Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : E-T1IFNs (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and Immunotherapy
Entité participante : University of Edinburgh — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2156300.0 €

Type I interferons represent both key molecules in anti-viral defence and mediators of inflammatory disease, so that the induction, transmission and resolution of the interferon response are tightly regulated - balancing protection against infection versus the risk of immunopathology. Monogenic type I interferonopathies (T1IFNs), and related ‘complex’ phenotypes such as systemic lupus erythematosus and dermatomyositis, represent examples of a disturbance of the homeostatic control of this system, where a constitutive upregulation of type I interferon activity is considered directly relevant to pathology. Set against the absence of a routine assay in clinical medicine for the detection of upregulated type I interferon, the current application addresses major questions in the developing T1IFN field. Analogous to other screening strategies (e.g. using mouse ENU mutagenesis or yeast gene deletion series), we have established a pipeline for the systematic identification of human mutant states predisposing to upregulated type I interferon signalling. Such an approach will allow for the comprehensive definition of important themes in interferon biology, informing our understanding of anti-viral signalling and self-non-self discrimination. Furthermore, these studies will have direct translational benefit - since the identification of a phenotype as a T1IFN implies the possibility of therapy to reduce type I interferon levels and / or block interferon signalling.

Mots-clés : type i interferon,type i interferonopathies,innate immunity
Projet ERC : BayeSN (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
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 : 2446736.0 €

Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are used as “standardiseable candles”: their peak luminosities can be inferred from their optical light curve shapes and colours, so their distances can be estimated from their apparent brightnesses. SN Ia distances with high precision and small systematic error are essential to accurate constraints on the cosmic expansion history, local measurements of the Hubble constant, and the properties of the dark energy driving the acceleration, in particular, its equation-of-state parameter w. The current global sample used for cosmology has grown to over a thousand SNe Ia. Future surveys will boost that number by orders of magnitude. However, the constraints on dark energy with the current optical sample are already limited, not by statistical uncertainties from the numbers of SNe, but by systematic errors. Near-infrared (NIR) observations of SN Ia are a route to more precise and accurate distances and significantly enhance their cosmological utility. SNe Ia are excellent standard candles in the NIR, and are less vulnerable to absorption by dust in the host galaxies. These good NIR properties are not exploited by the conventional optical models currently used for cosmological SN Ia analysis. Furthermore, the present useful sample of SN Ia with NIR data is relatively small compared to the growing nearby or distant optical samples. In this Project, we will leverage our involvement in new SN surveys using the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories to build a ~10X larger sample of SNe Ia with high-quality optical and NIR data. We will develop the next-generation probabilistic model for SN Ia spectral energy distributions (SEDs) in the optical-to-NIR, accounting properly for the variabilities and uncertainties inherent in the data by fusing advanced hierarchical Bayesian modelling and functional data analysis techniques. We will apply our state-of-the-art model to our new SN datasets and LSST to obtain robust cosmological inferences.

Mots-clés : astrostatistics
Projet ERC : MULT2D (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : National University of Ireland — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : NUI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499659.0 €

Type-2 (T2) Diabetes is associated with a 3-fold increase in bone fracture risk, despite the fact that bone volume is not reduced. This implies that T2 diabetes impairs bone quality, whereby the intrinsic material properties of the bone matrix are altered. However, current diagnostic techniques are unable to predict fracture probability in T2 diabetes as they are based on measures of bone quantity. While it is believed that non-enzymatic cross-linking of organic proteins (also known as AGE accumulation) in the bone matrix is responsible for bone fragility in T2 diabetes, there is a distinct lack of understanding how altered protein configurations impair whole-bone biomechanics. In this project, the applicant will embark on frontier research that will develop a state-of-the-art multiscale computational framework that couples behaviour from the molecular to whole-bone level, providing a basis to interrogate and elucidate the physical mechanisms that are responsible for diabetic bone fragility. A multiscale experimental framework will, for the first time, establish relationships between AGE crosslink-density and whole-bone fragility in animal and human T2 diabetic bone tissue. Together, this data will inform a probabilistic mutli-level model of hip fracture, which will be used to quantitatively evaluate the relationship between hip fracture probability, bone quantity and bone quality. The research programme will also establish a novel strategy for clinical fracture risk assessment that employs existing protocols to measure bone quantity, in combination with a surrogate measure of bone quality. The surrogate measure of bone quality proposed is a systemic measure of AGE content, which is clinically-obtainable through a blood sample and therefore widely-applicable. Overall, the project will provide a ground-breaking advance in our understanding of bone fragility, with remarkable potential to innovate novel solutions for clinical assessment of T2 diabetic bone disease.

