Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : CONSENT (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Conseil supérieur de la recherche scientifique — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999438.0 €

Losers’ consent is both a foundation of democracy and one of the big puzzles in political science. In democracies, elections divide citizens between winners and losers, and the expectation is that losers consent to be ruled by the winners. Despite the established notion that losers' consent is fundamental to democracy, recent events like the 2021 Capitol attack in the U.S. and the 2023 Congress attack in Brazil highlight its fragility. Without the losers’ consent, democracies are in danger.  This project addresses three central questions: 1) how can we conceptualize and measure consent; 2) which are the determinants of the losers’ consent and its breakdown, and 3) what are the consequences of the breakdown of consent. This research will provide a novel and comprehensive conceptualization of consent that encompasses three dimensions: acceptance of election results, recognition of the winners’ legitimate authority, and willingness to be governed by them. In addition, the project will develop a new typology of consenting losers based on their rationalization of electoral defeat and motivations to accept the legitimacy of the government. This typology will be validated using qualitative data.  The project will then develop an original quantitative measure of consent. This measure will be used to track consent in a large set of countries over a long period, and explore the factors that shape it. Special attention will be paid to the role of elites’ narratives and policy proposals in enhancing or eroding losers’ consent. Finally, the project will explore for the first time the impact of the breakdown of consent upon voting, contentious political behavior and social cooperation. Using a range of methods – focus groups, cross-country surveys, longitudinal analysis, and survey experiments across twenty established democracies – the project will deliver new insights into the dynamics of losers' consent and its importance for democratic resilience and stability.

Mots-clés : losers consent legitimacy elections public opinion political behavior democratic crisis
Projet ERC : Chem2Sense (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Conseil supérieur de la recherche scientifique — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999144.0 €

Sensors have a vital importance on human life, detecting diseases or contaminants that endanger the environment. A widely pursued challenge has been to develop universal biosensors with the flexibility to detect molecules regardless of their size. Antibodies have been used to fulfill this aim, but single-stranded oligonucleotides (aptamers) interact efficiently with targets and have also been proposed as an alternative. However, aptamers lack the ability for versatile functionalization to tune affinities, and they suffer from highly complex selection and identification. Chem2Sense proposes an interdisciplinary approach to overcome these obstacles. My hypothesis is that a new strategy based on the reversible conjugation of aptamers with small molecules will remove barriers in designing universal biosensors. Chem2Sense aims to redesign the aptamer concept with flexible oligolegonucleotides and a cutting-edge nanopore sequencing methodology. The two objectives will be to develop chemically modified nucleotides as lego-bricks to build high-affinity aptalegomers, and to develop a ground-breaking sequencing methodology using artificial intelligence to boost aptalegomer identification. The proposed legonucleotides are synthetic nucleotides that reversibly attach small molecules in a dynamic combinatorial library. After challenging a vast library against a target, a Darwinian chemical selection will occur, leading to the best fit, the aptalegomer, a high-affinity oligonucleotide of natural and conjugated legonucleotides. Therefore, the objective of Chem2Sense is to create a ground-breaking methodology that overcomes significant obstacles in aptamers’ development, providing a powerful synergy between novel chemical aptalegomers generation and a direct method for selection/identification using the latest advances in oligonucleotide sequencing. Chem2Sense will bring highly sensitive and versatile aptalegomers to a broad range of vital applications.

Mots-clés : dynamic combinatorial chemistry,nucleotides,non covalent interactions
Projet ERC : ECCO (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Conseil supérieur de la recherche scientifique — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1754518.99 €

