Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : EUROpest (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Lettonie — Pays : Lettonie — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 90000.0 €

Born from years of interdisciplinary collaboration, EUROpest aims to articulate the complex ways in which social-ecological systems shape epidemics. It builds on resilience and actor-network theories to advance its own eco-bio-social paradigm that embraces a multi-causal understanding of disease transmission and disease impacts on human societies and ecosystems. While striving to develop and validate a general theoretical model, it takes the well-documented and highly diverse world of late medieval and early modern Europe as its laboratory – investigating its interconnected climatic, cultural, demographic, economic, ecological, and pathogenic history. With regard to the latter, EUROpest assumes malaria, smallpox, tuberculosis and enteric diseases were major components of a disease baseline over which the most devastating disease, plague (Y. pestis), occurred. EUROpest will carry out regional case studies – from Spain to Lithuania, Greece to England – selected on the basis of available and procurable written, scientific and archaeological data. It will holistically consider the contexts of plague outbreaks identified in those regions, to understand how context both facilitated outbreaks and also shaped them, and their short- and medium-term impacts. EUROpest combines archival source analysis with archaeology, archaeogenetics, paleoecology and paleoclimatology, and subjects case studies to novel human-supervised machine-learning to identify the causal role of factors influencing regional outbreaks. As the contemporary imagination is guided in its understanding of epidemic disease by the outbreaks of the past, EUROpest’s contribution will be critical to developing more nuanced and realistic scenarios of future pandemics, academic as well as popular. With EUROpest PIs already engaging policy makers, the mathematical precision of the eco-bio-social analysis EUROpest proposes will help design more successful and targeted interventions for future pandemic response.

Mots-clés : adna studies,palaeogenomics,environmental history,interdisciplinary history,disease history,climate history,plague,smallpox,machine learning in historical applications
Projet ERC : BubbleLife (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université Louis-et-Maximilien de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LMU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2992787.5 €

The origin of life on Earth is one of humanity's profound mysteries that lacks scientific answers. We aim to answer this fundamental question by performing pioneering experiments starting from the Darwinian evolution of RNA and peptides to the emergence of cellular life, all in a single environment with only a small selection of starting molecules. We are an interdisciplinary team with diverse backgrounds in chemistry, physics, and biochemistry, and we have a proven track record of strong interdisciplinary collaborations.  Preliminary experiments have revealed the remarkable potential of heat-exposed air bubbles for molecular evolution. BubbleLife connects long evolutionary timescales through targeted experiments, bridging from amino acids and nucleotides to the emergence of protocellular life in one unified environment. Our experimental studies indicate a chemical cooperation of amino acids, nucleoside monophosphates and lipids, driving their Darwinian co-evolution towards modern biochemistry. The non-equilibrium at heated air bubbles promotes RNA oligomerization and template-directed ligation, fostering the emergence of autocatalytic replication networks, including the first RNA catalysts (ribozymes). Co-accumulating lipids form membrane vesicles at heated air-water interfaces that autonomously encapsulate RNA. Driven by prebiotic phosphorylation, amino acids polymerize into peptides in the same alkaline environment. Subsequently, they form RNA-peptide hybrids, revealing intriguing modes of early proto-translation. By combining our unique expertises in a synergistic manner, our work will ultimately culminate in "protocell generators" that feed and encapsulate not only primitive RNA-based replicators, but also modern transcription-translation-based systems.  BubbleLife will reshape our understanding of the origin of life on Earth and potentially elsewhere in the universe.

Mots-clés : prebiotic chemistry,origins of life,rna,lipids,peptides,ribozymes,cell free systems,in vitro translation
Projet ERC : GEOASTRONOMY (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université Louis-et-Maximilien de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LMU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3137775.0 €

