Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : EPIDEMIC (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
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 : 1495000.0 €

The study of ancient human DNA has been revolutionary in identifying large-scale admixtures and genetic variants subject to natural selection. Yet, key knowledge gaps persist. First, ongoing genetic mixing within spatially continuous populations is poorly understood. Second, the underlying selective pressures, particularly of infectious diseases, remain debated. To bridge both gaps, I propose sequencing 500 victims of the Black Death, one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, from a site in Central Europe and using this data synergistically with novel computational tools to make two breakthroughs. My first objective is to pioneer linking a large number of ancient and modern genomes through shared long haplotypes (known as IBD segments). IBD-sharing with modern genomes across Europe will reveal, for the first time, how genetic ancestry spread across space, starting from a large sample of a singular position and time. New inference tools using IBD-sharing will offer unprecedented insights into the European population structure of recent centuries, including mobility and effective population densities, and address a critical lack of population genetic models for spatially continuous populations. The second objective is to pinpoint genetic variants relevant to Black Death mortality. Observing the removal of alleles, for the first time in molecularly confirmed plague mass graves, will directly link an infectious disease and the resulting natural selection. The findings will decisively resolve long-standing debates regarding the human selective impact of the Black Death. Both IBD-sharing with modern Europeans and selection screens will greatly benefit from the large sample size of Medieval genomes. The synergy between the new analysis and tools I propose will break new ground for two key topics in population genetics relevant beyond humans, inferring the structure of continuous populations and the impact of natural selection.

Mots-clés : ancient dna,identity by descent ibd segments,demographic inference,natural selection,recent human evolution
Projet ERC : MigHealthGaps (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
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 : 1499616.0 €

Immigrants arrive to receiving countries in excellent health. Yet compared to natives their health deteriorates more rapidly. Why this is the case remains poorly understood due to the scarce availability of large longitudinal datasets useful to explain the dynamic of immigrants’ health over the life-course. In the near future, the immigrant-native health gap is likely to be further exacerbated by population ageing. In order to formulate effective policies to reduce immigrant-native health gaps, we need a deeper understanding of the causes of the unhealthy ageing of immigrants.  MigHealthGaps undertakes the most comprehensive analysis to date into the study of immigrant-native health disparities. MigHealthGaps has three main research objectives: (1) to quantify the gaps in healthy ageing trajectories between immigrants and natives by age, gender, and socioeconomic status, and their interactions; (2) to determine the impacts of family composition and family ties in generating these gaps; (3) to identify the critical events and circumstances in immigrant lives that put them on a different healthy ageing trajectory from natives.  MigHealthGaps addresses these objectives in a comparative and multidisciplinary framework, combining longitudinal survey data with large sample sizes from several European countries, and registry data from the Nordic countries, including the total population. It applies cutting-edge statistical methods to assess the causality between the above-mentioned mechanisms and the immigrant-native health gaps over age. The working-age population – including working age immigrants – will soon enter ages at which the risk of developing health frailties will be higher. Addressing these key objectives is crucial to formulate effective policies to prevent immigrants’ health excessive deterioration, and to make tangible improvements in the process of integrating immigrants into the receiving societies.

Mots-clés : migrant health,ageing,intersectionality
Projet ERC : REDBAC (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Université Ben Gourion du Néguev — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : BGU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1749998.0 €

Bacteria are haploid, having a single copy of each gene. We suggest a paradigm shift in bacterial genetics: bacteria can have two RNA versions of the same gene, encoding protein isoforms at the single-bacterium and population level. These protein isoforms can have altered activity, which could be advantageous under different conditions. Adenosine-to-inosine (A-to-I) mRNA editing can affect the sequence and the function of translated proteins because the ribosome identifies inosine as guanosine. We discovered that A-to-I mRNA editing occurs in bacteria (Escherichia coli), identified the mediating enzyme, and showed that it could affect protein function. Moreover, we discovered that environmental cues experienced during growth in culture affect bacterial mRNA editing. However, the prevalence and regulation of A-to-I mRNA editing across bacteria and the importance of editing for protein function and bacterial physiology in different environments are still unknown. Here, we will test the hypothesis that mRNA editing is widespread in bacteria, producing two RNA "alleles" (pseudo-heterozygosity). Subsequently, these RNA "alleles" may co-exist in the same bacterial cell or population of cells. Thus, mRNA editing may enable the translation of protein isoforms, making bacteria better adapted to changing environments. We suggest (1) identifying mRNA editing events across environmental conditions in hundreds of species, (2) uncovering the regulatory genetic factors governing bacterial mRNA editing occurrence, and (3) determining the effect of mRNA editing on the proteome and its functional role in bacteria. Our work could shed light on a new mechanism bacteria employ to grow and survive in different environments. Furthermore, bacterial mRNA editing—invisible to DNA sequencing—may account for unsolved problems or phenomena that current genetic and proteomic data cannot explain, affecting bacterial biology and human health.

