Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : NEXT-CRC (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Université de Salamanque — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 62500.0 €

Colorectal cancer (CRC) ranks among the most prevalent and lethal malignancies globally. However, efforts to translate CRC research findings into clinical advancements have been hampered by inadequate in vitro systems. Even the current gold standard organoid models remain severely limited as they lack the topobiological complexity required to fully capture CRC pathobiology ex vivo. Among other factors, their unsuitability to properly model the multifaceted interactions between CRC and its tumor microenvironment (TME) is particularly limiting, especially since the TME has emerged as an essential element to tumor biology. Crucially, while the TME is being successfully exploited for immunotherapy in many cancers, these therapies remain ineffective in more than 90% of CRC patients. Among the different components of the TME, the colon microbiota is particularly interesting for CRC tumor immunity as in vivo evidence indicates that it can regulate inflammation, modulate immune cell activity, and alter responses to immune checkpoint inhibitors. However, whether anti-tumor immunity can be enhanced through targeted microbiomal-based therapies in CRC patients not responsive to immunotherapy has not been approachable in vitro due to the lack of suitable models. Building upon our expertise in microfluidics, tissue engineering, cell biology, and multiomic technologies, we aim to develop a groundbreaking ex vivo platform capable of integrating complex lymphoid and microbiomal microenvironments in patient-specific tissue-engineered miniature colons. This TME-oriented cancer model will reconstruct functional interactions among diverse components of the TME with unparalleled pathophysiological intricacy. It will be primarily used to shed light on the cancer–microbiota–immune axis, aiming to discover opportunities to harness microbiomal components for improving anti-cancer immunity in CRC. We envision that this project will pave the way towards personalized oncology approaches.

Mots-clés : colorectal cancer,tumoroids,organ on chip,tumor microenvironment
Projet ERC : HOUSINGFREEDOM (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Studies of Cultures and Arts
Entité participante : Associacao iscte conhecimento e inovacao - centro de valorizacao e transferencia de tecnologias — Pays : Portugal — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CVTT-ISCTE
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499213.0 €

Today, the world’s prisons are home to circa 11.5 million people globally, an increase of more than 27% from 2000. Post-incarceration is a major challenge that reflects and contributes to the broader systemic issues within the criminal justice system, expressed by high recidivism rates. This interdisciplinary project proposes to reframe what spatial assemblies, edifices and policies are necessary on the path from prison, addressing the reentry process using housing as an infrastructure of care, incorporating an abolitionist epistemology. HOUSINGFREEDOM aims to: — Develop an innovative conceptualisation for studying housing in the context of post-incarceration, by conducting a far-reaching study of reentry processes. This approach is designed to overcome limitations in global scholarship on the nexus between post-incarceration life and housing insecurity. — Map and study how can the narratives of the formerly incarcerated people and their housing struggle facing reentry inform practical interventions, shaping more just urban landscapes, under a ‘abolition by design’ approach, also offering incisive policy analysis to informs policy reform. — Provide a solid conceptual, methodological, and empirical foundation for carcerality studies across a vast range of disciplines, through a participatory approach. Methodologically, HOUSINGFREEDOM offers innovative design-based spatial and visual analysis strategies to reimagine spatial justice and decent housing for those who leave incarceration, along mapping and multimodal ethnography. A research-by-design approach to humanize (not criminalize) by design will engage a Community of Practice with those affected by carcerality, centred in Portugal, Belgium and Norway. Radical and ambitious, HOUSINGFREEDOM bridges the gap between these seemingly distinct fields, carcerality and housing instability, by shedding light on the cyclical nature of poverty, crime, and social exclusion.