Billions of rocky worlds likely exist around Sun-like stars in our Galaxy. Yet, attempts to understand these exoplanets lack information on the elements that compose them, the geodynamic processes that drive them, and the atmospheres that cloak them. To meet these cross-disciplinary challenges, three PIs at three institutes have combined forces to break new ground in understanding fully-formed silicate+metal+fluid (i.e. ‘rocky’) exoplanets. By synergizing astronomical data analysis with planetary geochemistry and experimental petrology and atmospheric physics/chemistry, we deviate from a purely theoretical approach via forward modeling. Instead, we blend Bayesian inference applied to telescope data and laboratory experiments with theory. Our thesis is straightforward: An exoplanet’s geologic history can only be decoded indirectly through spectroscopic observations of its atmosphere. To take advantage of remote observations of such atmospheres by next-generation telescopes we must work to understand how and why exoplanets have the physical and chemical properties they do. We devote our closely aligned efforts towards three categories of worlds around Sun-like (FGK) stars well-studied by astronomers: sub-Neptunes (exoplanets smaller than Neptune), Super Earths (exoplanets slightly larger than Earth) and “ultra-short period” (USP) exoplanets that may harbour magma oceans and atmospheres. GEOASTRONOMY fuses principles of the Geosciences with Astrophysics. Our aim is to build the chemical foundations for the exoplanet community to understand secondary (outgassed), hybrid (commingled primary- and secondary-) and magma-ocean atmospheres of already assembled mature rocky exoplanets. The proposed work is urgent because new and emerging datasets, including those being collected by the James Webb Space Telescope, are already providing constraints on these three categories of atmospheres.

Mots-clés : exoplanet atmospheres,galactic chemical evolution,bayesian inference,experimental petrology
Projet ERC : HALF (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université rhénane Frédéric-Guillaume de Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : CO-PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 6443439.0 €

Recent advances in formalization have brought the longstanding vision of machine-verifiable mathematics within reach. Formed by world leading experts in harmonic analysis and formalization, HALF is the first research initiative to concurrently achieve breakthrough results in a foundational mathematical area while formalizing them in the proof assistant Lean.  HALF tackles pivotal and long-standing open problems in harmonic analysis, with an emphasis on multilinear and nonlinear operators. These fundamental questions are motivated intrinsically and also have applications in other mathematical and interdisciplinary fields such as ergodic theory and quantum computing. HALF also extends Lean's capabilities, establishing comprehensive libraries and tools tailored for the efficient formalization of harmonic analysis and related mathematical domains.  Being the first of its kind, HALF is a milestone towards making computer verification routine in research mathematics. It produces highly needed training material for anticipated artificial intelligence applications that will in the future aid the verification process and provide automated tools for rigorous discovery in mathematics.

Mots-clés : formalized mathematics,lean,harmonic analysis,multilinear singular integrals,convergence of ergodic means,nonlinear fourier analysis,quantum signal processing
Projet ERC : IRASTRO (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université d'Aarhus — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 4246240.0 €

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has ushered in a new era in observational astrochemistry. JWST's ability to obtain infrared spectra of molecular ices condensed on interstellar dust grains in dense, star-forming clouds and in protoplanetary disks is expected to revolutionize the field, since these ices are known to be important sources of complex organic molecules. On a fundamental level, the physico-chemical behavior of these ices obeys the laws of molecular quantum dynamics occurring in low-temperature condensed phases. This is a forefront research area in chemical physics that, unfortunately, remains poorly understood. This project establishes an interdisciplinary, synergistic research consortium to address this knowledge deficit, bringing together the unique expertise of the groups of Alec Wodtke (Chemical Physics at Surfaces), Liv Hornekær (Astrochemistry and Scanning Tunneling Microscopy) and Peter Saalfrank (Theoretical Quantum Dynamics). Under IRASTRO, we will develop and employ advanced infrared technology based on superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) for new experimental capability in laboratory experiments directly relevant to astrochemistry. We will combine megapixel SNSPD arrays with échelle spectrometers enabling solid-state mid-infrared emission spectroscopy, including single-molecule mid-IR spectroscopy in a scanning tunneling microscope. With these new experiments and forefront quantum theory, we will tackle three research themes: 1) Infrared Spectra of Molecules on Surfaces under Interstellar Conditions, 2) Energy Dissipation Channels on Low Temperature Surfaces, and 3) Chemical Reactivity under Interstellar Conditions. IRASTRO’s focus on IR spectroscopy will make the project’s findings directly relevant to the interpretation of JWST observational data and, through a fruitful collaboration of experiment and theory, provide a better fundamental understanding of astrochemistry.

