Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : TRITRAMO (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz de Hanovre — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1822724.0 €

A major challenge in physics is to prepare and control increasingly complex physical systems at ultracold temperatures down to the quantum level. Precise control allows analyzing the universal features of the system and, at the same time, enables tackling more complex systems. This development has led from atomic control to few- and many-body quantum systems. Similarly, atomic control has enabled the preparation and study of diatomic molecules - a development the PI of this proposal has significantly contributed to.  Our aim is to drive the next milestone on the path to increasingly complex quantum systems in the ultracold. We will make use of collisional processes and photoassociation in "chemically stable" atom-molecule and molecular quantum gases to progress beyond diatomic molecules to weakly bound trimers and tetramers. We will feedback the developed understanding of these small polyatomic molecules to controlling atom-molecule and molecule-molecule collisions - currently a hot topic in itself - and possibly enable the realization of the first BEC of diatomic ground-state molecules.  The experiments will start from atom-molecule quantum gas mixtures of 39K and 23Na39K and pure molecular quantum gases of 23Na39K as available in the PI’s laboratory and enable studies of weakly bound NaK2 and Na2K2. We will detect trimers and tetramers and information about their quantum state by ion spectrometry – a method from physical chemistry.  If successful, the proposal will extend significantly beyond the state of the art. It will extend the world of ultracold gases to small, weakly bound polyatomic molecules, provide insight into the building of simple molecular systems, and how few-body systems change with increasing number of atoms. It might enable precision control of diatomic molecule collisions, the longed-for BEC of polar molecules, and might unlock the full potential of polar molecules for dipolar quantum many-body physics.

Mots-clés : quantum gases,diatomic ground state molecules,small polyatomics molecules,molecular bec,atomic and molecular scattering
Projet ERC : TWISTRAIN (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Université polytechnique et économique de Budapest — Pays : Hongrie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : BME
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1939000.0 €

Correlations and topology are the cornerstones of modern condensed matter physics, and their coexistence is believed to lead to novel quantum electronic devices with built-in information protection. In the landmark discoveries of previous years it has been found that in 2D materials placed on top of each other at a magic rotation angle, correlated phases appear. In contrast to high-Tc materials, in twisted van der Waals materials correlation effects are coupled with topology and thanks to their gate tuneability the exploration of their phase diagram takes only days instead of years. This has led to the discovery of a multitude of correlated phases including correlated insulators, orbital magnetic, non-conventional superconducting and ferroelectric phases, etc. Despite the immense interest, the understanding of their behaviour at the microscopic level is limited, which calls for further experiments and novel experimental tools. In this project we will implement techniques that are radically new in this field: hydrostatic pressure and mechanical strain to uncover the ground state properties of twisted graphene and transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructures. Since the interlayer coupling plays the dominant role, changing the distance of the layers with hydrostatic pressure has a dramatic effect on the band structure and the correlated phases that emerge. The symmetries of the system can be deterministically broken by strain patterns applied in-situ. This very timely project will lead to several breakthroughs including a) revealing the ground state of twisted bilayer graphene at different filling factors from the large set of competing phases, b) in-situ engineering of the topology of these systems, or c) tuning quantum phase transition between non-Fermi liquid phases. The highly challenging research concept relies on my unique background in sample fabrication, quantum transport under strain and pressure, and studies on correlated and topological systems.

Mots-clés : van der waals structures,twistronics,strain,pressure,proximity effects
Projet ERC : RADIALIS (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative B iology : from Genes and Genomes to S ystems
Entité participante : Human Technopole — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HT
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1464500.0 €

