Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : OncoSeq (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Parmenides Foundation — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 41250.0 €

Host immunity plays a central and complex role in tumour progression, and the quality and quantity of immune infiltrate at the tumour site is used as a prognostic marker of cancer progression. Therefore, detailed single-cell analysis of tumor infiltrating immune cells, and ultimately liquid biopsy of circulating immune cells, is of vital importance for the development of new and improved immunotherapy strategies, and for diagnosis, prognosis, patient stratification and follow-up. We propose in OncoSeq to adapt the droplet barcoding microfluidics system, an output from the ERC EVOEVO project, to develop a novel “molecular cytometer” for high-throughput transcriptomic and phenotypic analysis, at the single-cell level, of tumor infiltrating or circulating immune cells. Readout of genotype and phenotype will be entirely based on next generation sequencing (NGS) allowing higher phenotypic multiplexing capacity (100s of phenotypic markers) than fluorescence (Flow cytometry) or mass spectrometry (CyTOF) based approaches (≤40 markers) and simultaneous RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq), allowing the creation of high-resolution phenotype-transcriptome maps for tens of thousands of single cells. This will be a powerful tool for cancer prognosis, clinical decision making and monitoring of disease progression, especially in the context of immunotherapy. So far, no such diagnostic instruments, enabling high-throughput single-cell phenotypic and transcriptomic analysis, exist. The technology developed will be transferred to our industrial partner through licensing for internal development of novel immunotherapies. In addition, once the prototype system is fully validated, we plan, with our industrial partners, to create a new company specialising in the sale of instruments and associated consumables for clinical single-cell immuno-monitoring for the research and clinical oncology markets.

Mots-clés : single cell,phenotyping,transcriptomic,next generation sequencing,droplet based microfluidics,immunomonitoring,immunooncology
Projet ERC : CITISENSE (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : VU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

How animal communication systems evolve is a fundamental question in ecology and evolution and crucial for our understanding of adaptation and speciation. I will make use of the process of urbanization to address how communication signals adapt to changes in the sensory environment. I will focus on the impact of noise and light pollution on acoustic communication of Neotropical frogs and address the following questions: 1) How do senders, such as a male frog, adjust their signals to altered sensory environments? I will assess plasticity and heritability of signal divergence found between urban and forest populations of the tungara frog. 2) How do signals evolve in response to direct (via sender) and indirect (via receivers) selection pressures? I will expose forest sites to noise and light pollution, parse out importance of multiple selection pressures and carry out experimental evolution using artificial phenotypes. 3) What are the evolutionary consequences of signal divergence? I will assess inter-and-intra sexual responses to signal divergence between urban and forest populations. 4) Can we predict how species adapt their signals to the sensory environment? I will use a trait-based comparative approach to study signal divergence among closely related species with known urban populations. Our state-of-the-art automated sender-receiver system allows for experimental evolution using long-lived species and opens new ways to study selection pressures operating on animal behaviour under real field conditions. Our expected results will provide crucial insight into the early stages of signal divergence that may ultimately lead to reproductive isolation and speciation.

Mots-clés : signal evolution,urbanization,sensory pollution,anthropogenic noise,artificial light
Projet ERC : GPS-Bat (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : Tel Aviv University — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TAU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1928750.0 €