Mots-clés : rna editing,trna editing,inosine,tada,bacteria
Projet ERC : DeathAndManipulation (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université d'Helsinki — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498621.0 €

This project’s overarching theme is how penal authorities conceal the prisoners’ poor health with malicious intent for various reasons and by various techniques, statistical and rhetorical. From this angle, the project examines British metropolitan, Indian colonial, American, and Soviet-Russian prisons and camps from the late modern era – the birth of the Western penitentiary - to the present moment. Within this ambitious temporal and spatial frame, the project poses "big questions" about the universal operational patterns of modern penality and bureaucracy, as observed via managing prisoners’ health and epidemics. The project seeks to understand why and when prisoner health statistics became significant enough to be manipulated for political purposes. Conceptually, the project engages with the contentious issue of deliberate extermination of prisoners concealed by medical malfeasance. The outcome will be the first comparative, integrated history of bureaucratic malpractices to occasionally downplay the accurate scale of sickness, epidemics, and mortality in custodial institutions of Western liberal and authoritarian regimes. The interdisciplinary research effort, while historical, combines insights from medical statistics, penology, criminology, penal sociology, and bioethics.  The ambition behind the project’s goals is to revise the traditional way literature classifies penal systems globally. This revision is achieved by shifting attention to health and its reporting as a defining feature that separates various carceral regimes from each other. The project will generate a new typology of penal systems based on the criterion of health reporting and its veracity. Beyond the strictly academic contribution to the debates on penality, modernity, technocratic social engineering, legacies of colonial violence, and total institutions, the project has implications for international prison reform and palliative care ethics.

Mots-clés : concentration camps,prisons,falsification of medical statistics,genocide,colonial violence,colonialism,race,ethnicity
Projet ERC : MitoReModel (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: B iological  Mechanisms , Structures  and Functions
Entité participante : Université d'Helsinki — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499408.0 €

The mitochondrion of the malaria agent Plasmodium falciparum is critical for parasite survival and a confirmed drug target. The dynamic organelle undergoes a Plasmodium-specific membrane remodelling process to adapt to changing metabolic conditions in different hosts. This remarkable transformation is thought to be driven by the arrangement of divergent ATP synthase and respiratory chain complexes into supramolecular assemblies, which shape the internal cristae membranes. However, the structures of both oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) protein complexes and the underlying molecular mechanism are unknown. Having recently pioneered parasite OXPHOS complex structure determination, I will tackle this longstanding enigma by combining state-of-the-art parasitology, high-resolution and in situ structural techniques and functional analysis to reconstruct a stage-resolved molecular model of the parasite’s bioenergetic membrane and reveal the mechanism of membrane remodelling:  In Aim 1, we will adapt cutting-edge cultivation methods to unlock structural studies of P. falciparum OXPHOS complexes by generating enough sexual-stage mitochondria to perform electron cryo-tomography and visualize the reorganisation of the inner membrane in situ.  In Aim 2, we will develop a stage-resolved molecular model of the P. falciparum inner membrane and reveal its architecture by determining high-resolution cryo-EM structures of both OXPHOS complexes, investigating their membrane-shaping properties and revealing binding mechanisms of investigational cytochrome-b inhibitors to inform antimalarial drug discovery.  In Aim 3, we draw on new structural insights to perform functional characterisation in parasites and understand the role of parasite-specific subunits in mitochondrial remodelling, energy conversion and parasite fitness.  This integrated approach will deliver novel insights into the plasticity and small-molecule modulation of mitochondrial energy metabolism in malaria parasites.

