Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : REVERSE (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Leiden University Medical Center — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LUMC
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2372681.0 €

Prevention of infectious diseases through vaccination is one of the greatest achievements of medicine, yet there is growing realisation that vaccine immunogenicity and efficacy varies greatly across populations in high- versus low/middle- income countries (LMIC) and in urban- versus rural areas within one country. For example, whereas vaccination of volunteers in Europe with attenuated malaria vaccine can result in 100% protection, the efficacy drops to only 29% when tested in Africa, where it is needed most. Other vaccines, such as rotavirus, BCG, yellow fever and Ebola show similar trends in either immunogenicity or efficacy. It is my ambition to take on the challenge of understanding the mechanisms underlying vaccine hypo-responsiveness across populations and find ways to REVERSE it.  I hypothesize that the variation in the immunological network, shaped by exposure to microorganisms and parasites, as well as by cellular metabolic state of populations residing in distinct environmental conditions, underlies vaccine hypo-responsiveness and can be REVERSEd by immunological and metabolic interventions. To address this, I will compare unique cohorts from LMIC and Europe, using single cell technologies to understand the immunological and metabolic networks that govern innate and adaptive immune responses. Not only blood but also secondary lymphoid organs will be studied to gain critical information on key cell-cell interactions within germinal centers, and how they are influenced by cells beyond B and T cells, discovering key pathways underlying hypo-responsiveness. I will take advantage of increasing availability of clinically approved modulatory compounds to target these pathways to improve vaccine responses in our in vitro models. I will also perform a proof of concept clinical trial to establish a pipeline for translating the fundamental insights gained, to human testing, and pave the way to new horizons for vaccines to show their full potential worldwide.

Mots-clés : vaccine,hypo responsiveness,immunology,immunometabolism,single cell technology,low middle income country,geographical variation
Projet ERC : QCexplore (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
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 : 2495175.0 €

Gaining comprehensive insights into chemical and biochemical reaction networks is crucial for understanding and controlling molecular and catalytic processes; however, unraveling their intricate mechanisms remains a key challenge. QCexplore will provide a generally applicable solution to this challenge by developing an unbiased quantum-chemical reaction network exploration method and a highly efficient, fully automated open-source software framework.  The starting point for these developments is our proof-of-concept approach of a computational hyperreactor introduced in 2024. By integrating reactivity-enhancing concepts – such as external acceleration of system components and elevation of the potential energy surface (hyperdynamics) – with fast, linear-scaling quantum-chemical methods, QCexplore’s framework will enable efficient and unbiased exploration of reaction networks under fully controlled and realistic conditions. The incorporation of novel data mining techniques, along with efficient refinement procedures, will allow for effective navigation and analysis of the reaction network’s data for identifying relevant reaction pathways. In this way, QCexplore overcomes traditional, manual and error-prone approaches to reaction mechanism elucidation.  The performance of QCexplore’s developed framework will be demonstrated by tackling key questions in origins of life research, such as how essential molecular building blocks are formed and combined to create larger aggregates like RNA strands. Further, it will be applied to lay a robust foundation for de novo enzyme design by accurately identifying the key steps in catalytic processes, determining dominant reaction pathways, and uncovering strategies to enhance enzymatic activity and selectivity. The demonstrated versatility of the QCexplore framework is expected to open new avenues for the interplay between theory and experiment.

Mots-clés : quantum chemistry
Projet ERC : DISORDERED-SPEECH (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : BCBL
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 275000.0 €

Language problems are common in children, with ~7% incidence of significant spoken language problems (Developmental Language Disorder, DLD) and a further ~7% for written language problems (Developmental Dyslexia, DD). While there can be overlap in behavioural indices of DLD and DD (eg prosodic difficulties), no accepted causal theories satisfactorily explain such overlaps, and early identification remains difficult: only half of “late talkers”, toddlers who are not speaking by age 2, go on to develop DLD. Here we combine our innovative neural theory of child language acquisition (temporal sampling [TS] theory) with a novel speech production task to open a new research front in developmental language disorders, based on speech rhythm and the accurate production of prosodic patterns. We test both pre-school children aged 2.5 – 6 years and children with DD and DLD in 4 languages varying in rhythm type, English, French, Spanish and Basque. We apply our in-house state-of-the-art methods for measuring the similarity between the child’s speech amplitude envelope (AE) and pitch contour (PC) of multisyllabic items to oral targets. Prior English data show impaired AE and intact PC for DD, impaired AE and impaired PC for DLD, and consistent links between AE/PC production in typically-developing (TD) children and phonology/vocabulary. We test whether similar patterns characterise TD, DD and DLD across languages. Our focus on the accurate production of the AE/PC is entirely novel, exploits an automatic aspect of linguistic processing, applies to all languages, and may suggest new avenues for remediation. The speech production data acquired from >1000 children will further enable a machine learning approach to early diagnosis based on AE/PC. Our goal is to develop new tools for identifying DD and DLD which can apply across European languages. The frontier vision is that as AEs and PCs describe words in all languages, our approach may reveal new universals in language disorders.