This project will build living evolutionary cellular computers, and showcase them as intelligent bioremediation agents. Current synthetic genetic networks that perform human-defined computations must remain unchanged—as initially designed—in order to perform well. This is a problem, since biological substrate adapts and evolves, compromising durability, robustness, and computing power. We will exploit the intrinsic dynamic features of living systems. ECCO’s biocomputers will be able self-adapt and reconfigure at run-time. They will show unprecedented levels of robustness and efficiency—far beyond current technological limits. To this end, we will tackle intra-cellular evolvability and multi-cellular reconfigurability. At the intra-cellular level, we will upgrade current genetic circuitry with pre-defined mutation, evaluation and selection dynamics. Circuits will optimise themselves. At the multi-cellular level, we will design cellular consortia able to reconfigure its structure—therefore changing its functionality—according to environmental needs, thus adaptive. The ECCO project will integrate theoretical developments with in-vivo experimentation. The soil bacteria Pseudomonas putida will be used as a host to illustrate the capabilities of evolutionary genetic circuits. To demonstrate long-run efficiency, bacteria will be used to colonize the root of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana—a much more complex environment than the pristine laboratory conditions where circuits are often characterized. Reconfigurability will be achieved by building a multicellular computer able to switch between metal and aromatic removal circuits—two important pollutants. Evolution, adaptation and reconfigurability are elusive to conventional computers; conveniently, these are intrinsic properties of living organisms. The ECCO will benefit from this in order to engineer living computers that unlock applications in novel domains—from synthetic agriculture to precision bioremediation.

Mots-clés : cellular computing,evolutionary computing,synthetic biology,genetic circuits
Projet ERC : ECOPROSPECTOR (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Conseil supérieur de la recherche scientifique — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1991470.0 €

Given a list of candidate species, which community should one form to optimize a target function? Answering this fundamental ecological question is particularly urgent in the emerging field of synthetic microbial ecology, where it would dramatically improve our ability to design multi-species consortia for biotechnological applications. An empirical solution is out of reach, due to the astronomical number of possibilities: one could form ~1E30 possible assemblages from just 100 species. To provide a solution, ECOPROSPECTOR will borrow state-of-the-art ideas from Evolutionary Systems Biology and the theory of Fitness Landscapes, where similarly vast combinatorial spaces must be explored to find optimal sequences (peaks) in a genotype-phenotype map. This will result in a new and groundbreaking theoretical paradigm to map community composition and function in large communities at the single-species level. My proposal is motivated by exciting preliminary results revealing an ecological parallel to the emerging evolutionary concept of global epistasis: the functional effect of adding a species to a community can be predicted by a simple mathematical relationship. I will start by characterizing these relationships in a model empirical system consisting of 100 starch-degrading soil bacteria. I will then use machine learning to reconstruct and navigate the full combinatorial landscape between community composition and function, in search of communities that optimize the rate of starch hydrolysis. Through genetic and environmental manipulations and mathematical modeling, I will then mechanistically explain the emergence of those predictive equations and causally link them with species traits. Besides solving a problem of critical practical importance, the theoretical paradigm emerging from this work will unify quantitative research in ecology and evolution, providing unique opportunities for cross-pollination across fields.
Projet ERC : CAVE (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Consolidator grants)
Entité participante : Université de Rome « La Sapienza » — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999490.0 €

The Aeneid, Vergil’s masterpiece, published in 17 BC, two years after the death of the author, is universally recognised as the most important Roman epic poem. Since the very beginning of its circulation, in the 1st c. AD, it has drawn the attention of philologists and has been included in the school teaching of Latin grammar and rhetoric; in the following centuries an increasing number of commentaries on the Aeneid has been produced, engaging generations of scholars up to modern times. Therefore Vergil’s poem has not only played a key role in the history of poetry in Western literature and, more generally, in the reception of classical civilisation, but also in the history of the linguistic, rhetorical, and literary education in Europe as well as in the development of scribal practices and philological methodologies across Antiquity and Middle Ages. From the first 1000 years of such exegetical effort, two complete commentaries, countless glosses, Greek translations, and grammar books have survived: their tradition, that counts approximately 160 witnesses and also includes papyri and late antique parchments, is closely intertwined. The rich variety of the ancient and early medieval scholarship on the Aeneid can now be systematically investigated and illustrated thanks to digital humanities. Focussing on the first millennium of the transmission of the poem, CAVE aims to collect and critically edit the ancient and medieval exegetical works on the Aeneid, and to reconstruct, in a broader perspective, the places, moments, cultural environments, teaching practices in which Vergil’s masterpiece was studied. CAVE addresses these challenges with a multidisciplinary approach, gathering experts in textual criticism, palaeography, digital humanities, history of scholarship, linguistics, multispectral imaging. The research team will build an open source digital infrastructure, that will make available all the exegetical materials along with the catalogue of their manuscripts.