Mots-clés : superconducting nanowire single photon detectors condensed phase tunneling mid infrared spectroscopy
Projet ERC : SUBNORDICA (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université d'Aarhus — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : CO-PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1459427.73 €

The landscapes that extended for millions of square kilometres offshore of the world’s coastlines due to low sea-level during the last glaciation and were then drowned by sea-level rise, are known to preserve valuable archives of landscapes, palaeoclimatic change and stratified archaeological remains, with the potential to transform understanding of human history in this period of dramatic change. The absence of archaeological sites across much of this vast area prevents realisation of this potential. In SUBNORDICA we propose a systematic approach to develop new methods for recreating the submerged landscapes and human settlement of NW Europe and assess the impact of postglacial sea-level rise. We will address two questions: (1) What changes to the topography and environment of the submerged landscape were brought about by rising sea level and climate change? (2) How was the distribution of archaeological settlements and other traces of cultural activity impacted by this changing palaeolandscape, and can we recover them in sufficient detail to investigate human impact and human response? Combining information from 4 regions in the southern North Sea and the southern Baltic, we will use artificial intelligence to develop machine-learning routines to (a) integrate existing and newly acquired geophysical and geological data to map key areas of the changing landscape, and (b) combine this information with data from known underwater archaeological sites to identify new targets of archaeological potential for more detailed investigation. Investigating these targets will use high-resolution geophysical methods, sediment coring, archaeological excavation, and geochronological, palaeoenvironmental, sedimentological and biological analyses of recovered deposits. We will reveal a new chapter in human prehistory, provide a world-leading model for the investigation of submerged landscapes, and offer improved policy guidance for underwater cultural heritage management.

Mots-clés : submerged landscape archaeology
Projet ERC : DELTA-LANG (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Tromsø — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiT
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2517604.0 €

Mental life fluctuates, changing from moment to moment as the incessant and turbulent flow of thought rages. In 3% of the world’s population, the fragile equilibrium that we all hope to maintain gives way to dynamical changes resulting in psychotic episodes, which after remission tend to recur over time. A capacity to predict them at a clinically relevant temporal resolution, similar to our capacity to forecast a thunderstorm, would be a major advance in public health, with the important difference that, unlike thunderstorms, psychosis can be prevented. We test a previously untested and untestable hypothesis: that meaning encoded in spontaneous speech, translated into digitalized quantitative features, computationally analyzed with natural language processing (NLP) tools, can serve as a key personalized and interpretable predictor of phase transitions from remission to psychotic relapse. Addressing this hypothesis requires conceptual and methodological breakthroughs in our understanding of language and what signals its variability can carry for a pathophysiological process. We pursue these with a synergetic combination of linguistic, neuroimaging, psychiatric, and e-health insights. Using a hypothesis-driven approach we will (i) define generalizable language metrics relating to symptom variability cross-sectionally; (ii) identify individually-specific neural signatures of psychosis and remission related to changes in these linguistic metrics, using a dense-sampling approach; (iii) test the metrics retrospectively as predictors of relapse in an independent longitudinal cohort; and (iv) take the paradigm from the lab to the patient’s home in a prospective clinical study testing whether we can predict state change before it is catastrophic, at the temporal resolutions clinically required. DELTA-LANG (ΔLANG) thereby identifies the delta of language – a linguistic change that enables the prediction of clinically significant change, before it occurs.

Mots-clés : language,speech,psychosis,relapse,fmri,clinical decision support system,thought disorder
Projet ERC : MAGNESIS (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université d'Aarhus — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3176548.0 €

In the last years, electrochemistry and electrocatalysis are increasing their impact across several fields. A major driving force comes from the promise of substituting current fossil-fuel powered thermal methods in the industry by electrochemical alternatives, driven by renewable electricity. However, electrochemical methods are still far from reaching the desired target performance. In this landscape, the recent discovery of magnetic fields enhancing electrocatalytic processes offers a plausible new strategy. The idea of boosting an electrocatalytic reaction by an external magnetic field becomes highly persuasive. Still, the origin of this phenomenon is hardly understood, given its complexity: dealing with a magnetic field, in an electric field, on a dynamic surface, during a chemical reaction is a multiple-body problem.  Our objective is to foster magneto-electrocatalysis by exploring rigorously the interplay between magnetic fields and electrocatalytic performance from atomic resolution in model systems up to full cell devices. This can only be achieved by a synergetic effort between experts in catalysis, surface science, magnetism and theory. We will focus on two relevant reactions: the spin-restricted water oxidation and the carbon dioxide reduction, both potentially spin-sensitive. Our aim is to validate the structural, electronic and magnetic key descriptors controlling this phenomenon, assessed by complementary ex-situ and operando data within the corresponding theoretical framework. Computational tools will consolidate the understanding and quantify the different mechanistic contributions to microscopic and macroscopic observations. The ambition with MAGNESIS is to define, in a rigorous way, the first principles and ultimate possibilities of magnetic fields in the development of advanced electrocatalytic methods, pioneering the novel field of magneto-electrochemical science & technology.

