Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : WelfareStruggles (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
Entité participante : Bielefeld University — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499325.0 €

The transformation of China and Vietnam from centrally planned economies into today’s market economies has been fuelled by the labour of millions of migrant factory workers from rural areas. These countries started reforming at the turn of the 1980s, embracing marketisation while remaining under the Communist party’s political monopoly, a system now commonly termed market socialism. In what seems to be a reversal of the wider trends of austerity, there has been rapid expansion of social protection, much like what has been happening in other Global South contexts. While the shifts indicate state and societal responses to the social conflict and tension induced by marketization, they in turn have been foregrounded by the politics around how different groups of people should be cared for, politics that are part of wider moral struggles between actors in the new economy. Given their underclass status and their salience as a social force, the question of the migrant factory workers’ welfare is critical for the understanding of the on-going shifts in these countries’ welfare systems. WelfareStruggles is aimed at uncovering the politics of care underlying the provision of welfare for migrant factory workers in China and Vietnam. It does so through a comparative investigation that has two ground-breaking features: 1) the combination of ethnography with comparative social policy analysis, and 2) a translocal approach that takes into account the workers and their families’ negotiation for welfare across the city and the countryside. The comparison is expected to generate path-breaking knowledge about the variable moral dynamics of market socialist welfare. The knowledge will be essential for understanding the momentous yet little-known transformations of Global South welfare and has wider relevance to policy makers and organisations working with analysing and formulating solutions to the welfare needs of the migrant labour force in Vietnam, China and beyond.

Mots-clés : welfare,migrant labour,politics of care,morality,translocality,market socialism,vietnam,china
Projet ERC : DULICAT (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
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 : 211842.5 €

The transition metal catalyzed activation of aromatic carbon-hydrogen (C–H) bonds has enabled a variety of novel transformations that complement traditional approaches towards complex aromatic compounds. The vast majority of methods developed in this field relies on the use of directing groups, which coordinate the catalyst prior to the C–H activation step to induce activity and selectivity. In contrast, nondirected methods have remained underdeveloped, since it has remained highly challenging to achieve reactivity and induce good selectivities in such processes. My research group has recently discovered a new design paradigm for palladium catalysts, which exhibit extraordinary activities and selectivities. Through the combined action of two complementary ligands these catalysts enable the activation of arenes without requiring a directing group or the use of an excess of the substrate. Here, I propose to initiate a broadly conceived research project aiming at three major goals: 1) The development of highly active palladium catalysts that can activate even the most challenging arene substrates. This goal will be pursued by building a broad ligand library and conducting systematic structure activity studies that are designed to deliver an in-depth mechanistic understanding. 2) The development of catalysts that enable high sterically controlled regioselectivities. This goal will be tackled using a mechanism-based design approach, aiming to minimize the influence of electronic effects and to suppress unintended directing effects. 3) The development of novel synthetic methods for late-stage functionalization. A particular focus will be on transformations that exhibit otherwise challenging regioselectivities and deliver attractive motifs for medicinal chemistry. Overall this project is expected to establish dual ligand-enabled palladium catalysis as a novel tool in synthetic organic chemistry that will prove highly useful in both academic and industrial laboratories.

Mots-clés : palladium catalysis,c h activation,late stage modification
Projet ERC : eCAPE (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Aalborg University — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : AAU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2116000.0 €

