Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : FLEXINEL (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Université de Valence — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999943.0 €

Photosynthesis, the biochemical process by which vegetation harvests sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates and O2, fuels all life on Earth and drives the global carbon cycle. Although the majority of absorbed light is used for carbon assimilation, a remaining part is lost as heat and dissipated as emissions of solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF). SIF, the radiant flux emitted between 650 and 800 nm, is therefore the most direct measurable reporter of photosynthetic machinery in plants. Dedicated to retrieve the full SIF signal emitted across the globe, ESA has selected the FLuorescence EXplorer (FLEX) mission concept as Earth Explorer 8. To be launched in 2024, FLEX will fly in tandem with Copernicus’ Sentinel-3 (S3) and will operate at ideal spectral, spatial and temporal resolutions. We are only at the dawn of uncovering the full SIF potential from space, as so far only a few single SIF bands have been exploited. The key challenge in the upcoming FLEX era will be to explore this unique new source of information and link it to photosynthetic activity. This proposal - named FLEXINEL - is determined to take leadership in exploiting and interpreting the forthcoming FLEX data stream targeting European vegetation productivity and carbon fluxes monitoring, given state of the art in plant physiology, leaf-canopy-atmosphere radiative transfer mechanisms, machine learning and image processing. FLEXINEL seeks to advance the science in consolidating relationships between SIF products and complementary S3 vegetation traits, thereby uncovering the role of dynamic vegetative and atmospheric variables given a changing Earth. Together with physically-based modelling, latest image processing concepts will be applied, such as emulation and cloud computing. FLEX and S3 products will be fed into assimilation systems for quantifying photosynthesis dynamics, and into an operational biosphere model for improving Europe-to-global carbon flux estimation.
Projet ERC : DISSECT-HF (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : University Medical Center Groningen — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UMCG
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998775.0 €

The objective of DISSECT-HF is to generate engineered heart tissue (EHT) with the use of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) from specific forms of heart failure (HF). It focusses on three etiologies of HF with a clear trigger and a large inter-individual susceptibility (pregnancy induced HF, anthracycline cardiotoxicity and PLN cardiomyopathy) to unravel common pathophysiological mechanisms involved in the development of HF. The rationale is: - Better understanding of molecular pathways leading to HF and knowledge about inter-individual susceptibility is needed to improve treatment. - For detection of changes on a molecular level cardiac tissue is needed. - Using innovative experimental approaches, such as dynamic loaded EHT (dyn-EHT), patient specific cells, unbiased target finding and deep phenotyping, I will dissect common disease pathways in the development of HF. SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES: 1. Construction of dyn-EHT from patient specific hiPSC derived cardiomyocytes, endothelial cells and fibroblasts. 2. Generation and deep-phenotyping of dyn-EHT from: A) Females with pregnancy induced HF (susceptible) and siblings with a normal pregnancy (resilience) B) Cancer patients with severe HF after anthracyclines (susceptibility) and patients who could resist high dose anthracyclines (resilience) C) Patients with an early PLN cardiomyopathy phenotype (susceptible) versus elderly asymptomatic PLN mutation carriers (resilience) 3. Identify overlapping and diverse factors. 4. Validate discoveries and apply in unique human cohorts with data on incident HF. WORKPACKAGES: WP1: Optimize construction of dyn-EHT from patient specific hiPSC. WP2: Phenotyping of dyn-EHT from the three HF etiologies focussing on susceptibility and resilience. WP3: Explore the transcriptome and proteome and apply a systems biology approach. WP4: Validate results and explore human relevance in a large cohort with unique phenotyping.

Mots-clés : heart failure,pluripotent stem cells,disease modeling
Projet ERC : CONTACT (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 364881.0 €

For ten thousand years, the world was divided in two. Almost all human societies belonged to either the Old or the New Worlds. Amid this consummate isolation, the two worlds followed their own cultural and ecological trajectories. The loop was finally closed when the Norse arrived in the Americas in 1021 CE. However, the story of this closure ironically remains one of the most significant gaps in our knowledge of the past. This project addresses the timing, duration, geographical extent and lasting significance of this period of first contact. Using the newly developed tools of spike radiocarbon dating and ancient DNA provenancing, current understanding of the Norse transatlantic expansion will be both tested and extended. Data of unprecedented precision will cast the history of Greenland into sharp relief, allowing fresh insights to be gained on the role of conflict, climate and trade in the ultimate abandonment of the colony. Furthermore, by analysing artefacts on either side of the Atlantic, the true extent and temporality of the Norse presence in the New World will be unveiled. Drawing all the new evidence together, CONTACT will be able to trace the story of the period as it has oscillated down the centuries between fact and fiction. In so doing, it will establish a framework for reanalysing the earliest connections between the Old and the New Worlds.