Mots-clés : multiscale modelling,bone mechanics,bone fragility
Projet ERC : ULTRASUPERTAPE (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Spanish National Research Council — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2496652.0 €

ULTRASUPERTAPE aims to demonstrate an unprecedented approach for fabrication of low cost / high throughput / high performance High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) tapes, or Coated Conductors, to push the emerging HTS industry to market. The breakthrough idea is the use of Transient Liquid Assisted Growth from low cost Chemical Solution Deposition of Y, Ba, Cu metallorganic precursors to reach ultrafast growth rates. The key concept relies on the discovery of a tool to control the ignition effect of the transient liquid formation through the decomposition of barium carbonate even for thick films. The capability to modulate the transient liquid state with composition variations and low cost capital investment equipment enriches its potentiality. Innovative Additive Manufacturing and Digital Printing methodologies are identified to devise an integrated system able to address the full manufacturing process from solution deposition by ink jet printing to ultrafast epitaxial crystallization of the superconducting phase. A combinatorial chemistry strategy ensures fast screening operation. Furthermore, ULTRASUPERTAPE will boost Coated Conductor performances up to outstanding limits at high and ultrahigh fields, by smartly designing and engineering the local strain and electronic state properties of nanocomposite superconducting films. The digital-printing additive-manufacturing approach developed will be cleverly adapted to create unique superconducting nanocomposites from nanoparticle colloids with unlimited concentrations. This new instrument is foreseen to be transferable to many other functional applications of advanced nanocoatings, where long length or large area production of functional epitaxial films or multilayer structures are required. Consequently, wise ideas and technology emerged from this proposal are foreseen to penetrate the new energy paradigm beyond the clean, efficient and smart limits that Superconductivity offers.

Mots-clés : high temperature superconductors,coated conductors,epitaxial nanocomposites,transient liquid growth,additive manufacturing,ink jet printing,chemical solutions deposition,electrical energy
Projet ERC : ESSENS (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : University of the Basque Country — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UPV;EHU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 149760.0 €

UN-Water has recently warned that in only ten years' time, by 2025, water scarcity will be affecting 1.8 billion people, with two-thirds of the world population possibly living under conditions of water stress. There exists, hence, a strong need to rigorously manage drinking water resources. The production of potable water by membrane water treatment systems is relatively economic and benign. 80 million m3 of potable water are already produced nowadays using membranes. However, the efficiency of membrane water treatment processes may severely be impeded by a phenomenon known as "membrane fouling". Hereby, organic matter present in the water to be treated adsorbs on the surface of the porous membrane filters, resulting in the build-up of a surface layer which then increasingly closes the membrane pores and, hence, dramatically diminishes the potable water production. If detected at an early stage, such fouling could be counteracted by adequate process operating conditions. Once a rigid fouling layer is formed, however, chemically aggressive membrane cleaning procedures need to be employed with respective negative environmental impact. ESSENS proposes a monitoring device that outperforms existing fouling detection techniques and allows optimizing both fouling prevention and membrane cleaning cycles. The result is a significantly more efficient and sustainable membrane water treatment processes, enabling a greatly improved management of the drinking water production.