The transition to a low-carbon society is vital and requires major changes in everyday life for European households, including new prosumer roles linking renewable energy production and household consumption by use of smart technologies. This implies major alterations in the materiality as well as the social organisation of everyday life. To guide this low-carbon transition, new theory development on the role of technological systems in everyday life is needed. Practice theories represent a strong approach in this; however, they have developed in opposition to understanding actors and structures as mutually interlinked. This means that major drivers, as well as consequences, for sustainable transition are being overlooked. This project will contribute with important new theory development to understand and promote a low-carbon transition as well as to ensure that this transition does not indirectly become a driver of gender and social inequality. Three theoretical lines within theories of practice will be developed: 1. The importance of gender and social structures when studying household practices, including how these social structures influence formation of practices and how, in turn, social structures are formed by the development of practices. 2. The role of the ethical consumer in developing new practices, including how learning processes, media discourses and institutionalised knowledge influence formation of practices. 3. The inclusion of non-humans as carriers and performers of practices, rather than seeing the material arrangements only as the context for practices, especially when dealing with automated and internet connected technologies. Quantitative and qualitative empirical research guided by these theoretical approaches will contribute with work on how future low-carbon living can be achieved and the theoretical developments will form an essential foundation for policy development towards a mandatory low-carbon transition.

Mots-clés : consumer studies,theories of practices
Projet ERC : TRANSGENE (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Edinburgh — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498708.0 €

The translation of basic biomedical research into clinical practice has become a central concern for science policy. Policies to foster translation are being applied to large amounts of genomic information available in open-access databases. This information is the result of concerted initiatives that, in the early 2000s, determined the full genetic sequence that characterises humans and other organisms. However, when the initiatives started the goal of determining the full sequence and making the resulting information available was not universally supported. My project will investigate how and why this objective of completing the sequence was adopted in preference to other models that prioritised the usability of the data. Newly available archives suggest that the yeast, human and pig genome initiatives underwent crucial changes from the mid-1980s onwards. In their early years, the priority had been rapid translation of results into the improvement of human and animal health. Consequently, sequence determination was limited to small areas of the genome for which there was an existing medical interest. However, as the initiatives progressed the systematic sequencing of the full genome prevailed over those approaches. My project will follow the development of these sidelined models that sought to use the sequences as they were produced, in order to investigate their significance for current translational research policies. I will develop a collaborative framework in which archival research will be combined with insights from social studies of science and innovation studies. By doing this, I seek to bridge the current fragmentation between history of science and other fields of science studies focused on present-day events. In my project, biomedical translation will be approached as a historical process that unfolds over time and can be investigated with a cross-disciplinary set of tools, to be commonly applied to historical, contemporary and prospective studies.
Projet ERC : LIGHTPORT (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : University of Groningen — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : RUG
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

The transport of anions across the cell membrane, which is mediated by transport proteins, is essential to many important biological processes. Dysregulation of this transport has been associated to various diseases and therefore, chemists endeavour to develop artificial receptors that mimic the function of natural transporters. Despite much progress over the last decade, the current artificial systems are mostly static, while proteins are able to change their activity dynamically in response to stimuli in the environment. To integrate such stimuli-controlled behavior in synthetic systems is a key contemporary challenge. In view of this, the goal of the proposed research program is to develop anion receptors in which the binding properties can be effectively modulated by light and to apply these receptors as transmembrane carriers and pumps, in order to regulate passive transport (i.e. down a concentration gradient) and to induce active transport (i.e. against a concentration gradient). This interdisciplinary program is divided into three work packages: WP1 aims at the development of structurally rigid and visible-light-actuated photoswitches and their use as platforms for constructing anion receptors; WP2 deals with the development of mechanically interlocked structures as photoswitchable anionic hosts; WP3 is directed at utilizing these receptors for light-gated transport and light-driven pumping of anions across phospholipid bilayers, whereas also an alternative dual-responsive anion channel will be prepared. Eventually, it is expected that this work will open a new route toward light-based localized pharmacological treatment, e.g. via light-triggered cancer or bacterial cell death. Furthermore, active transport systems, that are able to build up and maintain concentration gradients across membranes, could provide a completely new view on how to convert and store light (solar) energy.