Mots-clés : speech production,developmental dyslexia,developmental language disorder,machine learning
Projet ERC : SympNetO (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Université d'Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2612128.0 €

The brain regulates various physiological functions, including body weight, through descending autonomic sympathetic neurons. While targeting this system can improve obesity, it often carries cardiovascular risks. These limitations arise from a limited understanding of sympathetic neural networks due to their complexity and anatomically inaccessible location. My laboratory has been developing innovative strategies, including a novel imaging technique with single-neuron resolution and advanced single-cell analysis algorithms. In mice, these methods have enabled my laboratory to identify sympathetic interneurons, offering a new perspective into autonomic neuroscience. These interneurons are melanocortinergic and reside in sympathetic ganglia that do not target the heart but a unique thermogenic fat cluster, which we hypothesize is analogous to one found in adult humans. SympNetO will investigate whether these sympathetic interneurons can provide a neurobiological basis for cardioprotective anti-obesity mechanisms that promote fat burning. My laboratory will expand its suite of unpublished techniques, integrating single-cell genomics data across humans and macaques, alongside intersectional mouse models. This approach will enable us to develop anatomical and molecular atlases and functionally characterize sympathetic neural networks conserved across species. In Aim 1, my laboratory will molecularly define sympathetic neural networks across ganglia. In Aim 2, we will manipulate these networks to differentiate those regulating energy expenditure from other physiological processes like heart rate and blood pressure. In Aim 3, we will determine how sympathetic circuits control previously unrecognized thermogenic fat pads to regulate energy expenditure. This research aims to bring sympathetic neuroscience into the era of neural networks, providing a platform that could identify new fat-burning medications that spare the cardiovascular system.

Mots-clés : brown adipose tissue,obesity,sympathetic nervous system
Projet ERC : MAESTRO (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
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 : 2642021.76 €

Recent research has shown that the spatial organisation of convection (and hence clouds) at the mesoscale (20-200km) dramatically affects the Earth’s energy balance and hydrological cycle. This raises the question as to how the organisation of convection will change with warming, and how it will influence the climate. A poor understanding of the physical drivers of the mesoscale organisation of convection, compounded by an inability to simulate and observe such processes, has hampered our ability to articulate this challenging question, let alone answer it. In MAESTRO I propose to develop observational approaches and analysis frameworks specifically designed to test mechanisms hypothesized to control the mesoscale organisation of both shallow and deep convective clouds. Advances in airborne remote sensing will be exploited to map the spatial structures of clouds and water vapor, to interpret their coupling through the analysis of coherent structures within the clear-air environment around clouds, and to understand their dependence on environmental conditions. This will help understand why and how convective clouds organise at the mesoscale, why the organisation co-varies with water vapor, clouds and radiation locally and remotely, and why it co-varies with climate conditions. By connecting observations from the airborne measurements to satellite observations and meteorological analyses, the generality of the insights from the field measurements will be tested and tempered. Finally, observational insights will be used to assess the new and emerging generation of climate models whose resolution is fine enough to represent the mesoscale organisation of convection and its interaction with climate. MAESTRO will lead to new experimental techniques for studying atmospheric processes, to an improved conceptualization of the interplay between convective organisation and climate, and to a critical assessment of the new generation of climate models for climate change studies.

Mots-clés : tropical convection,mesoscale organisation,clouds,water vapor,radiation budget,atmospheric processes,convective aggregation,field campaign,climate models
Projet ERC : KolmoCrypt (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Technion - Institut de technologie d'Israël — Pays : Israël — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 522250.0 €

Cryptography—and its basic tasks such as encryption, authentication and key exchange—is essential for ensuring privacy and security on the Internet. The question of whether “unbreakable” encryption methods exist has fascinated mathematicians and cryptographers for thousands of years, and is closely related to the famous NP vs. P problem. This question is still wide open and consequently, Internet security today relies on cryptographic constructions based on the *conjectured* hardness of some computational problems (such as e.g., the factoring problem, the discrete logarithms problem or various noisy linear algebra problems). However, these conjectured hard problems all contain significant (e.g., algebraic) *structure*, that may make them vulnerable to attacks. Furthermore, for tasks such as key exchange and public-key encryption, only a *handful* of candidate hard problems are known on which these tasks can be based. As a result, some unexpected algorithmic developments for structured problems could upend the whole infrastructure we rely on for communicating and transacting on the Internet.  In this project, we propose to develop an alternative approach: a foundation for provably-secure Cryptography from *unstructured hardness* assumptions. Towards resolving this long-standing challenge, we will leverage our recently-discovered connection between Cryptography and the seemingly unrelated area of Kolmogorov Complexity. Specifically, we will develop new hardness assumptions rooted in Kolmogorov Complexity on which the cryptographic tasks (e.g., private-key encryption, key-exchange, public-key encryption) can be based. Critically, these assumptions will lack algebraic and other computational structure that may make them vulnerable to attacks. Overall, KolmoCrypt will provide a new theoretical foundation for the hardness assumptions on which Cryptography is based, and ultimately, a more secure foundation for the Internet (and beyond).