In exciting preliminary experiments leveraging our GPSeq method we discovered that the genome of mammalian cells in interphase folds into a steep radial gradient of guanine and cytosine (GC) density, which seems to persist at the level of individual mitotic chromosomes. However, we still lack a fundamental understanding of how this higher-order 3D genome architecture is established and what its functional implications are. Here, I go beyond the state-of-the-art and propose that the observed steep radial GC-gradient is a universal design principle of the radial arrangement of the genome in the nucleus—which I call the radiality principle—that provides a biophysical framework for spatially orchestrating key nuclear processes, beyond gene expression regulation. To test this hypothesis, in this project I pursue five Objectives: (1) First, we develop a novel approach (GP-C) for high-resolution single-cell 3D genome reconstructions to study whether the radial GC-gradient is indeed a universal property of nuclei across different species and cell types. (2) Next, we apply GP-C together with RNA-seq to monitor genome radiality and concurrent gene expression changes as cells undergo karyotype rewiring or significant epigenetic perturbations. (3) In parallel, we develop innovative approaches to probe the internal structure of mitotic chromosomes and model how genome radiality is reorganized as cells traverse mitosis. (4) We then expand our preliminary finding of large-scale DNA-RNA contact hubs that seem to shape cell-type specific radiality landscapes by opposing the radial GC-gradient. (5) Finally, we pioneer methods for profiling nuclear proteins radially and apply them to test the bold hypothesis that the radiality principle provides a blueprint for organizing numerous nuclear processes. This project aims at conclusively addressing long-standing questions in the field of 3D genome biology and proposes novel mechanisms of nuclear function regulation.

Mots-clés : 3d genome organization chromosomes mitosis dna rna contacts transcription factors fluorescence in situ hybridization high throughput sequencing
Projet ERC : ChinaComx (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université de Heidelberg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Comics Culture in the People’s Republic of China (ChinaComx) sets out to investigate the intellectual, political, social, historical, and transcultural dimensions of a medium still heavily understudied: lianhuanhua, literally “linked images.” It studies them as a medium from the People’s Republic of China and its place within the larger Chinese and global comics culture. Studying the conditions of comic art’s production, distribution and consumption, the project sheds light on how comics contribute to the project of nation building, to the creation of a new socialist man and to the continued legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In addition, it investigates how these at times highly propagandistic texts were read by ordinary citizens. In clearly circumscribed case studies, the project analyzes large amounts of literary and filmic adaptations, the conventions of text-image relations (and the breaking of these conventions), narrative qualities, as well as the visual language which is very much indebted to other visual forms of art, including traditional Chinese visual art, cartoons, propaganda posters, photography and movies. With its focus on practices and meaning making, ChinaComx moreover delves into the changing global cultural, political and economic connections within the socialist cultural sphere, within the Greater China region, East Asia and beyond, tracing distinct and changing relationships of domestic and foreign elements. The case studies cover developments since the late 1940s to the present and situate concrete phenomena within larger developments and traditions. In providing more knowledge about comic culture from China and in contributing to theoretical debates, ChinaComx aims to delineate the term „lianhuanhua“ as a distinct genre and area of academic research that bears specific characteristics, being embedded in a particular context of origin, yet, changing across time and space as Japanese manga or Franco-Belgian bandes desinnées.

Mots-clés : comics,media studies,modern and contemporary china,chinese culture,literature and politics,propaganda,
Projet ERC : MENA-PERC (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : École supérieure Sainte-Anne de Pise — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1915601.0 €

Whether political elites accommodate or exclude their rivals during regime crises can be a matter of life and death. Following the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), elite compromise sustained a democratic transition in Tunisia, while elite conflict triggered a coup in Egypt. Tunisia has since seen three democratic elections, while thousands of Egyptians were jailed or killed by the new military regime. Why do elites in some cases pursue accommodation while they push for excluding their rivals in others? MENA-PERC proposes an answer to this puzzle: the degrees of asymmetry and polarization between regime coalitions and their challengers shape elite preferences for accommodation or exclusion. These preferences, in turn, determine the type of regime emerging from crisis. Regime coalitions comprise elites who provide crucial links to social constituencies and whose collective support stabilizes the regime. The project theorizes the role of these actors, linking macrolevel outcomes in terms of regime types to evidence on the microlevel of individual elites. The project draws on evidence on 12 regime spells in three MENA countries across more than a century. Regime coalitions are identified by focusing on members of parliament in Egypt (1882-present), Tunisia (1907-present), and Turkey (1908-present), observing processes of elite change empirically based on individual-level data on these elite members and leveraging these data in a mixed-methods design. Second, the project traces causal mechanism through elite surveys and in-depth fieldwork examining authoritarian consolidation in contemporary Egypt, democratization in Tunisia, and democratic backsliding in Turkey. The project makes three contributions. It theorizes why elites accommodate or exclude during regime crises; it pioneers an innovative way of testing this model by observing elite change over time; and it traces the model’s causal mechanisms in ongoing processes of regime change.