Mots-clés : fouling,membrane filtration,surface sensitive monitoring techniques
Projet ERC : 2DNANOPTICA (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : University of Oviedo — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1459219.0 €

Ubiquitous in nature, light-matter interactions are of fundamental importance in science and all optical technologies. Understanding and controlling them has been a long-pursued objective in modern physics. However, so far, related experiments have relied on traditional optical schemes where, owing to the classical diffraction limit, control of optical fields to length scales below the wavelength of light is prevented. Importantly, this limitation impedes to exploit the extraordinary fundamental and scaling potentials of nanoscience and nanotechnology. A solution to concentrate optical fields into sub-diffracting volumes is the excitation of surface polaritons –coupled excitations of photons and mobile/bound charges in metals/polar materials (plasmons/phonons)-. However, their initial promises have been hindered by either strong optical losses or lack of electrical control in metals, and difficulties to fabricate high optical quality nanostructures in polar materials. With the advent of two-dimensional (2D) materials and their extraordinary optical properties, during the last 2-3 years the visualization of both low-loss and electrically tunable (active) plasmons in graphene and high optical quality phonons in monolayer and multilayer h-BN nanostructures have been demonstrated in the mid-infrared spectral range, thus introducing a very encouraging arena for scientifically ground-breaking discoveries in nano-optics. Inspired by these extraordinary prospects, this ERC project aims to make use of our knowledge and unique expertise in 2D nanoplasmonics, and the recent advances in nanophononics, to establish a technological platform that, including coherent sources, waveguides, routers, and efficient detectors, permits an unprecedented active control and manipulation (at room temperature) of light and light-matter interactions on the nanoscale, thus laying experimentally the foundations of a 2D nano-optics field.

Mots-clés : graphene,2d materials,nano optics,plasmonics,near field optics
Projet ERC : QBox (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
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 : 1943753.0 €

Ultracold atomic gases offer flexible systems for fundamental studies of both equilibrium and non-equilibrium many-body problems that are relevant across many fields, from condensed matter physics to high-energy physics and astrophysics. In the long run, research on these systems could also lead to practical applications, in the development of novel materials, force sensing, navigation, and quantum information processing. Traditionally, an important difference between "conventional" many-body systems and ultracold gases has been that the former are usually spatially uniform, while the latter were produced in harmonic traps. This difference can often be addressed using the local density approximation (LDA), but for studies of some very important problems it is a serious hindrance. In particular, LDA breaks down close to phase transitions, where the correlation length diverges, and where (due to the “critical slowing down” of the system) some of the most interesting non-equilibrium effects also emerge. Here we propose a comprehensive study of both equilibrium and non-equilibrium many-body phenomena in a homogeneous 39K Bose gas with dynamically tuneable interactions. The use of a homogeneous quantum gas, produced in our newly developed box-like trapping potential (in contrast to the standard setting of a harmonic trap) is a particularly important and unique aspect of this proposal, which will allow for closer connections with both other many-body systems and the theoretical calculations. We will specifically focus on problems in beyond-mean-field physics and on those that cannot be effectively tackled using a harmonically trapped gas. The outstanding problems we will address range from the 50-year-old equilibrium problem of the critical temperature of an interacting homogeneous gas, to the modern topics of quenches and non-equilibrium (Kibble-Zurek and beyond) critical dynamics, to the largely unexplored problem of the unitary Bose gas.

Mots-clés : strong correlations,beyond mean field,critical behavior,non equilibrium many body dynamics,thermal and quantum quenches,unitary interactions
Projet ERC : ENIGMA (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : University of Southampton — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499957.0 €

Ultrafast laser material processing is approaching its limits in terms of ability to produce innovative materials with compositional and structural consistency. The main idea of this project is to remove barriers to product development and go beyond state-of-the-art by applying tailored and few-cycle laser pulses (FCLPs) for engineering of materials. In this project I will investigate the interaction between intense ultra-short light pulses and matter at or below the wavelength scale reaching states of matter found only deep planetary conditions.A key goal of the project is to exploit these extreme conditions for synthesising unique material phases with on-demand optical and electronic properties, and progress photonic devices with utilizing FCLP advantages: control over the bond scissoring density; efficient and highly localized energy deposition; seeding of self-organized nanostructures; manipulation of spatio-temporal coupling. Currently, a key limitation is plasma scattering that diminishes the performance of engineered materials. The question I will address is whether control of ultra-short pulses can lead to ways around this limitation. The control of self-organization process will revolutionize the field of data storage by achieving record high 100 TB/cm3 densities, high writing speed and practically unlimited lifetime. I will radically improve the performance of printed flat optics with perfected nanostructures engineered from nano- to macro-scale and capable of replacing conventional optics significantly advancing photonic devices used in high-resolution microscopy, consumer electronics, and high-power laser applications. I envisage obtaining exotic material phases such as metallic phases of silicon and tailored metallic nanoparticles in silicate glass. Hence this project will push the frontiers of laser material processing to unprecedented precision and will develop novel family of devices that will feed into the future of optics, electronics and computing