Mots-clés : magnetoelectrocatalysis,electrocatalysis,dft calculations,microscopy,multiscale modelling,magnetism,water electrolysis,water splitting,co2 utilisation
Projet ERC : EUROpest (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Leibniz-Gemeinschaft — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : WLG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 612500.0 €

Born from years of interdisciplinary collaboration, EUROpest aims to articulate the complex ways in which social-ecological systems shape epidemics. It builds on resilience and actor-network theories to advance its own eco-bio-social paradigm that embraces a multi-causal understanding of disease transmission and disease impacts on human societies and ecosystems. While striving to develop and validate a general theoretical model, it takes the well-documented and highly diverse world of late medieval and early modern Europe as its laboratory – investigating its interconnected climatic, cultural, demographic, economic, ecological, and pathogenic history. With regard to the latter, EUROpest assumes malaria, smallpox, tuberculosis and enteric diseases were major components of a disease baseline over which the most devastating disease, plague (Y. pestis), occurred. EUROpest will carry out regional case studies – from Spain to Lithuania, Greece to England – selected on the basis of available and procurable written, scientific and archaeological data. It will holistically consider the contexts of plague outbreaks identified in those regions, to understand how context both facilitated outbreaks and also shaped them, and their short- and medium-term impacts. EUROpest combines archival source analysis with archaeology, archaeogenetics, paleoecology and paleoclimatology, and subjects case studies to novel human-supervised machine-learning to identify the causal role of factors influencing regional outbreaks. As the contemporary imagination is guided in its understanding of epidemic disease by the outbreaks of the past, EUROpest’s contribution will be critical to developing more nuanced and realistic scenarios of future pandemics, academic as well as popular. With EUROpest PIs already engaging policy makers, the mathematical precision of the eco-bio-social analysis EUROpest proposes will help design more successful and targeted interventions for future pandemic response.

Mots-clés : adna studies,palaeogenomics,environmental history,interdisciplinary history,disease history,climate history,plague,smallpox,machine learning in historical applications
Projet ERC : COGRA (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1995128.0 €

"First principles" and "bottom-up" have become buzz words across scientific and engineering disciplines when it comes to the discovery, prediction and understanding of material properties and their link to processing and microstructure. Reality, however, teaches us that in the foreseeable future computational resources will be insufficient to apply predictive techniques such as quantum mechanics or atomistics to the technologically most relevant length and time scales - far above nanometers and nanoseconds. This proposal aims for nothing less but the seemingly impossible: the application of atomistic techniques to problems occurring over microns to millimeters and seconds to minutes. Instead of relying on computational power, this will be achieved by a combination of scale-bridging methodologies (involving the PI's nonlocal and meshless quasicontinuum techniques, concepts from particle methods, continuum and statistical mechanics) and computational science strategies in order to produce new theory and an open-source, computational toolset for long-term, large-scale simulations relying solely on atomistic input. Spatial upscaling, temporal upscaling as well as heat and mass transfer will be addressed. Enabled by the new scale-bridging capabilities, two representative, open challenges will be investigated: recrystallization in magnesium during thermo-mechanical processing and corrosion in steel by hydrogen embrittlement. Both are of enormous technological and economic importance but current techniques are insufficient to bridge the gap between the macroscopic mechanical performance, microstructural mechanisms and predictive atomic-scale simulations. The outcomes of this five-year research program will provide never-before techniques and numerical tools to catalyze a user community across science and technology. Although the focus is on metals, several of the proposed techniques are applicable to a significantly wider range of materials and applications.

Mots-clés : solid mechanics,computational science