How animals make decisions in the wild is an open key-question in biology. Our lack of knowledge results from a technological gap – the difficulty to track animals over long periods while monitoring their behaviour; and from a conceptual gap – how to identify animals’ decision-points outdoors? We suggest applying our innovative on-board miniature sensors, to study decision making in the wild. We focus on one of the most fundamental contexts of decision making – foraging for food. We will study bats, which constitute over 20% of mammalian species and are extremely diverse, enabling to examine different aspects of decision making. Importantly, echolocating bats emit sound to perceive their environment, allowing us to infer their behavior (attacks on prey and interactions with conspecifics) via sound recording. Our miniature sensors include a GPS and an ultrasonic microphone, which enables us to reveal not only bats’ movements, but also their behavior and accordingly the factors underlying their decisions. We will study three bat species to elucidate different aspects of foraging decisions: (1) How does animal sociality facilitate decision making? We have developed a system to monitor an entire colony including all conspecific-interactions when bats are in the roost or foraging outside. (2) How do animals weigh current input against previous experience? We will study a bat that must nightly search large areas over sea to find food. (3) How flexible are animal decisions? We will manipulate the natural environment of specific individuals to study how they adjust their foraging. Our results will have far-reaching implications in many fields, from animal conservation to robotics. The operational and technical difficulty of performing controlled manipulations in the wild drives most disciplines to perform experiments exclusively in artificial laboratory conditions. Our approach opens new opportunities to conduct controlled studies in the natural environment.

Mots-clés : foraging,behavior,bats,biologging,modeling,signal processing,neuroscience,decision making,echolocation,biosonar,social behavior
Projet ERC : ACTINIT (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Inserm
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1338130.0 €

How are actions initiated by the human brain when there is no external sensory cue or other immediate imperative? How do subtle ongoing interactions within the brain and between the brain, body, and sensory context influence the spontaneous initiation of action? How should we approach the problem of trying to identify the neural events that cause spontaneous voluntary action? Much is understood about how the brain decides between competing alternatives, leading to different behavioral responses. But far less is known about how the brain decides "when" to perform an action, or "whether" to perform an action in the first place, especially in a context where there is no sensory cue to act such as during foraging. This project seeks to open a new chapter in the study of spontaneous voluntary action building on a novel hypothesis recently introduced by the applicant (Schurger et al, PNAS 2012) concerning the role of ongoing neural activity in action initiation. We introduce brain-behavior forecasting, the converse of movement-locked averaging, as an approach to identifying the neurodynamic states that commit the motor system to performing an action "now", and will apply it in the context of information foraging. Spontaneous action remains a profound mystery in the brain basis of behavior, in humans and other animals, and is also central to the problem of asynchronous intention-detection in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). A BCI must not only interpret what the user intends, but also must detect "when" the user intends to act, and not respond otherwise. This remains the biggest challenge in the development of high-performance BCIs, whether invasive or non-invasive. This project will take a systematic and collaborative approach to the study of spontaneous self-initiated action, incorporating computational modeling, neuroimaging, and machine learning techniques towards a deeper understanding of voluntary behavior and the robust asynchronous detection of decisions-to-act.

Mots-clés : self initiated action,action initiation,volition,accumulator,computational model,voluntary movement,autocorrelation
Projet ERC : CARBONFIX (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Fondation Jean-Marie Lehn — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CIRFC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

How can simple molecules self-organize into a growing synthetic reaction network like biochemical metabolism? This proposal takes a novel synthesis-driven approach to the question by mimicking a central self-amplifying CO2-fixing biochemical reaction cycle known as the reductive tricarboxylic acid cycle. The intermediates of this cycle are the synthetic precursors to all major classes of biomolecules and are built from CO2, an anhydride and electrons from simple reducing agents. Based on the nature of the reactions in the cycle and the specific structural features of the intermediates that comprise it, we propose that the entire cycle may be enabled in a single reaction vessel with a surprisingly small number of simple, mutually compatible catalysts from the recent synthetic organic literature. However, since one of the required reactions does not yet have an efficient synthetic equivalent in the literature and since those that do have not yet been carried out sequentially in a single reaction vessel, we will first independently develop the new reaction and sequences before attempting to combine them into the entire cycle. The new reaction and sequences will be useful green synthetic methods in their own right. Most significantly, this endeavour could provide the first experimental evidence of an exciting new alternative model for early biochemical evolution that finally illuminates the origins and necessity of biochemistry’s core reactions.