Mots-clés : data storage,laser material processing
Projet ERC : MUSE (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Eindhoven University of Technology — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TU/e
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998504.75 €

Ultrasound (US) is the modality of choice for imaging and functional measurements of the cardiovascular system due to its high spatial and temporal resolution. In recent years, the use of US has been on the rise owing to huge advancements in acquisition speed and resolution. Nevertheless, because of physical constraints, several issues —limited field-of-view, refraction, resolution and, contrast anisotropy— cannot be resolved using a single probe. This proposal will aim at tackling these issues introducing Multi-perspective Ultrasound Strain Imaging & Elastography (MUSE). MUSE will push the frontiers of 3-D US imaging by introducing a novel, multi-perspective 3-D US system. The revolutionary system will consist of two synchronously controlled 3-D matrix arrays and advanced signal and image processing to improve geometric and functional measurements (strain, elasticity). Validation will be performed for two applications: cardiac strain imaging in patients with aortic valve stenosis (AoS) and elastography of abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA). Fusion of dual-probe data will be challenged and achieved by new algorithms, preserving important features and improving both contrast and field-of-view. Advanced 3-D processing of the raw US data will be developed for motion and strain imaging. A novel compounding technique, fusion strain imaging, will combine multi-perspective strain data to improve accuracy and precision. A comprehensive framework for system verification and validation will be built, comprising US simulations, ex vivo experiments, and in vivo pilot studies on healthy volunteers. The proposed technique will be validated in AoS and AAA patients. Ultimately, MUSE will introduce a non-invasive, ground-breaking US platform for functional screening and follow-up, and a breakthrough in early diagnosis, clinical decision making, and risk assessment of cardiovascular disease. Moreover, MUSE has the potential to replace invasive or costly imaging modalities with US.

Mots-clés : ultrasound,multiview,fusion,strain imaging,elastography,biomechanics,heart disease,aneurysms
Projet ERC : BCLLatlas (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Centre for Genomic Regulation — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : CO-PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CRG;CRG-CERCA
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 5451231.0 €

Unbiased analyses of the molecular make up of single cells are revolutionizing our understanding of cell differentiation and cancer. Over the last years, our groups have characterized the molecular features of normal B-cell subpopulations and of pools of leukemic cells from chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), the most frequent leukemia in the Western world. These analyses have revealed that CLL subtypes are related to different B-cell maturation stages, and that they can show a complex subclonal architecture. Such subclonality is dynamically modulated during the course of the disease, and has deep implications in CLL biology, clinical aggressiveness and treatment responses. In this scenario, BCLL@las aims at deciphering the origin and molecular anatomy of CLL during the entire life history of the disease by generating genetic, transcriptional and epigenetic maps of hundred-thousands of single cells across locations, time points and individuals. We plan to fulfill four major objectives: 1) To generate a comprehensive atlas of normal B-cell maturation, 2) To understand the initial steps of neoplastic transformation through the analysis of minute B-cell monoclonal proliferations in healthy individuals, 3) To decipher the cellular diversity and clonal architecture of CLL at diagnosis, and 4) To characterize the single-cell subclonal dynamics of CLL during disease evolution and treatment response. To reach these goals, BCLL@las gathers together four teams with complementary expertise in B-cell biology, clinics and pathology of CLL, genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics, sequencing technologies, single-cell profiling and computational biology. This, together with the richness of the available CLL samples and the technical and analytical depth of BCLL@las shall lead to unprecedented insights into the origin and evolution of cancer in the precision medicine era.

Mots-clés : single cell genomics,chronic lymphocyic leukemia,b cell,clonal heterogeneity