Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : HUNTING-3BFs (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université technique de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 145000.0 €

HUNTING-3BFs aims to solve the many-body problem in nuclear physics. This would allow describing the properties of nuclear matter starting from the interaction among the constituents and to extrapolate its behaviour in dense environments in the Universe, like in the innermost region of neutron stars. The main difficulties in the current state-of-the-art many-body calculations arise from complex effects induced by long-range Coulomb interactions, which are challenging to predict, and from the emergence of short-range three-body nuclear forces (3BFs) in the dynamics of hadrons, which have been never anchored to direct experimental measurements. The primary goal of this project is to quantify for the first time these effects using new three-body scattering measurements. The latter will be performed using the femtoscopy method at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The final state interaction of p-p-p and p-p-Λ triplets as well as p-d and Λ-d pairs emitted in pp collisions at the LHC will be measured with the ALICE detector using correlation functions. The sensitivity to the contribution of 3BFs will be reached with the full statistics of the LHC Run 3 data taking (2022-2026). The PI will deliver phenomenological potentials for the NNN and NNΛ 3BFs, by constraining the models to experimental correlation functions. To reach this goal the PI will develop a framework capable of solving numerically the three-body problem. One of the main novelties of HUNTING-3BFs is the study of the interactions as a function of the energy and distance, giving a unique chance to probe different interaction ranges. This project will provide a new groundbreaking method to solve the many-body problem in nuclear physics with strong impact on research areas ranging from the domain of nuclear physics to astrophysics.

Mots-clés : strong nuclear force,femtoscopy,three body strong interaction
Projet ERC : FDS (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Université technique de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1496305.0 €

Three major trends put immense pressure on existing infrastructure. First, there is an increased demand for compute given the exponential growth of data volume we are collecting. Second, as most data- and compute-intensive systems move to the cloud, it is vital to make data-centers more efficient. Third, pressured by the waning laws of computing infrastructure (end of Dennard scaling and its impact on Moores' law) the hardware landscape has embarked on a major push towards specialization. Unsurprisingly, all of these have major implications on software development. FDS addresses these challenges in a holistic fashion by establishing the foundations of a new software infrastructure. More specifically, I propose new system software abstractions that enable more efficient execution of data-intensive jobs on modern hardware; and new cost-models to support reasoning about the performance/resource efficiency trade-offs when scheduling the said workloads. To enable development of future-proof data systems, I propose replacing the traditional monoliths of a logical-graph optimizer and execution engine, with a new flexible framework for optimization and compilation, and a runtime system that can exploit the features of modern hardware, but remains amenable to its evolving nature. Doing so requires innovation on many levels, and combines work from many layers of the system stack: from HW/SW co-design, to compilers, operating and runtime systems, databases and distributed systems.  It is a non-trivial undertaking, but it is a necessary one. And it will have big and lasting impact on academia, industry, and society. In fact, I strongly believe that the only way forward towards reducing the increasing gap between data- and compute-demand in resource-hungry data centers is a software-solution that boosts efficiency, embraces specialization, removes redundancy and optimizes for data movement. FDS will be the pioneering system leading the way.

Mots-clés : data intensive systems,modern heterogeneous hardware,system software infrastructure,compilers,operating systems,data management systems,runtime systems,distributed systems
Projet ERC : ECOVI (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université technique de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499493.0 €

Violence against women is a violation of fundamental human rights and substantially compromises women’s health, wellbeing, and empowerment. Globally, more than one in four women experience physical and/or sexual violence by a partner in their lives. This risk is considerably higher among women in low- and middle-income countries and in cultures with pronounced patriarchal gender norms. However, existing research has so far neglected an important dimension of intimate partner violence (IPV): economic abuse. This form of abuse includes denying women the right to participate in financial decisions, taking away their income or preventing them from seeking employment. The consequences are profound – economic IPV compromises women’s economic welfare and independence, traps them in abusive relationships, and adversely affects their mental health. To tackle this major global health concern, ECOVI has three objectives: first, to establish the prevalence of different forms of economic IPV; second, to develop a theory of economic abuse by investigating drivers of economic IPV and linkages with other forms of IPV; and third, to design and test a community-based prevention approach. To this end, I will focus on India, which is home to 670 million women and girls and exhibits high levels of gender discrimination that exacerbate women’s vulnerability to economic IPV. I will capitalise on a mixed-methods approach, including (i) systematic reviews and meta-analyses, (ii) conducting qualitative in-depth interviews and focus groups, and (iii) implementing a cluster randomised controlled trial and innovative survey experiments with husbands and wives in 150 Indian communities. ECOVI will generate the largest existing database on economic IPV and establish an evidence-informed prevention approach. This has the potential to yield ground-breaking scientific and programmatic evidence on how to alleviate the economic violence and associated economic hardship that women worldwide are facing.