Mots-clés : biomimetic synthetic methods,metabolism,co2 as feedstock,self amplification
Projet ERC : OFF-SITE (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
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 : 1223843.75 €

How can violence be studied when access to the field is impossible? Fieldwork is a trademark of ethnography, which is fast becoming a key practice in qualitative research across disciplines. In conflict and post-conflict zones, social scientists tend to negotiate access to fieldwork through an international community of experts and practitioners. But empirical investigation proves more difficult in strong regimes that are closed or restricted, and exert (tight) surveillance over academics and the civil society. The power-knowledge apparatus draws some boundaries for researchers to respect in order to keep access to the field: thus, subjects that fall outside the domain of ‘researchability’ disqualify for ethnographic study. Consequently, research is (re)oriented by opportunities of access to the field. The study of violence (its mechanisms, effects, genealogy and everyday experiences) in repressive States thus remains a blind spot, with protracted effects on the understanding of societies that are built on this history of violence. Based on the case of Iran, this pioneering research seeks to change our ways of studying ‘locked’ societies, by adapting our methods and episteme to the global circulation of norms, data and people. Through the anthropology of the State and violence, archive ethnography and the use of new technologies, it experiments trans-disciplinary methods in the production of empirical study off-site, in order to fill a substantive gap in scientific knowledge on the Khomeini years in Iran (1979-1988), and how their legacy reappears in todays’ politics of memory. By classifying and reviewing available sources in a digital “counter-archive”, the project will establish a genealogy of post-revolutionary violence and state formation in Iran, and make this documentation available for further research. It will also document and analyze the memory politics linked to this foundational past and how they redefine the boundaries of political participation.

Mots-clés : anthropology of violence,historical anthropology,iranian studies,patrimonialization,collective memories
Projet ERC : EuroWARCHILD (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Peace Research Institute Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : PRIO
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 161517.5 €

How can we ensure that children born of war do not pay for the sins of their parents? Political debates about how to address the plight of children born of foreign fighters to ISIS/Daesh make this an acute concern in Europe today. The European debates are polarized; some argue that socialization of these children will transform them into the next generation of terrorists, while others argue that they must be assumed innocent with rights to citizenship in European countries and state protection. How might we understand, respond, and address the needs and rights of these children raises the fundamental question of how we understand children of the enemy, as innocent individuals or security threats? Further, it is important not to repeat previous historical mistakes. By learning from the past, we can ensure that we will not need to issue apologies for wrongdoings in the future. After World War II, children conceived by enemy soldiers experienced shaming, harassment and isolation. We know that some of the children conceived through conflict related sexual violence during the Bosnian war of 1992-1995, were rejected and adopted, whereas some remained with their mothers under difficult circumstances. These war children were long silenced, but with time, they have formed vocal groups who argue for the right to be seen, heard, and recognized. Their core message is that the sins of their parents are not theirs to bear; they are not the enemy. EuroWARCHILD develops methodological innovation and combines theory development, life history interviews and text analyses to investigate how a child born of war can become a security concern, and what it entails for the child who does. This project is the first to comprehensively examine different groups of war children in the European context; across different conflicts, security settings and generations. EuroWARCHILD will affect policy development and increase attention to children born of war in many European countries, and beyond.

Mots-clés : children born of war,feminist security studies,conflict related sexual violence,international relations
Projet ERC : ReARQ.IB (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa — Pays : Portugal — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ISCTE-IUL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499613.0 €