Mots-clés : latin language and literature,cultural history,history of linguistics,sociolinguistics,rhetoric
Projet ERC : DEMFAM (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université libre de Berlin — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999546.0 €

Through the lens of ‘shared and equal parenting’, DEMFAM studies the transformation of gender and the family in contemporary global history. First, it studies a shift from hierarchical to egalitarian conceptions of family relations, or a democratisation of the family. This entails the equalisation of parental rights within and outside the domain of heterosexual marriages, which coincided with the harmonisation of the rights of marital and non-marital children. The emergence of post-familial care arrangements, secondly, led to a denser regulation, or juridification of co-parenting. Inner-familial power shifts were accompanied by a reconfiguration of family-state relations. The project investigates the development of judicial and extra-judicial institutions (including family courts, social work interventions, and mediation agencies) which aimed to promote parental cooperation and safeguard child welfare in familial conflict situations. Finally, it shows how parental rights assumed centre stage in the twenty-first century’s ‘gender wars’, or the politicisation of gender, sexuality, and the family in struggles over national and religious identity, liberalism, and democracy. DEMFAM analyses these (limited and contradictory) transformative processes across different political-economic and legal systems within a shared global environment. The project develops a social history of law reform on different political scales to understand global dynamics of divergence and convergence in the transformation of gender and the family. It combines the analysis of transnational knowledge circulation (including policy transfer, civil society mobilisation, and scientific expertise) with the comparative study of family change in Western Europe (FRG, UK), Central Eastern Europe (the GDR, Poland), and South Asia (India). Integrating research on post-colonial legal pluralism, and on (post-)socialist gender and family politics, DEMFAM opens new horizons for global gender history.

Mots-clés : global gender history history of the family gender equality care childcare child custody parental rights
Projet ERC : EXREAN (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université libre de Berlin — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1980706.0 €

Background. In historical linguistics, reanalysis is described as process by which speakers assign a new meaning to a superficially unchanged element. Reanalysis is basic to grammar change. However, due to the methodological difficulty of studying change on the basis of historical texts and limitations in the understanding of associated social processes, current research struggles to explain both why and when reanalysis occurs and why it spreads between speakers. Aim. EXREAN has three main innovative objectives: (a) to develop a methodology that allows replicating historical reanalysis processes in a laboratory setting, (b) to determine in which context types reanalysis occurs, (c) to determine which social, language-specific, and individual factor favor or disfavor reanalysis and its actualization. Approach. The EXREAN project is the first of its kind to systematically examine reanalysis and actualization processes in a laboratory setting. EXREAN brings together and integrates insights from historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and social psychology. Using experimental paradigms from natural language comprehension and artificial language learning, participants from typologically diverse languages will be trained to replicate three attested historical reanalysis processes from different grammatical domains. The project will test the hypothesis that reanalysis processes can be predicted from exposure to bridging contexts, social factors such as arousal and familiarity, individual differences in habit tendency, and blocking effects arising from previous experience with language.  Innovation and impact. EXREAN breaks new ground by developing a methodology by which hypotheses on processes of language change can be submitted to rigorous testing. It will establish the necessity to define reanalysis not only as a cognitive, but also as a social process. In doing so, EXREAN will establish a new historical linguistics that understands itself as a predictive science.

Mots-clés : language change experiment artifical language learning social psychology reanalysis actualization grammaticalization
Projet ERC : ACE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université de Plymouth — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2997020.0 €

Turbidity currents, akin to underwater avalanches, are rapid, destructive, sediment-rich bodies of water that flow down-slope. They destroy seafloor infrastructure and transport and store organic carbon (OC), impacting climate over long (>1,000 yr) timescales. Global climate is controlled by atmospheric carbon dioxide, so understanding the processes influencing OC transfer and burial between Earth’s major stores is crucial to predict and mitigate against future climate change. Currently turbidity currents are largely excluded from global carbon models, mainly due to challenges in measuring these processes directly, with no turbidity currents measured yet at high latitudes. Antarctica disproportionately affects climate regulation, storing 40% of all anthropogenic carbon in the ocean, with projected climatic changes likely to affect future storage. I propose an innovative Antarctic Canyon Experiment (ACE) to directly measure Antarctic turbidity currents and OC for the first time. ACE involves novel deployments of subsea acoustic and optical instruments over 12-months, seafloor sampling and high-resolution seafloor mapping using Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, to establish the causes, character, and behaviour of Antarctic turbidity currents and OC. I will determine how turbidity currents and OC changed under past climates using extensive palaeoclimate, sedimentary and geochemical data and advance ocean-sediment-carbon models to predict how turbidity currents and OC will change under projected future scenarios. The outputs will drive forward global carbon models and climate mitigation policies by providing the first parameterisations of these processes, enabling improved representation of processes influencing the global carbon cycle. The outputs represent a paradigm shift in quantifying the role of high-latitude turbidity currents in OC cycling by assessing past, present and future impacts of climate on Antarctic turbidity currents and OC transfer to the deep ocean.