Mots-clés : chronology,radiocarbon dating,norse expansion
Projet ERC : AviArch (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 174557.5 €

We love birds but probably do not worry enough about our relationship to them. Across the world, we are threatening their critical ecosystem functions, including birds’ positive impact on our wellbeing, and poultry has become our favourite meat, yet industrial-scale breeding has consequences for human and bird health. Arguably, this lack of concern is due to our ignorance of the deep historical roots of these relationships. Our interaction with birds, for their plumage, eggs, meat, song, or spirit, extends back to prehistory. At the same time, avifauna responded to climate shifts, and to our modifications of the landscape. This has created a tangled archaeological record, which makes understanding bird-human relationships all but impossible. Building upon and moving beyond my expertise in biomolecular archaeology, AviArch will explore, from a bird’s eye view, the transition to agriculture in Epipalaeolithic/Neolithic southwest Asia and the emergence of urban life and trade routes in Bronze Age Crete. AviArch will reveal the variety of birds in past human systems by using new techniques for the identification of avifauna, integrating zooarchaeology, palaeoproteomics and AI. My sites have been carefully chosen to target biodiversity hotspots with a rich archaeological record intersecting socio-ecological changes of human-bird relationships. We will combine ecological, morphological, and behavioural traits for each bird, to produce the most refined exploration of human-avian relationships yet attempted in archaeology. Using network analysis and underpinned by multispecies theory, AviArch’s archaeoecological models will discover how environmental shifts affected people, and anthropogenic- and climate-driven changes affected birds.  By transforming the ways in which past bird-human interactions are studied, AviArch promises to improve human adaptivity, avian conservation strategies, and make us worry and marvel about these beautiful creatures a little more.

Mots-clés : zooarchaeology avifauna archaeological methods human environment interactions palaeoproteomics artificial intelligence networks
Projet ERC : HEAT-UP (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Obesity and cardiometabolic diseases are global crises that threaten to cripple healthcare infrastructures. These disorders originate from an excess calorie burden caused by consuming too much food and expending too little energy. Yet despite recent advances in obesity drugs, weight-lowering pharmacotherapies only reach about half the efficacy of surgical interventions. This difference could be due to existing drugs only acting to reduce food intake and not boost calorie-burning. Therefore, I believe our discovery of a leptin-independent signaling axis between adipose tissue (AT) and the central nervous system (CNS) that both decreases food intake and increases energy expenditure poses a breakthrough in obesity research. We uncovered this axis through receptor profiling and human genetic association studies and engineered a highly selective agonist that significantly decreases bodyweight and improves glucose and lipid homeostasis in obese mice. Our preliminary data have already led to a spinout company. However, the physiological signaling mechanisms of this receptor in AT and the CNS that shape systemic energy balance through peripheral calorie-burning and central control of food intake remain unknown. Thus, in HEAT-UP, we will delineate AT and CNS receptor circuits with single cell resolution and functionally test this signaling in 3D cultures of mouse and human AT. Tissue-specific contributions to whole-body metabolism will be assessed by combining our proprietary, selective agonist with state-of-the-art viral, genetic, and surgical manipulation of the receptor and neuronal wiring in AT and the CNS. Viral and genetic cell-labeling strategies will be used to characterize novel secretory cells that we found in mouse and human AT to contain the ligand for this receptor. Collectively, these studies will provide a comprehensive, physiological overview of a previously unknown fat-brain signaling axis and insight into its potential for counteracting metabolic diseases.