Mots-clés : authoritarian regimes,political elites,regime change,middle east and north africa
Projet ERC : BEFPREDICT (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Université d'Helsinki — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999923.0 €

The observed degradation in essential ecosystem services has catalysed a demand for biodiversity promoting policies. To implement them we need quantitative information on how ecosystem functions are changing due to the direct effects of global change vs. effects mediated by changes in biodiversity. With BEFPREDICT, I will tackle this challenge by providing a novel framework for linking global change, through its effects on biodiversity, to ecosystem functions. My approach builds on three recent developments, each transformative in itself but so far essentially unlinked to each other. First, community ecology has significantly progressed our ability to predict how abiotic drivers shape biodiversity. Second, trait-based ecology offers a tool for learning mechanisms behind ecosystem functions. Third, methods developed by climate scientists and statisticians provide tools for predictive model comparison and assessment in ecology, which have so far largely been lacking. Building on these advances, I will: (Objective 1) develop novel predictive models of the joint distribution of species and ecosystem functions that build on community and trait-based ecology (JEF models); (Objective 2) develop a novel toolbox of model comparison and assessment methods for comparing and testing for the predictive limits of ecological models; (Objective 3) apply the JEF models to unique long-term observational datasets. Through this joint approach, I will tease apart the relative roles of direct effect of the abiotic environment on ecosystem functions and the effects mediated by changes in biodiversity. This proposal balances high risk and high gain by aiming at the truly ambitious goal of establish the scope and limits for quantitative predictions of ecosystem functioning. These conceptual and methodological breakthroughs will open new horizons for global change research and provide tools urgently needed for a transformative change to ecologically sustainable societies.

Mots-clés : ecological statistics,bayesian statistics
Projet ERC : Geometric fate (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cell Biology, Development, Stem Cells and R egeneration
Entité participante : Université d'Helsinki — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2617155.0 €

Tissue renewal by adult stem cells is regulated by a multitude of cell intrinsic and extrinsic mechanism, which jointly guide decisions between stem cell self-renewal and differentiation. Change between these two cellular fates is considered to result from transcriptional events that sequentially alter the function of the whole cell – including its metabolism. However, recent findings by us and others demonstrate that metabolism can actually actively influence cell fate. Moreover, metabolites can be exchanged between neighbor cells in the stem cell niche, raising the question on how cell fate can be accurately controlled.  I hypothesize that fate of tissue stem cells is controlled by metabolism running jointly within the surrounding cellular community, and the geometry of the niche regulates stem cells via effects on this communal metabolism. In order to first identify metabolic pathways capable of altering cell fate, we will establish the exact order of metabolic and transcriptional events that distinguish the two daughters cells in the first hours after asymmetric cell division. Second, to assess the extent and impact of metabolite sharing in the stem cell niche, we will develop methods capable of detecting exchange of metabolites that are produced specifically in one cell type and used by others. Finally, to study the impact of niche geometry, we will develop artificial scaffolds instructing custom niche topology, and study the communal metabolism and stem cell fate regulation on tissue mimetic and non-physiologic niche geometries.  The work is enabled by our unique research tools allowing identification of cells with distinct fates based on the chronological age of organelles they inherit in cell division. Moreover, we study two stem cell systems with opposing dynamics, providing insights on general principles and increasing robustness of the study plan. Our work also has the potential to uncover metabolic tools advancing protocols for future cellular therap

Mots-clés : stem cell niche,adult stem cells
Projet ERC : BeMAIQuantum (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université de Leyde — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1995289.0 €