Mots-clés : mitochondria,malaria,plasmodium falciparum,mitochondrial remodelling,oxidative phosphorylation,energy metabolism,bioenergetics,small molecule modulation,antimalarial inhibitors,structural biology,cryo em
Projet ERC : NoJoke (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université Johann Wolfgang Goethe de Francfort-sur-le-Main — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1895277.5 €

Something weird is happening in politics. Satirical parties, comedic journalism and memeification are gaining more and more traction; the slippages between parody and sincerity, play and earnestness, real and fake, ridicule and seriousness have proliferated at a dizzying rate. Global entanglements, new technologies, and the surge in populist politics are producing a cacophony of intricate cognitive, social, and economic dissonances bordering on the absurd. The underlying hypothesis of NoJoke is that these dissonances, and the comical reactions produce, have become formative phenomena of the political present; they have seeped into the social fabric and into the ways in which people appropriate their lifeworlds and make sense of themselves and others as political actors. The practice of humour, NoJoke argues, can help us to make sense of the political present; it offers a unique methodology of discovery, a specific education by attention with regards to dissonances that elude conventional academic methods. Bringing together insights from the anthropology of politics and the political, from studies on humour, satire and laughter, and from anthropological advances in ontology, epistemology and methodology, NoJoke will conduct research with humour and humourists, and not merely on them, and establish a radically new approach to the study of the political present. Through a long-term comparative study with caricaturists, comedians, writers of satire, satirical politicians and comedic journalists in Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Caracas, Johannesburg and the Iranian diaspora, it will follow three objectives: (1) to explore the intrusion of humour and humourists into the field of politics; (2) to articulate a theory of humour as an epistemic practice ? a mode of perception, creation and anticipation ? in and of the political present; (3) to launch an alternative practice of academic knowledge production by converting the heuristic of punchlines into a practice of theory.

Mots-clés : epistemology humour methodology politics
Projet ERC : AGI-Safety (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Université Ben Gourion du Néguev — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : BGU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1625000.0 €

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) represents AI systems with human-level cognitive abilities, capable of understanding, learning, and applying knowledge across a wide range of tasks and domains. While AGI holds immense potential to revolutionize industries, its imminent arrival also poses significant threats to society. Without proper safety mechanisms, AGI could cause unintended harm, be misused by malicious actors, or act autonomously in unpredictable and dangerous ways.  Our ambitious goal is to pioneer AGI safety by introducing a new paradigm grounded in cybersecurity principles. Current safety mechanisms—such as safeguards and alignment training—are proactive, serve only as the first line of defense, and are insufficient for the complex, autonomous nature of AGI. Stronger, more explicit mechanisms are essential to handle AGI use cases and mitigate their inherent risks.  The new paradigm employs a layered approach: beyond proactive safety, we propose adding two additional protective layers. These layers form the novel domains of active and reactive safety, both built upon a foundation of adversarial robustness. Active safety mechanisms, such as fail safes, enable us to detect and correct harmful thoughts made by the AGI in real time and explicitly, ensuring continuous and safe operation while enabling us to perform auditing when necessary. Reactive safety mechanisms, such as kill switches, serve as a last line of defense to contain or neutralize an AGI when all other measures fail. We also propose research into making these safety mechanisms immutable, preventing adversarial bypass.  Our preliminary data shows that these mechanisms are feasible and have high potential to outperform existing AI safety approaches. By fundamentally rethinking AI safety for the AGI era, this research aims to ensure we have robust safety mechanisms in place before AGI becomes a reality, while also enhancing the security and reliability of current AI systems in the interim.
Projet ERC : LEGACY (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université d'Helsinki — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1496595.0 €