Mots-clés : anion binding,molecular switches,photochromism
Projet ERC : ChemEpigen (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Radboud University Nijmegen — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 233110.0 €

The ultimate aim of this ERC project is to provide a comprehensive and complete understanding, at the atomic-level of sophistication, of genuinely important biomolecular recognition processes in epigenetics that play key roles in human health and disease. At the biochemical level, epigenetics refers to mechanisms, such as enzymatic modifications of DNA and posttranslational modifications of the associated histone proteins, that regulate the activity of human genes. The proposed work aims to address epigenetics using the physical-organic chemistry approach that enables the elucidation of the elemental processes with unprecedented molecular/atomic detail. The project will experimentally and computationally examine non-covalent interactions between three essential constituents of the epigenetic biomolecular system, namely epigenetic proteins, histones and water, at the level of short histone peptides, intact histone proteins, the nucleosome assembly and nucleosome arrays. Our programme, built on synergistic thermodynamic, structural and computational studies, aims to unravel i) the underlying chemical origin of methyllysine-containing histones in epigenetics, ii) the chemical basis for the recognition of methylarginine-containing histones in epigenetic processes, and iii) the role of unstructured histone tails in biomolecular recognition, which together form the three main structural elements found in the epigenetic framework. Results from this work will be important from both a fundamental molecular perspective as well as from the biomedical perspective, because proteins involved in epigenetic regulation processes are currently regarded as important targets for numerous therapeutic interventions, most notably for cancer treatment.

Mots-clés : epigenetics,histone,molecular recognition,physical organic chemistry
Projet ERC : QUSCO (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
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 : 1494738.0 €

The unique features of quantum mechanics enable communication and computation tasks impossible to achieve by classical means. This opens a tremendous potential for enhancing the power, efficiency and security of everyday interactions in our information-based society. The quest of the demonstration in physical systems of quantum superiority has led to milestone implementations, most notably of the distribution of secret keys with unconditional security or of elementary computations such as the efficient sampling of bosonic distributions. In this project, we propose to develop and experimentally demonstrate a framework where quantum resources can be used to outperform their classical counterparts for a much larger range of problems than key distribution or boson sampling, with applications in algorithms, cryptography, communications, scheduling, routing, data mining, process monitoring and control or DNA sequencing. The theoretical basis of our framework is decomposed in three well defined elements-circuits, of increasing complexity, which can individually be used for specific quantum enhanced applications and together lead to the demonstration of the holy grail of quantum information science – quantum superiority for hard computation algorithms. The implementation of all the elements will be based on a photonic experimental platform exploiting a mapping of quantum information protocols involving multiple quantum bits of information to protocols based on coherent states of light in a superposition of optical modes. This is extremely appealing from a practical point of view and will be fully explored, in particular using silicon photonic technologies that allow for scalable devices involving fast switching operations, compact delay lines, and reconfigurable couplers, the main components of our circuits. Our project sets a highly ambitious target, providing on the way powerful and readily accessible applications of quantum technologies.

Mots-clés : quantum communications,quantum computing,silicon photonics,optical communications,communication complexity
Projet ERC : TeX-MEx (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : Imperial College London — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1996316.0 €

The unique properties of a new type of X-ray source produced by a compact laser-plasma accelerator will be used to probe the ultra-fast dynamics of the electronic structure of matter under extreme conditions. The TeX-MEx project will study: 1) hot dense matter, such as that found at the centre of the Sun; 2) warm dense matter such as that found at the centre of Jupiter and 3) photo-ionized plasmas far from equilibrium such as is found in the exotic environment of an accretion disk surrounding a black hole. These extreme conditions will be created in the laboratory using 1) direct laser heating, 2) proton heating and laser driven shock heating and 3) intense X-ray pumping using the betatron source itself and the extraordinary X-ray fluxes available with a free electron laser. Using the unique combination of a few-femtosecond duration and broad spectral coverage that the X-rays produced by a laser wakefield accelerator possess, the TeX-MEx project will explore new physics in each of these regimes. For example we will be able to directly measure the rates of ionization of hot dense matter for the first time; we will observe the onset of ion motion in warm dense matter and how this affects the electron energy levels; we will make the first observations of non-collisional photo-ionized plasmas. These will allow us to accurately test and develop models used to describe matter under extreme conditions in the laboratory and in astrophysics. This integrated program of innovative experiments and new approaches to modeling will open up a new field of femtosecond time-resolved absorption spectroscopy of matter under extreme conditions and will drastically improve our understanding of how matter behaves throughout our Universe. It will, for the first time, bring to our laboratories on Earth the ability to probe some of Nature's most violent processes, to date only hinted at in data from a new generation of astronomical instruments.

