overconfidence about one’s ability or prospects for learning about other economically important variables; and (iii) incorporate into economic settings, and explore some consequences of, the idea that self-esteem— our feelings about ourselves—may be exceedingly fragile. In the more applied projects, I will use psychologically realistic models to shed light on important economic issues regarding markets and organizations. I will (i) identify market outcomes and especially welfareincreasing regulations when consumers with limited attention make tradeoffs between “browsing” more products superficially and “studying” fewer products in detail; (ii) use a contract-theoretic approach to help understand and possibly undermine organizations that pursue goals its members oppose; (iii) analyze the nature and consequences of procrastination when a person’s alternative choices are supplied by the market; (iv) explore the potential for a policy framework centered around informed consent to address privacy concerns in a market where some consumers are naive about product offers; and (v) investigate the implications of financial choice and financial information in a market for retail securities when investors do not understand that issuers are utilizing superior information in designing offers.

Mots-clés : mental accounting,rational inattention,overconfidence,misguided learning,self esteem,malicious organizations,regulation,procrastination,switching,consent,privacy,cursed equilibrium
Projet ERC : PlasmoCycle (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and Immunotherapy
Entité participante : Keele University — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 197364.36 €

This proposal promises to transform our understanding of the basic biology of the malaria parasite Plasmodium, and of how that biology affects virulence. Remarkably little is known about the Plasmodium cell cycle, despite a wealth of knowledge on the subject in model cells. This project will reveal, with unprecedented resolution, how DNA replication is organised in Plasmodium and how changing conditions in the human host and exposure to antimalarial drugs affect it. Plasmodium is an early-diverging protozoan with a complex lifecycle & unusual cell-biological features. It replicates in its human host by ‘schizogony’: a single parasite generates many nuclei via independent, asynchronous rounds of genome replication prior to cytokinesis. This occurs over ~24hrs inside infected erythrocytes. However, the genome can also be copied extremely rapidly during the sexual cycle in the malaria-transmitting mosquito. Here 8 male gametes are produced from a single gametocyte in less than 10mins, necessitating extraordinarily rapid DNA synthesis. This project will first elucidate the spatio-temporal dynamics of DNA replication in these contrasting cell cycles. To do this, I have developed a method for labelling nascent DNA replication, which was not previously possible in Plasmodium. It will permit: a) a detailed characterisation, at the whole-cell level, of the asynchronous genome replication that occurs in schizogony; b) a study of replication origin spacing & DNA synthesis speed at single-molecule resolution on DNA fibres, comparing these parameters in schizogony & gametogenesis; c) mapping sequences with replication origin activity in the Plasmodium genome; d) investigation of cell-cycle checkpoints & replicative responses to the changing environment in the human host and to antimalarial drugs. These are crucial issues for understanding parasite virulence and drug-resistance, and the work will inform vital new research into transmission-blocking interventions for malaria.

Mots-clés : malaria,schizogony,gametogenesis,drug resistance,host pathogen interaction
Projet ERC : SCARCE (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Cranfield University — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499655.89 €

This proposal seeks to develop a novel non-invasive, real-time direct observation methodology to provide new knowledge on the mechanisms underpinning crystal growth and harvesting within membrane crystallisation reactor technology. Crystallisation represents one of the most important separation processes in the chemical industry and will play a critical role in the circular economy through enabling the recovery of resources from wastewater to yield an array of sustainable low cost chemicals for use in European industries. Existing crystallisation reactor designs suffer from imperfect mixing and inhomogeneous solvent removal which makes control of crystal quality and consistency problematic and can limit application of the final product. Membrane crystallisation reactor technology is a disruptive innovation that combines process intensification with the capability to achieve significant control over the crystallisation process at a fraction of the scale thus ameliorating many of the problems associated with existing crystallisers. However, before this disruptive membrane based technology can be realised at full scale, there is a critical need to understand the role of shear forces in mediating the growth and harvesting of crystals at the solvent-membrane boundary which has to date received little attention. With no reliable and accurate description of the shear force behaviour within the boundary layer, there is considerable risk incurred in the scaling up of membrane crystallisation reactor design which could lead to inconsistent and inefficient performance. Development of the novel non-invasive, real-time direct observation methodology will enable direct measurement of these discrete forces. The arising new knowledge will be challenged at various process sizes to evolve the science underlying process scale-up of membrane crystallisers and in doing so will deliver internationally competitive research, placing the applicant at the forefront of his academic field.