The distinction between agents and non-agents is central in law: only agents can decide about their affairs, enter contracts or be held responsible for their actions. Western law has since the 19th century relied on an understanding of agency that has developed in the liberal tradition of thought. According to this “Liberal Agency”, agents are highly rational human individuals. Persons with cognitive disabilities, artificial intelligences, and nonhuman animals are therefore not agents because of their lack of rationality or humanity. This view of agency is deeply embedded in Western legal systems.  Liberal Agency has recently come under increasing criticism and challenges. Many now argue that persons with disabilities, artificial intelligences and/or nonhuman animals could in fact be treated as agents. However, these criticisms have been narrow in scope, and the debate is overall highly fragmented.  LEGACY, situated within legal philosophy and history, will offer a comprehensive reappraisal of legal agency. It will investigate three main questions: First, how did Liberal Agency become the dominant understanding of agency in law? Second, what challenges confront Liberal Agency today? And finally, what kind of a theory can best explain the evolving notion of agency in law?  The objectives of the project are to deliver: (1) a systematic understanding of the historical background and context of Liberal Agency, its spread in Western legal thought, and its challengers; (2) an in-depth analysis of contemporary agency accounts that incorporates and conceptualizes the historical insights with a systematic understanding of the contemporary debates; and (3) a theory of agency that provides an overall synthesis of the accounts and can explain, reconcile and/or solve the outlined contemporary challenges.  The project will thus develop a historically informed, comprehensive and rigorous understanding of legal agency, based on a broad synthesis of legal and philosophical thought.

Mots-clés : agency,legal philosophy,jurisprudence,legal history
Projet ERC : HIPMAT (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Université Johann Wolfgang Goethe de Francfort-sur-le-Main — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1878908.0 €

Over the past decade a branch of solid-state inorganic chemistry has emerged that aims the discovery of novel atypical compounds at high-pressure conditions. Nevertheless, the need of modern technology in new materials, which are available only from the high-pressure synthesis, can be fulfilled only if these materials are produced in measurable quantities via a controlled and reproducible process. Within HIPMAT I will focus on the synthesis of nitride materials – a class of compounds with outstanding and diverse physical and chemical properties, which find applications as ultrahard materials as well as in semiconductor technology. The overarching aim of HIPMAT is to address the challenges of high-pressure synthesis, which lie beyond simple material discovery. We will use new opportunities provided by the European X-ray Free Electron Laser for studying mechanisms of high-pressure nitridation reactions, using the combination of pulsed laser-heating and ultrafast X-ray probing. Knowledge of the reaction mechanisms and kinetics will allow to choose reaction conditions favoring maximum amounts of desired products. Next, we will focus on the upscaling of the synthesis of the most promising high-pressure nitrides by developing novel precursors and by performing the synthesis in newly developed large-volume diamond anvil cells. HIPMAT will not only result in the discovery of plethora of novel high-pressure materials, but also will provide deep understanding of mechanisms underlying the chemical synthesis at high-pressure conditions and will enable controllable large-scale synthesis of new functional materials. The methods developed within HIPMAT will be applicable to other classes of materials and will be an important contribution to the field of solid-state inorganic chemistry and materials science.

Mots-clés : high pressure,nitrides
Projet ERC : LiquidStateDNP (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Université Johann Wolfgang Goethe de Francfort-sur-le-Main — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499950.0 €

Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) is an exciting and rapidly developing field in magnetic resonance, with solid-state and dissolution DNP techniques emerging as powerful tools across various applications, ranging from materials science to medicine. However, direct DNP in solutions still suffers from a lack of general applicability to macromolecules. The LiquidStateDNP project aims to establish DNP spectroscopy in the liquid state as an innovative tool for chemistry and biology, enabling the analysis of biomacromolecules with small sample volumes as low as a few hundred nanoliters – an achievement beyond the capabilities of traditional NMR techniques. This research will focus on using the solid-effect mechanism at high magnetic fields and room temperature, which offers significant potential for investigating a wide range of molecules. Notably, the solid-effect mechanism exhibits a favorable dependence on the molecular weight of the analyte, becoming increasingly effective for larger macromolecules. To achieve the project’s goals, I will pursue the following objectives: (i) develop a DNP probehead with improved signal sensitivity and resolution; (ii) establish methodologies for various nuclei, including ¹H, ¹³C, ¹⁹F, and ³¹P; (iii) optimize the structure of polarizing agents to maximize their effectiveness in solid-effect DNP; and (iv) demonstrate the application of liquid-state DNP to biomolecules for the first time. This will involve monitoring ligand binding to nucleic acids or proteins, investigating the dynamics of native membranes, and conducting in-cell NMR studies on living cells to detect drug binding and penetration. The LiquidStateDNP project aims to develop an innovative tool for liquid-state NMR, unlocking fundamentally new opportunities for a variety of biological applications at the nanoliter scale under physiological conditions.

Mots-clés : nuclear magnetic resonance,dynamic nuclear polarization,electron paramagnetic resonance