Mots-clés : submarine canyon continental slope processes submarine geomorphology marine geology and geophysics antarctica iodp organic carbon climate change canyon experiment direct measurements
Projet ERC : MRStain (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UKE
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 533692.5 €

Ex-vivo histology is the gold standard to investigate human brain microstructure. However, its invasive nature precludes its use in monitoring disease progression and the investigation of the pathophysiological origin of neurological disorders. MRStain will address this shortcoming by exploiting the sensitivity of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) signal to estimate aggregated histological metrics in the human brain non-invasively. Like established histology staining methods (e.g., myelin-basic protein), MRStain will be sensitive to changes in cellular populations, axons, myelin, and iron. This will be achieved by augmenting the MRI measurements with computational biophysical models, which can disentangle tissue metrics at the micron-scale using the macroscopic spatial resolution (1–4 mm) of MRI. However, the clinical use of these models has not been employed because their validity and generalizability across disease trajectories has yet to be tested against the ex-vivo histological gold standard. This project will address this shortcoming by generating a globally unique multi-modal dataset that combines novel in-vivo and ex-vivo MRI techniques with biophysical models as well as cutting-edge large-scale 3D histology. The project will benefit from a unique translational university hospital environment where large sections of freshly excised brain tissue from drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy patients (TLE, 80 sections of about 3 x 2 x cm^3) can be examined, enabling in-vivo MRI-based biophysical tissue parameters to be validated against their histological gold standard. I will develop an MRStain model to identify TLE relevant changes that will achieve a paradigm shift in how epilepsy is treated by identifying target brain areas for surgery that will help to predict seizure-free outcome after surgery. The final validated MRStain models will also pave the way for similar noninvasive investigations of other neuropsychiatric diseases with unprecedented precision.

Mots-clés : mri,mr physics,biophysical models of mr signal,3d ex vivo histology in the human brain,physical informed models for artifact correction in mri,machine learning and cell segmentation,machine learning and mri
Projet ERC : SAINTBARTH (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université d'Uppsala — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1707113.75 €

Surveys and datasets of the trans-Atlantic slave trade do not include Swedish slave trade and colonial history. Yet, when Sweden acquired the Antillean island Saint Barthélemy in 1784 it became a slaving nation that traded and smuggled captive Africans and punished the enslaved population using draconic slave laws until the abolition of Swedish slavery in 1847. The project is the first investigation of new sources and it situates Swedish colonialism in the Caribbean archipelago. By shifting the emphasis of the previous historiography from the European colonizers to building knowledge on the enslaved and free Afro-Caribbean majority population the project shows how the Swedish Caribbean society only can be understood in a larger setting where single-nation historical narratives have little explanatory power. Five subprojects creates new knowledge that will build a critical mass of data on hitherto unstudied facets of Swedish Caribbean history: slave law and justice, slave trade, abolition of slavery, colonial demography, and colonial governance. The project uses the Swedish governmental colonial archive held in France that for the first time has been made accessible in the PI’s preceding project. By scholarly publications and the creation of datasets covering legislation, biographies of the majority Black population, slave trade data etc. – and publishing them online in both project-owned databases and by contributing to major international datasets – it develops new methods within digital Caribbean and colonial history. The Caribbean intergovernmental organization CARICOM has included Sweden in its claims for reparations for “genocide, slavery, slave trading, and racial apartheid” and the project builds a firm basis to evaluate Swedish participation in Caribbean slavery and colonialism.

Mots-clés : caribbean history,slavery,abolition,legal history,colonial demography