Mots-clés : social architecture,housing,incarceration,reentry,prision abolition,participatory action research
Projet ERC : PRO-DEMOCRATIC (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Université de Varsovie — Pays : Pologne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1479938.0 €

The project is set in the field of computational social choice. We will focus on formal models describing scenarios, where a group of individuals, called voters, disagrees on certain matters, yet needs to make a collective decision. The decision must truly represents a compromise. We focus on group fairness understood as proportionality. There are numerous real-life scenarios that involve collective (public) decisions, and where our solutions could be applied. Examples include: elections of representative bodies (such as parliaments, faculty boards, etc.), participatory budgeting elections (where citizens decide how to allocate a part of a municipal budget), or scenarios where certain local communities (say, housing cooperatives) make series of decisions. In addition, proportional algorithms for making collective decisions can be used for selecting nominees for an award, for constructing rankings of movies or books, for selecting validators in consensus protocols, such as the blockchain, for constructing rankings of web-pages in response to user queries, for locating public facilities, or for improving genetic algorithms.  The goal of this project is to develop generic methods of reasoning about equity of treatment of voters, and to design new algorithms that satisfy the most demanding criteria of proportionality. The new methods should be applicable to a number of specific models that concern public decisions. We will (1) prove theorems specifying whether and under which conditions our notions of proportionality are satisfiable, and (2) we will analyse various rules and algorithms with respect to our criteria of proportionality and other important desiderata that are commonly considered in social choice theory. We plan to (3) determine the computational complexity of the problem of finding proportional public decisions, and to (4) develop exact, approximation, fixed-parameter-tractable, and heuristic algorithms for this and related computational problems.

Mots-clés : computational social choice,participatory budgeting,committee elections
Projet ERC : EILisCh (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université d'Islande — Pays : Islande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499000.0 €

The EILisCh project will focus on linguistic variation and change in Icelandic syntax and it will be the most ambitious attempt so far to model, understand, and explain Individual Lifespan Change in linguistic behavior, drawing on recent advances in sociolinguistics, quantitative syntactic theory, clinicial linguistics, as well as resources recently made available by Language Technology. The project will harness these ingredients and the experience of the PI and the infrastructure present in his Language and Technology lab in order to facilitate a new kind of a large scale project that will yield substantial progress towards important empirical, theoretical, and methodological goals, as well as benefits for society. I will track hundreds of Members of Parliament via their speeches over their entire political career and interview dozens of current and former MPs to establish an even deeper profile of how they use language. Carrying this research out in Iceland is important because of the unusually easy access that researchers have to public figures in this small language community. The kind of precise modelling that I describe in this proposal is only possible in a project that builds on substantial pre-existing Language Resources and takes place in a setting where extensive knowledge of the linguistic data and the required technological tools is present. My Language and Technology lab at the University of Iceland is the right place to do this and the experience I have gathered in several previous projects will be essential for my team’s success. However, the scale of this enterprise is beyond the means of national funding agencies in Iceland; thus I turn to the ERC, so that together we can redefine the state of the art in the study of Individual Lifespan Change.

Mots-clés : linguistic lifespan change,sociolinguistics,language variation and change,quantitative syntax,language technology,icelandic language
Projet ERC : PROMISE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Institute of Science and Technology Austria — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ISTA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1496991.0 €

ab initio simulation techniques have evolved to the point that we can reliably predict many properties of materials before they have been synthesized. This paradigmatic change has led to databases that contain millions of theoretically predicted materials with desirable attributes. However, all this information is of little use if we cannot predict if these novel materials can be made at all. I will develop a framework based on first-principles computer simulations to predict if and how a material can be made. The proposed approach will boost the success rate of “materials by design”, expedite experiments to create novel materials, and thus greatly enhance the speed of materials discovery. To achieve this goal, computational methods that combine crystal structure prediction, advanced statistical sampling, and state-ofthe- art machine learning techniques will be designed. The whole framework will be benchmarked on model systems with known properties. The resulting software will be made generic and open-source. The computational framework will be used to gain mechanistic insight into the physical processes that control the formation of specific functional materials including high-pressure phases of matter, perovskites, and molecular crystals.