Mots-clés : cryptography,foundations of cryptography,computational hardness,kolmogorov complexity,provable security,computational hardness assumptions,one way functions
Projet ERC : ARCHIMEDES (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Institute of Organic Chemistry — Pays : Pologne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IChO
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499825.0 €

The applications of light-based technologies in modern society cannot be underestimated. Some well-known examples of these include organic light-emitting diodes, fluorescent sensors, organic photovoltaics and fluorescence imaging. Emissive radicals have recently appeared as promising and entirely new building blocks for these technologies. This breakthrough is due to the fact that their electron spins at the lowest excited state and ground state are both doublets and the transition from the lowest excited state to the ground state is not hindered by being a spin-forbidden reaction which allows for higher operational efficiencies. Additionally, compared with both classical fluorescence microscopy and infrared imaging methods (750-900 nm), imaging in the second near-infrared window (NIR-II, 1000-1700 nm) allows for both deeper tissue penetration and a higher signal-to-noise ratio. The applicability of NIR-II emitters can be bolstered through combination with circularly polarized luminescence (CPL, the differential emission of left and right polarized light). The overarching goal of this project is to uncover a strategy to create radicals which at the same time: (a) strongly emit light in the NIR-II region; (b) are stable under ambient conditions; (c) strongly absorb light; (d) display large circularly polarized luminescence. The primary objective of ARCHIMEDES is to deliver breakthrough organic materials possessing large fluorescence quantum yields and stable radical structures in the integrated fields of molecular design, chromophore synthesis and fluorescence imaging of living cells. The realization of ARCHIMEDES will be based on both expanding the chemical space of stable, emissive C-centered radicals and on heretofore nonexisting emissive nitroxide radicals. The synergistic effects of increased brightness of NIR-II dyes and the higher sensitivity and resolution offered by CPL fluorophores will provide quality fluorescence imaging on a previously unthinkable level.

Mots-clés : synthesis,fluorescence,radicals,dyes,chirality,helicenes
Projet ERC : Re-S (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Académie autrichienne des sciences — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ÖAW
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1981951.0 €

Indigenous populations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere have become a major source of inspiration for more sustainable relations with the environment. Their animist orientations – attributing agency, personhood or spiritual powers to the non-human world – is what prevents them from treating the environment as a resource to be exploited. Extractive industries, by contrast, are seen to objectify the environment as an entity separate from human beings, which is what allows them to extract resources at an industrial scale. Through long-term ethnographic research in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Timor-Leste, this project investigates how natural resource extraction affects people’s diverse relations with the environment. However, rather than pitching indigenous communities against extractive industries, this project’s conceptual step-change consists in the development of a social interactionist framework that examines how animism and extractivism are constituted through their interactions. The hypothesis is that we find extractive logics within animist practices and that animist assumptions might also be uncovered within extractive industries. The focus on interaction allows us to determine whether animist orientations truly ‘protect’ against extractivism and how multinational corporations counteract criticism by incorporating the very logics on which this criticism is based. Ethnographic studies of resource extraction tend to be dominated by single cases, focussing on indigenous opposition and the incommensurability between indigenous and modernist ways of relating to the environment. The methodological innovation of this project lies in its comparative multi-scalar approach. Through historically informed, long-term ethnographic case studies in four Southeast Asian countries, it constructs a comparative matrix for South-to-South comparisons and examines how human-environment relations are constituted through their interactions at different scales.

Mots-clés : indigenous populations,southeast asia,natural resource extraction,animism,sustainability,anthropology of mining,anthropology of oil and gas,environmentalism,religion
Projet ERC : PersCom (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Académie autrichienne des sciences — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ÖAW
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1684949.0 €

Who are Persian Jews and what can we learn from their history? Looking back on a history of almost 3000 years, the majority of Jews left the Persianate world from the mid-20th century onwards. As Jews who lived in Muslim cultures, their trajectories do not fit into mutually exclusive concepts of “Jews” and “Muslims”. However, we hardly know how interactions between Muslims and Jews worked on a daily basis because the contemporary narratives about Jewish-Muslim relations tend to be highly polarized, and access to sources in Persianate societies is hampered. Based on different forms of interconnectedness, this research provides the first comprehensive study about Persianate Jews from the 19th century until today. It analyses Jewish contacts within and outside of their communities in everyday life, to shed light on the various forms of connecting with and separation from the surrounding Muslim societies. It highlights religious identity as applied in context, rather than as fixed notion. This can only be achieved by an innovative method of combining a variety of sources that have not been brought into dialogue until now, including the different languages Persianate Jews used. Focusing on non-elites and everyday life also includes a completely new pool of data that until now was considered too mundane for analysis. Yet, exactly these documents from ordinary people and daily encounters provide significant new insights into Jewish life in the region, the role of transregional networks and their connection to global markets. In this way, the project aims to overcome the geographic, disciplinary and linguistic separation that has shaped modern Persianate Jewish history to date. Expanding this method systematically to a number of different archives will generate significant new insights on Jewish life in the region, present Jews as active members of Persianate societies, and contribute to preserving an endangered cultural heritage.

Mots-clés : jews in the muslim world,modern history of iran,central asia,and afghanistan,trade networks,religious and ethnic minorities,religious identity,biographic research