Mots-clés : brown adipose tissue,adipose thermogenesis,energy expenditure,appetite regulation,obesity,diabetes,g protein coupled receptors
Projet ERC : ALBA (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1869055.0 €

Does efficient verification imply efficient search? Can randomness provide massive speed-ups in computation? These are fundamental questions in theoretical computer science, known as P vs. NP and P vs. BPP respectively. Progress on these questions requires us to to show that certain computational problems are inherently intractable, i.e. do not admit efficient solutions. An important, and concrete, approach to such questions is to understand the complexity of algebraic problems such as the Determinant and the Permanent, in algebraic models of computation. The aim of this project is to tackle these questions head on.  Recent results of the PI and his collaborators have made progress on these problems by resolving a three-decade old open question. These results show intractability for algebraic models of bounded depth, which is a step towards P vs. NP. As a consequence, they also imply the first sub-exponential time deterministic algorithms for the important Polynomial Identity Testing (PIT) problem in these settings, which is progress towards P vs. BPP.  However, this barely scratches the surface of what we want to achieve. The aim of this project is to push beyond these state-of-the-art results in many directions. The principal goal is to prove the first lower bounds for algebraic formulas, which would be a huge breakthrough. Further, we want to improve our recently obtained lower bounds in order to devise faster PIT algorithms. We also want to show lower bounds over finite fields, and to explore the applications of such work in related areas such as algebraic proof complexity and algorithm design. The recent results point out a new way of exploiting structural and algebraic techniques to prove lower bounds. The aim is to develop and systematically investigate these techniques, incorporating methods from related fields of mathematics such as the theory of symmetric functions and representation theory, to accomplish these goals.

Mots-clés : circuit complexity,arithmetic circuits,permanent vs determinant,lower bounds,polynomial identity testing,derandomization
Projet ERC : MERCURY (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999993.0 €

The recent increasing use of mercenaries in armed conflicts such as in Libya, Central African Republic, Nagorno-Karabakh, Mali, and Ukraine has focused attention on some of the problems arising from the deployment of these private actors. Their involvement in proxy wars, predatory recruitment, and asymmetric warfare, which internationalise, exacerbate, and prolong armed conflicts, creates space for grave human rights abuses and war crimes. Millions of people are directly negatively impacted by mercenaries globally, but accountability is rare, and so these actors operate with impunity, their victims denied access to justice and redress. In essence, mercenaries operate in an accountability void. Academic attention until now has focused on the anti-mercenary norm, definitions of mercenary, and treatment of mercenaries, but there is little research on how accountability and remedy is ensured for victims of mercenarism. MERCURY focuses on this accountability void, combining cutting-edge, data-driven mapping and analysis of mercenary operations with thorough legal and qualitative analysis. The mapping will provide a novel understanding of mercenaries to underpin ground-breaking legal analysis of the shortcomings and weaknesses of national and international frameworks when it comes to remedies for victims. Via legal and qualitative analysis, MERCURY will evaluate routes to accountability and remedy via international and national human rights courts, tribunals, mechanisms, and transitional justice processes, and propose potential pathways to justice for victims. PI MacLeod is internationally recognised for her expertise on mercenaries and human rights. Together with the MERCURY team, she will offer pioneering scholarly insights into routes to accountability and remedy. The richer understanding derived from MERCURY will help inform stakeholders on how they can better prevent abuses perpetrated by mercenaries, or failing that, ensure accountability and redress for victims.

Mots-clés : mercenaries,private military companies,private military and security companies,proxy wars,armed conflicts,human rights,international humanitarian law,asymmetric warfare,accountability,remedy,redress,justice
Projet ERC : ENCODED (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999968.0 €