Mots-clés : intimate partner violence economic abuse gender inequality gender transformation women empowerment financial literacy economic strengthening intrahousehold dynamics primary prevention global health social determinants of health randomised controlled trial impact evaluation mixed methods low and middle income countries india
Projet ERC : CONSTEMO (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université technique de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499919.0 €

High-Tech architecture made use of standardized, serial components whose characteristics were meticulously described in technical specifications. The scope of this historic information is almost unmanageable, the analogue sources are increasingly difficult to access. The challenge of quantity is mirrored by the scale of the built structures, constraining the possibilities of thorough building investigation. As a result, these building elements are often replaced during renovation before they could be acknowledged, evaluated, and possibly preserved. What if, based on a few geometric details recorded on site, one could identify standardized building products semi-automatically and make use of the historic knowledge by integrating both into Historic Building Information Models? The method I aim to develop will first target window frames manufactured between 1960 to 1990 in Germany. A close historic reading of hitherto neglected sources will produce a thesaurus, mapping technological development, production, and distribution. In this process, the analogue archival material will be digitalized, structuring both geometric and alphanumeric information. A second work package will develop sophisticated 3D scanning techniques for documentation and comparative analysis of similar facade elements. Parallel, existent conditions of the case studies will be evaluated in relation to standards of conservation and retrofitting. The outcome of these steps will be implemented iteratively into a graph database for efficient matching of 3D scans with information of historic building products, finally leading to semi-automatic identification. The resulting digital repository will for the first time allow for a comprehensive overview and understanding of windows in High-Tech architecture. Innovative means of surveying and the new insights into the construction history of serial, standardized components in late 20th century modernism will be crucial for future conservation and reuse.

Mots-clés : construction history,building survey,building conservation,hbim,high tech architecture
Projet ERC : EscapeX (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative B iology : from Genes and Genomes to S ystems
Entité participante : Université technique de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1491750.0 €

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) occur and progress differently in men and women, and the risk dramatically increases with age. Hormone differences have been suggested to account for the sex difference by observing that younger women are regularly protected from CVD until post-menopause. However, hormone replacement therapies failed to provide cardioprotection, suggesting that other biological factors contribute to sex disparities in CVD development. Other likely contributors to sex bias are genes that escape female X chromosome inactivation, an understudied epigenetic phenomenon that has so far not been linked to sex differences in CVD. These so-called escaper genes have twice the gene dose in females compared to males and thus are likely to contribute to sex-based differences. EscapeX aims to identify sex-specific protective mechanisms by disentangling the impact of hormones and sex chromosomes on sex bias in CVD. First, we will combine the transgenic FCG mouse model, in which the sex chromosome complement (XX or XY) is independent of the gonadal hormones, with the pressure overload heart failure model, which shows a sex-specific phenotype. Next, EscapeX uses our established escaper detection pipeline to map and characterize escaping during cardiac aging and disease. The resulting dataset will uncover the escaper gene function, the extend of lineage-specific escaping, and how the escaper landscape changes during aging and disease. Building on those findings, EscapeX aims to overexpress the identified escapers in the disease model using viral vectors with the ambitious goal to rescue the sex-specific phenotype. Finally, we will combine allele-specific genomics and single-cell technology to explore if X-reactivation occurs in cardiac aging and disease and if such a novel disease mechanism further contributes to sex differences. EscapeX will elucidate new regulatory disease mechanisms and relevant therapeutic candidates, forming the basis of new sex-specific therapies.