Mots-clés : computational materials science,ab initio methods,statistical mechanics,machine learning for chemistry and materials,atomistic simulations
Projet ERC : OTTOWAQF (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Gand — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UGent
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1425464.0 €

This project investigates how pious endowments shaped state-building in the Ottoman Empire between 1450 and 1650. Pious endowments (waqf, singular) were trusts of property devoted to charitable activities that constituted the most widespread and powerful social institutions within the empire and across Islamic societies, yet their significance for state formation has been overlooked. Previous scholarship in the field focuses on the development of institutions directed by Ottoman sultans to produce models of the state that emphasize unfettered sultanic authority. This project overturns that view by focusing on how social institutions in the form of pious endowments limited, enhanced, and shaped the character of the Ottoman state. The approach will radically reshape our understanding of the Ottoman Empire by demonstrating how a diverse range of social actors from across the empire created the early modern Ottoman state. In doing so, OTTOWAQF will fundamentally reconceive our understanding of how empire worked outside Europe. To do this, OTTOWAQF will scrutinize a large body of legal and accounting records related to endowments to produce a comprehensive survey of their management, administration, and interaction with the state across south-eastern Europe, Anatolia, and the Arab provinces of the empire. OTTOWAQF will produce a database with a web portal offering comprehensive coverage of these endowments, including key metadata on their functioning over two centuries. In addition, the project team will complete an edited volume, one doctoral dissertation, five journal articles, and three monographs, culminating in a new synthesis that explains state-building in the Ottoman Empire. OTTOWAQF will offer a path-breaking approach to imperial state formation outside Europe that will open up new frontiers in the study of comparative empire and socio-economic and legal history.

Mots-clés : early modern empires,state formation,islamic endowments waqf
Projet ERC : HYBRIPEST (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Université de Gand — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UGent
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499375.0 €

Mating with an incompatible partner can result in dysfunctional hybrid offspring. Multiple processes cause such hybrid defects, including incompatible gene interactions and cytoplasmic incompatibilities that are mediated by bacterial parasites such as Wolbachia. Hybrid defects are strong reproductive barriers that drive speciation and are being harnessed by new pest control strategies to suppress harmful pest populations. Although pivotal to our understanding of these biological phenomena and applications, the molecular-genetic mechanisms that underpin these incompatibilities remain poorly understood. With HYBRIPEST, we will unravel all major mechanisms, and their interactions, that shape hybrid dysfunction within a system that recently became amenable to such a research endeavour. The system of Tetranychus mite species (important agricultural pests) is typified by various processes that culminate in different hybrid defects and benefits from a recently developed genetic toolkit. For the first time, we will dissect the molecular-genetic underpinnings of cytoplasmic incompatibility from the perspective of Wolbachia and host, an approach that will test biological theory and identify novel pest control opportunities. We will identify the molecular-genetic bases of incompatible gene interactions within and between species, shedding light on early speciation mechanisms. We will test for mechanistic convergence of different incompatibility loci and study how polygenic hybrid dysfunction is controlled. We will implement high-resolution genetic mapping techniques and comparative genomics to identify (in)compatibility loci. The functional importance of (in)compatibility loci to hybrid dysfunction will be further validated by recombinant expression, genome engineering, and other experimental advances. HYBRIPEST will bridge pertinent gaps in our mechanistic understanding of hybrid dysfunction, insights that will be translated into new theory and bio-applications.

Mots-clés : hybrid incompatibility,pest control,reproductive parasitism,genetic mapping,spider mites
Projet ERC : ACCESS (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université de Bologne — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499788.0 €

Pushbacks, walls, fences, detention measures and externalisation of asylum proceedings are the most widespread barriers that States around the globe implement to keep refugees out, and consequently prevent their access to international protection. In a global refugee context lacking an international court to interpret the 1951 Refugee Convention (RC), the burden of assessing the compatibility of these barriers with the RC lies on domestic and supranational courts. These separate jurisdictions are interpreting the same treaty, are often presented with similar factual circumstances, and have a duty to uphold the rule of law. Yet, we do not know if courts around the globe have systematically yielded similar or different interpretations on the compatibility of State-developed barriers with the RC; and if common patterns have developed, whether or not they uphold those barriers in light of the RC. Despite these overarching problems, the literature has, so far, had a piecemeal approach; we thus lack an empirically driven socio-legal comparative analysis of the role of courts in interpreting the right to access asylum. ACCESS will introduce an empirically driven theoretical model of how domestic and supranational courts develop international refugee law (IRL) and advance the executive driven model of migration governance in response to State-developed barriers. More specifically, we will investigate: 1) how do judges apply the same legal treaty (RC) and related international norms in different political and socio-legal contexts?; 2) to what extent are there any discernible patterns in the courts’ decisions related to barriers to asylum (either restricting or expanding access to asylum)?; 3) what are the socio-legal factors influencing adjudication?; and 4) how have courts developed IRL in response to these barriers? Given that we are faced with the highest displacement figures on record and the increasing barriers to asylum, ACCESS is of topical importance.