How can we manage, improve and develop resilient, sustainable communities, without a solid scientific knowledge of our built environment? Our everyday life is framed by a cohort of buildings about which we know very little, or nothing: they are outside of our cultural concerns, even though we reside, work, learn or convalesce in them. Understanding the architecture that shapes our everyday empowers our communities – it enables them to take informed decisions about what to preserve, reuse and replace; how to update and improve their buildings. At a time when resources are dwindling and must be used rationally, repurposing and retrofitting existing buildings is a priority over new construction, everywhere. European societies have a vast building stock at their disposal, erected in the second half of the past century, to be used and transformed: sturdy, pragmatic objects whose features are seldom discussed. ReARQ.IB bridges the gap between local communities in Spain and Portugal and their ‘architecture of proximity’: structures, ensembles and neighbourhoods generally left out of canonical historiography, close to our lives but far from our minds. Making the genetic fabric of this built environment clear, intelligible and operative is an essential first step for responsible management and decision-making by stakeholders. Contemporary architecture in both countries may be celebrated in professional circles, and even enjoy public visibility – but communities across the Iberian Peninsula, including many designers, know precious little about their modern built environment, which grew exponentially in the 20th century. Focusing on public-use and residential buildings – prevalent generic typologies that concern most communities – ReARQ.IB will integrate information and critical enquiry to support management and action while advancing architectural and urban history. This is applied science for community participation enabling a more sustainable and resilient built environment

Mots-clés : architectural culture,spain,portugal
Projet ERC : ResilienceBuilding (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : University of Amsterdam — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UvA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

How can ‘resilient communities’ remain resilient in protracted conflicts and contribute to sustainable peace rather than to increased vulnerability to renewed conflict? How do local conflicts link to national conflicts and what are the implications for peacebuilding? What are the gender dimensions of social resilience? Is resilience always ‘a good thing’ or may it impede conflict resolution? This project pioneers an interdisciplinary research agenda into resilience building. The need for a greater analytical focus on the causes and consequences of social resilience is evident in the modest international record of peacebuilding and civilian protection. Scholarship increasingly invokes resilience terminology but lacks mature conceptual and empirical work. Building on the PI’s expertise in social resilience, communal conflict, and gender and peacebuilding, this project will establish an empirically-grounded research agenda on social resilience and sustainable peace. By providing a comparative analysis of resilience building and barriers to peace in Nigeria, South Sudan, the Central African Republic (CAR) and Kenya, the project will create a new agenda for resilience research that rests on novel conceptual development and interdisciplinary approaches to resilience combined with the systematic study of social resilience and local peace produced by an integrated team of specialist researchers. The project will involve a fieldwork-based multi-method research design that combines advanced quantitative techniques for assessing the consequences of international peacebuilding with regard to local peace and women’s empowerment with context-sensitive qualitative analysis of the often unintended consequences of social resilience and hidden barriers to local peace and changing gender relations. The project will result in a new scholarly community with a shared intellectual focus on social resilience and sustainable peace in protracted conflicts.

Mots-clés : social resilience,communal conflicts,peacebuilding,gendered civilian agency,adaptation,vulnerability,coping strategies,un peacebuilding,civilian protection,local peace agreements,women s empowerment,masculinities
Projet ERC : HolyEarth (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : University of Münster — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : WWU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 645125.0 €

How did Earth form with the properties that made it the only inhabited planet of the Solar System? Answering this question is the Holy Grail of planetary science and is key for (i) placing the formation of Earth into the context of general planet formation (ii) unveiling the fundamental processes that led to the formation of a planet able to sustain life and (iii) assessing the likelihood that similar processes occurred in other, extrasolar systems. However, despite decades of research, it is still unknown how Earth formed. Although several competing models exist, the reason we do not yet have a consensus on how Earth formed is that all proposed models have only been tested against a limited number of constraints (and sometimes different constraints for different models) with no common intersection. HolyEarth will overcome these limitations by developing a holistic approach to understand Earth’s formation that is based on the largest set of observational constraints: orbits, masses, formation timescales, chemical and isotopic properties of terrestrial planets and meteorites, and the structure of the asteroid belt (the relict of planet formation). The overarching goal of this project is to identify a unique scenario which, for the first time, simultaneously satisfies all these constraints in a self-consistent way. This project will break the boundaries between Earth science and astronomy by placing the formation of Earth in the context of a cosmic evolution towards stars and planets. Its impact will reach other scientific domains, such as biology and exobiology, and resonate with the public’s keen interest in the question of our origins.

Mots-clés : earth formation,meteorites,asteroids and planetesimals,protoplanetary disk