Mots-clés : laser plasma accelerators,matter in extreme conditions,ultra fast x rays
Projet ERC : mVITO (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : National University of Ireland — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : NUI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 67303.75 €

The urgent imperative to discover and understand topological quantum matter (TQM) is based both on the fundamental significance of its rich new physics and on the potential for unprecedented applications e.g. topological quantum computing. Specific topological ordered states, such as topological superconductors, ferromagnetic topological insulators, and topological Kondo insulators, are now the focus of physics research. Their microscopic quantum states have proven very difficult to address experimentally, one reason being the lack of instrumentation designed to deal with their novel measurement challenges, especially in high-resolution visualization of TQM. However, new opportunities for this field, based on discovery of viable new materials and on the development of new visualization techniques, have emerged very recently. Therefore, we propose to develop and utilize a suite of new spectroscopic imaging scanning tunnelling microscope instruments capable of visualizing topological quantum matter at millikelvin temperatures. The objective is to achieve the extremely high energy-resolution required to access the energy gaps and exotic electronic states of TQM. Using these unique instruments, we propose a specific sequence of key experiments on direct visualization and quantitative understanding of topological quantum matter. These include direct measurement of the momentum-space structure of the energy gaps of topological superconductors, ferromagnetic topological insulators, and topological Kondo insulators. We plan atomic scale visualization of the Cooper-pair condensate, the ferromagnetic state, and the heavy-fermion hybridization to explore how the real-space structure of these ordered states influences their topological characteristics. Finally, we propose to visualize scattering interference of topological quasiparticles to detect the spectra of extremely exotic Majorana/Jackiw-Rebbi/Heavy-Dirac states that are predicted for these three topological orders.
Projet ERC : CONTREX (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : University of Cambridge — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. Cambridge
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 789041.13 €

The urgent need to reduce carbon emissions in order to mitigate climate change requires the development of clean, renewable energy sources. Solar power offers a virtually unlimited supply of energy, providing it can be harnessed efficiently. Traditional silicon solar cells demonstrate high performance (~20%) but their required method of manufacture prohibits large area production rendering them too expensive to be used on a global scale. Organic solar cells (made from conjugated polymers and fullerenes) have the potential to be fabricated by low cost printing methods allowing for large scale modules to be produced cheaply. Conventional organic solar cells function by generating charge from a singlet excited state. In order to achieve optimum performance the precise morphology of polymer and fullerene must be controlled which can be extremely challenging. These devices however, have attained good efficiencies (10%) but are hampered by severe loss mechanisms which generally involve the formation of a lower energy triplet excited state. We propose to develop novel materials for organic solar cells which will instead utilise this triplet excited state to generate charges. This will enable us to not only eliminate this loss mechanism but due to the unique properties of the triplet excited state will allow for numerous benefits. Firstly, the long lifetime of the triplet excited state will be exploited to allow for a simpler organic solar cell where precise morphological control is not required. Secondly, the proposed new materials will allow for the utilisation of near-IR light which is typically wasted in ALL current solar cell devices. Thirdly, exploiting a unique photophysical process we will produce materials capable of delivering efficiencies in excess of the theoretical limit available to conventional solar cells. Thus we propose that utilisation of triplet excitons is the required step-change to allow for organic solar cells to achieve their ultimate efficiencies

Mots-clés : conjugated polymers,organic solar cells