Mots-clés : asylum,migration control,barriers to accessing asylum,courts,international refugee law
Projet ERC : DYE-LIGHT (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Université de Gand — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UGent
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499351.0 €

Ocular diseases affect the quality of life of millions of patients. Despite improvements in pharmacological treatments, the arsenal of medications to treat severe ocular diseases today remains rather restricted to traditional drugs. Use of most modern biotherapeutics like proteins and nucleic acids, could be a major step forward. However, current ways of administration such as eye drops and intravitreal injections, are no longer sufficient to deliver these drugs to most targets in the eye. Therefore, novel concepts allowing biotherapeutics to safely overcome ocular barriers are of high interest. In ocular surgery, pulsed-lasers (P-Ls) are used for ‘tissue cutting’, though safety concerns remain. DYE-LIGHT hypothesizes that strategies which would allow the use of P-Ls in the eye at much lower energy than today, could considerably improve safety and pave the way for both novel ocular therapies and advanced surgical interventions. DYE-LIGHT will explore vital dyes, as used by ocular surgeons to stain tissues, as photosensitizers. DYE-LIGHT follows the recent observation that P-L irradiation of ocular dyes can result in the formation of water vapor nanobubbles (‘dye-based nanobubbles’) and thermophoretic transport (‘dye-based thermophoresis’). Interestingly, these biophysical phenomena occur at a laser energy that is ~ 1000 times less than a P-L alone. As compared to free dyes, dyes encapsulated in nanocarriers are expected to penetrate less into the retina, which might improve safety. Therefore, focus in DYE-LIGHT will be on nano-encapsulated ocular dyes. DYE-LIGHT will explore the potential of dye-based nanobubbles for delivery of nucleic acids in the corneal endothelium and for spatial selective vitreolysis in the eye. Finally, DYE-LIGHT will explore dye-based thermophoresis for controlled transport of nanomedicines injected in the vitreous towards the retina. If successful, this might open new perspectives to improve the efficacy of retinal drug and gene delivery.
Projet ERC : DISOBEY (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de Gand — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UGent
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1496688.0 €

The core goal of this project is to unravel the mechanisms of disobedience. To understand the factors that prevent an individual from complying with immoral orders, research should focus on two critical axes: (1) which social and situational factors support disobedience and (2) which individual traits and neuro-cognitive processes support disobedience. While the first axe has been extensively addressed in past literature, the second axe has scarcely been approached. DISOBEY is uniquely focused on developing a social neuroscience approach to understanding the mechanisms through which resistance to immoral orders may develop in a given situation. Two main neuro-cognitive processes will be considered: the sense of agency that one experiences when performing a voluntary action and the empathic response towards others’ pain. The main hypothesis is that individuals who retain a high sense of agency and empathy for pain under coercion are more likely to resist immoral orders despite potential social costs. To validate this hypothesis, MRI and neuromodulation techniques will be used. The project will include WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich & Democratic) adults, as well as very unique and rare non-WEIRD populations, such as military, genocide perpetrators, survivors and their offspring in Rwanda, and ‘Righteous’ individuals who rescued lives from extermination during genocides. Including these populations will also allow to validate my hypothesis beyond WEIRD societies, with individuals who actually experienced the disastrous consequences of obedience during real-life events. With this project I aim to pioneer a new area of research that will have deep societal implications. In the future, I intend to develop specific education programs in the future, with the NGOs I am currently working with, for both military members and civilians in vulnerable societies that seek to prevent illegitimate violence on the ground of compliance to authority.

Mots-clés : disobedience sense of agency empathy for pain social neuroscience behaviors