Modern economics has become an influential scientific discipline, but its ability to explain, predict, and provide solutions to socioeconomic problems has been questioned. The criticism of and debates about economics, including the philosophical discussions, ignore the role that computer technology has played in economic research. ENCODED argues for putting the focus on digital data and algorithms at the centre of the philosophical analyses of economics to achieve substantial breakthroughs in understanding modern economics and move debates in philosophy of economics beyond the state of the art.  The hypothesis of the project is that reliance on computer technology in modern economics has transformative epistemological consequences. To investigate the hypothesis, ENCODED will analyse whether and how computer technology 1) has had an effect on what is being investigated in modern economics, 2) has affected economists’ theorizing and their choices of empirical methods, and whether and how 3) values embedded in this technology have influenced knowledge produced in modern economics.  ENCODED will provide an innovative philosophical approach based on insights from philosophy of science, history of economics, science and technology studies, philosophy of data and algorithms. A crucial move to achieve the aim of ENCODED is to focus on the epistemological significance of the aspects of computer technology: digital data and algorithms. The focus on digital data and algorithms allows insights from the various disciplines informing the project to be synthesized. This focus will also allow for the development of innovative analysis of case studies (in decision theory, macroeconomics, financial economics, and empirical research), to address fundamental challenges to the epistemological analysis of economics brought about by computer technology, as well as to examine values encoded in computer technology and their importance for knowledge production in modern economics.

Mots-clés : values in science values in economics history of economic thought critical studies of data and algorithms philosophy of economics
Projet ERC : PAR2 (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : University Medical Center Groningen — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UMCG
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 271945.0 €

How does life, how does a person change when one becomes a parent? Are new parents really lost as close friends? Are they actually better listeners because they have learned to put themselves second? Why are some parents caring and attuned to their children’s needs when others struggle? It is surprising that researchers have so far overlooked the transition to parenthood as a driver for social-developmental change and have hardly zoomed in on parenting as social behaviour. Like any other social behaviour, substantial individual differences can be found between parents but research has neglected various likely determinants. PAR2 changes this by 1) elucidating whether, indeed, parents develop differently in the social realm compared to people without children, and 2) using the methodological tools of social development research to test why parents differ in the ways they parent. To achieve this, we compare parents and people without children on social-emotional skills and social behaviour using longitudinal cohorts that span multiple decades across adolescence and adulthood (WP1). How parenting behaviour -as a unique social behaviour in adulthood- is being shaped under different circumstances and in different people, is central in work packages 2-4. We use longitudinal social networks (WP2), multiple-generation cohorts (WP3), and social genome data (WP4) to understand the influence of 1) family, partner, friends, and other parents, 2) social relationships prior to becoming a parent, and 3) own, partner, and child genes on parenting. PAR2 significantly innovates research on social development by explicitly conceptualizing parenthood as a crucial transition and parenting as social behaviour. Viewing parenthood as driver of developmental change and parenting as social behaviour means that PAR2 generates a novel direction in research and will result in significant theoretical and methodological innovation to our understanding of variation in human development.

Mots-clés : parenting,parenthood,social development,multiple generation cohort,social network,social genome
Projet ERC : PARADOx (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université Érasme de Rotterdam — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : EUR
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

One-third of adolescents (12-18) experience emotional problems, such as anxiety and depression. This leads to enormous personal impact which often continues a lifetime. Support from parents is a protective factor that can increase the well-being of adolescents and reduce depression and anxiety. However, defying this currently held view, concerns are growing that support backfires in some families. THE PARENTAL SUPPORT PARADOX. No matter how well-intended and well-received in the short run, over-supportive parenting can undermine opportunities for personal growth. This weakens long-term well-being. Who support backfires for and what the mechanisms are is unknown, because psychologists have lacked the data and analytical tools to study how parenting predicts well-being in individual family units. DEVELOPING FAMILY-SPECIFIC METHODS. To theorize the short-term and long-term effects of parenting, my team and I will conduct one of the largest and most intensive studies of parental support and well-being. 300 Dutch families with a child, aged 12 to 16, will complete smartphone-based micro-surveys to capture parent-child interactions in daily life. Families are followed for three years, with seven follow-up surveys. As ultimate proof of theorized family-specific dynamics, we will test in an experiment (2 x n=100) if feedback on their real-life data strengthens parenting and improves child well-being. IMPACT. Now that we can study each family’s unique daily dynamics, PARADOx will generate an entirely new family-specific theoretical model of parental support, explaining for whom and through which mechanisms support backfires. We will also target these dynamics with prevention, to transform support from a potential cause of emotional problems to a protective factor. The project will develop new concepts for personalized parenting advice for this purpose. Moreover we will deliver a toolbox of methods to study family-specific dynamics, which is disseminated across d

Mots-clés : parenting,adolescence,experience sampling method,time series analyses,emotional problems,well being,mental health,depression,co creation,ehealth