Mots-clés : sex differences,escaper,heart failure,cardiac hypertrophy,aging,cardiovascular disease,sex chromosomes,x chromosome inactivation,hormones,lncrna,genomics
Projet ERC : 2DTopS (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Université technique de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1945000.0 €

Periodic potentials superimposed onto an atomic crystal allow to enhance electronic correlations in a broad class of materials, from semiconductors to semimetals, if the spatial period of the potential becomes comparable to the Fermi wavelength of electrons. In this regime, the external superlattice potential creates tailored electronic minibands with new functionality. By concentrating the density of states into van Hove singularities, superlattices can ultimately lead to flat bands, where complex correlated electronic behaviour emerges already at moderate temperatures. Recent work evidenced that lithographically defined superlattices in 2D van der Waals materials can achieve the necessary, close-to-atomistic precision to access this regime. At this point, 2DTopS proposes a concerted effort to radically expand the concept of top-down superlattice engineering in 2D van der Waals materials and to explore the emerging physics. I will generalize top-down fabrication of flat bands to dramatically enhance correlations in a broad class of materials, including semiconductors, semimetals with strong spin orbit coupling, and topological semimetals. In particular, I will leverage the polarizability of low-symmetry 2D materials to electronically and periodically modulate spin-orbit coupling, which has been theorized to enable unprecedented spin functionality. While the equilibrium Fermi surface and phase diagram will be characterized by magnetotransport, I will further establish light-matter coupling in solid-state superlattices as a complementary tool to interrogate symmetries and non-equilibrium dynamics of resonant interband transitions between flat bands, which are predicted to be intrinsically non-semiclassical but rather given by quantum geometric properties of the bands. 2DTopS bears potential for a paradigm shift in 2D materials research by harnessing close-to-atomistic top-down nanofabrication to access artificial quantum phases.
Projet ERC : HIGH-Q (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Université d'Hambourg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Our ability to observe processes and study function at the nanoscale is hindered by the compromise between temporal and spatial resolutions inherent to the majority of far-field imaging techniques. This limits our perspective on a wide range of non-equilibrium processes at the nanoscale such as chemical/catalytic reactions, ultrafast phase-transitions and biological processes at room temperature in native phase. Intense and spatially coherent femtosecond-short X-ray flashes from free-electron laser (XFEL) sources can combine high spatial and temporal resolutions through 'diffraction-before-destruction' coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) of individual nano-specimens within a single exposure. XFEL CDI studies have found surprising variety of morphologies in soot, unknown metastable shapes of metal nanoparticles and exotic states of water, which are otherwise inaccessible. PI and colleagues applied this technique to follow an ultrafast irreversible laser-superheating process with few nanometers spatial and 100 femtosecond temporal resolutions at the single nanoparticle level. Despite significant efforts, the spatial resolution of single XFEL CDI images of non-periodic specimen could not be improved beyond few nanometers. This proposal will overcome this limit by exploiting previously little explored phenomena which arise when specimen are exposed to newly available intense 500 attosecond to few femtosecond short FEL pulses. All matter exposed to intense X-rays is photo-ionised. When XFEL pulses are comparable or shorter than subsequent relaxation processes, non-linear effects such as transient resonances and resonant stimulated emission increase the brightness of images by several orders of magnitudes and significantly improve the spatial resolution. In combination with sparsity based reconstruction algorithms this proposal will push ultrafast CDI towards the single macromolecule limit and open novel avenues for photochemistry, catalysis, and material studies.

Mots-clés : ultrafast processes at the nanoscale,x ray coherent diffraction,x ray free electron lasers,diffractive imaging with higher harmonic generation
Projet ERC : FIREPOL (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Collegio Carlo Alberto — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 290000.0 €

Extreme wildfires have been on the rise across the globe due to climate change and other human actions. Despite the abundant literature on fire ecology and a recognition of the linkages of wildfires to global warming, a patchy understanding of the relationship between fire and anthropogenic actions and their political drivers persists. Social sciences scholarship has mostly focused on fire mitigation and management in the Global North, while complex relationships between societies and fires in the Global South remain broadly unexplored. These two gaps in the academic literature in terms of scope and geography are reflected in a narrow public understanding of wildfires as ‘risks’ and ‘natural disasters’.  FIREPOL goes beyond the state of the art by leading the most rigorous, cross-continental study of the political drivers of wildfires in the Global South. Through a radical multi-methods approach and a comparative perspective, my team and I will combine and analyse newly compiled fire policy and remote sensing data with qualitative case studies and ethnographic research. The aim will be to understand and explain how a range of political factors linked to formal policies and institutions, actor-driven power dynamics, and social contention shape the geographical distribution and social impact of wildfires, and public narratives about them. FIREPOL is an ambitious, high-risk/high-gain project that will deliver a new framework to understand and explain the connections between politics and wildfires, at a timely moment when wildfires have been identified as crucial socio-ecological challenges within the global climate change agenda. It will develop a new theoretical framework around the concept of ‘wildfire commons’ as a way of engaging the academic community, policy stakeholders and the general public in the co-production of alternative pathways for the sustainable, equitable and politically engaged management of wildfires.