A primary challenge in quantum computing (QC) is finding its ideal application, i.e., an essential problem with the largest advantage of quantum over classical computing. To resolve it, I propose to focus on the notoriously complex area of quantum many-body systems. This project will characterise which quantum many-body problems, in various physics domains, allow for significant quantum advantages even over any future machine learning, data-driven methods. By exploiting my pioneering research in this area, I will also develop new quantum machine learning (QML) methods to solve them better than classically possible, using a two-stage approach.  In the first stage, we will develop the project's theoretical foundations. My recent works on quantum-over-classical learning advantages provide the starting points for the development of new mathematical machinery which facilitates the proving of quantum advantages in selected many-body settings. In parallel, building on circuit-decomposition methods I recently developed, we will elucidate the role of quantum phenomena in QML in order to design new QML methods which can be better tuned to quantum many-body settings. In the second stage, we will identify suitable concrete quantum many-body problems with substantial real-world interest, apply the newly designed high-performing quantum learners, and formally prove learning advantages using the developed theoretical machinery. The positive results of the project will resolve some of the main open problems in QML and will have a major impact on both QC theory and aspects of foundations and applications of QML. In our search for the best application, we will consider many-body problems from diverse areas of physics: condensed matter, high-energy, and quantum control. The project will therefore also establish new bridges between quantum many-body physics, machine learning, and quantum computing.

Mots-clés : quantum machine learning,many body physics,quantum algorithms
Projet ERC : SATURN (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
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 : 1964550.0 €

Transition-metal (TM) catalysis is pivotal in organic synthesis, and led to spectacular breakthroughs in that field over the last fifty years. In particular, development of catalysts using non-noble metals from the “iron triad” (Fe, Co, Ni) keeps attracting a lot of efforts. This is due not only to their low cost and their abundance, but also to their incredibly diverse reactivity, thanks to a broad panel of oxidation states and coordination patterns. Still, the design of efficient Fe, Co or Ni catalysts proves to be tedious work, as their coordination sphere often requires drastic rearrangements along the reaction paths. To accommodate those events, next-generation catalysts have to display a high plasticity, and must overcome the paradigms of classic design of “static” ligand spheres, with no consideration of their dynamic evolution.  The central idea of the SATURN project is to use external main-group Lewis acids to achieve a dynamic control of the composition of the TM coordination sphere, with a focus on Fe, Co and Ni chemistry. In a catalytic context, this original approach will i) unlock the formation of key intermediates and ii) drive their reactivity towards selective paths, providing new strategies in synthetic chemistry. The first work package (WP1) will establish the general guidelines of this approach, and show that main-group Lewis acids can modulate the coordination sphere of reactive TM compounds. Development of new catalytic 3-component couplings will validate this approach. To widen the application scope of this method, WP2 will enable the control of a single TM catalyst by different main-group Lewis acids, whose nature will selectively guide the system towards different E–H functionalization paths (E = C, Si, B, Ge). The last WP3 will show that this approach can also modulate the reactivity of redox-active catalysts, achieving a control of both TM and main-group oxidation states, leading to new strategies of alkyne difunctionalization.

Mots-clés : organometallic chemistry,non noble metals,main group cations,reaction mechanisms
Projet ERC : ChangingLandscapes (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de Leyde — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Puberty, menstrual cycle, and menopause are all critical periods in a female’s life characterized by drastic changes in sex hormone concentrations. These periods are also associated with changes in cognitive, affective and social processing as well as an increased risk of depression and anxiety, stressing the need to advance our understanding of effects of hormonal fluctuations on females’ well-being across the lifespan. A central process directly associated with cognitive, affective, and social functioning is performance monitoring. Adequate processing of errors, reward, and feedback is essential for efficiently adapting to a changing environment in everyday life. Gender and age effects exist for these processes and disturbances have been linked to anxiety and depression, making performance monitoring an important topic in the investigation of neurocognitive functioning across the lifespan. However, research so far has largely ignored the effects of fluctuating hormonal levels. To answer the outstanding question how changing hormonal concentrations affect neurocognitive functioning in women, I will employ a unique multi-disciplinary methodology combining longitudinal, psychopharmacological, and neuroimaging techniques. I will address the current gaps in our knowledge using a novel combination of three approaches: (1) a lifespan approach that includes female participants from late childhood to late adulthood, (2) a social approach that moves beyond the non-social focus of performance-monitoring research, and (3) a psychopharmacological approach that focuses on the interactions between the relevant exogenous and endogenous neurotransmitters and hormones for the first time. The project represents a turning point in our understanding of the effects of naturally occurring hormonal variations on processes that are central for healthy cognitive, affective and social functioning, and will thus change the landscape of neurocognitive research relating to females of all ages.

Mots-clés : performance monitoring,female lifespan,estradiol,puberty,menstrual cycle,menopause,social cognition,electroencephalography,dopamine,oxytocin