Mots-clés : wildfire politics political drivers of wildfires wildfire commons global south mixed methods
Projet ERC : BreathingUnderground (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Université de Nottingham — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499157.0 €

Roots play an essential role in plant growth by absorbing water and nutrients from the soil. As roots penetrate deeper into the soil, they encounter naturally decreasing oxygen levels, which can be exacerbated by soil structure and water content. With the increasing frequency and severity of floods due to climate change, these oxygen limitations (hypoxia) pose a growing threat to global food security because roots require oxygen for respiration, which is vital for efficient energy production. In addition to external factors, my previous research showed that internal factors can create hypoxic niches within root meristems, even in oxygen-rich environments. This pioneering study has begun to uncover a new area of research, highlighting the dynamics of root oxygenation and the consequences of inadequate oxygen supply on root architecture. BreathingUnderground now sets an ambitious goal: to discover how roots breathe beneath the surface and the impact this has on their development and physiology. We will explore: 1) oxygen distribution in root tissues; 2) the impact of chronic hypoxia on root development; and 3) the ability of roots to sense and grow towards oxygen-rich zones. This holistic approach aims to revolutionise the way oxygen provision feeds into root architecture, using advanced microsensors, orthogonal biosensors, X-ray tomography, and spatial transcriptomics. This project aims to create a high-resolution 3D map of root oxygen distribution by precisely measuring root zone oxygenation in natural settings. The project will reveal how oxygen acts as a diffusible signal to monitor root barrier integrity, regulate vascular development. Finally, it will uncover the mechanisms by which roots perceive and respond to fluctuations in oxygen. This fundamental knowledge can be applied to improve plant resilience and/or to modify agricultural practices, and thus to increase crop yields in response to oxygen-limited environments and the challenges posed by climate change.

Mots-clés : oxygen limitations,root development,root physiology,oxygen signalling,oxygen sensing,suberin lamellae,vascular cambium development,oxytropism,hypoxia
Projet ERC : SPINOCCHIO (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Molecules and atoms with unpaired electrons exhibit a net magnetic moment and serve as the building blocks of molecular quantum devices for next-generation technologies. As the design principles for long-lived molecular magnets become clearer, the next challenge is assembling these units into spin lattices via surface deposition and addressing their magnetic behavior at the single-molecule level. Advancing molecular quantum technologies requires understanding the electronic structure and magnetic properties of these building blocks and their interactions with the environment; thus, it depends on quantum chemical calculations. However, our current theoretical toolkit for molecular magnetic materials is inadequate. Density functional theory fails to capture strong correlation, while wave function-based methods are computationally prohibitive for strongly-correlated materials. SPINOCCHIO aims to change this and advance our understanding of the static and dynamic behavior of spins on surfaces and surface spin arrays. These systems, which represent real molecular quantum devices comprising hundreds of atoms and multiple magnetic centers, pose a huge dilemma in quantum chemistry between system size and complexity. To overcome this challenge, we will develop a new quantum chemical approach that combines periodic quantum embedding with a coarse-grained treatment of strong correlation. Equipped with these new tools, we will investigate how the surface affects the magnetic behavior and spin relaxation of the magnetic adsorbate. Moreover, we will explore all light-induced phenomena key to the optical control of individual spins. This newly gained knowledge will guide the design of magnetically stable and optically addressable spins on surfaces, bringing molecular quantum technologies to fruition.

Mots-clés : quantum embedding theories,molecular magnets,electronic structure theory,equation of motion coupled cluster theory,quantum technologies,dynamic and non dynamic electron correlation