Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : PQART (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Photons are an excellent platform to explore fundamental quantum properties without disturbance from the environment. They are also advantageous for applied topics such as quantum communication and simulation. The prerequisite for exploiting photons in quantum science is producing and manipulating high-quality streams of entangled photons in a scalable setting. Yet, the progress on this front has been slow primarily due to shortcomings in material properties. So far, only small states involving three photons have been demonstrated, and the quest of generating two-dimensional entanglement is untouched. In this project, I will address the scalability problem employing an emerging class of artificial atoms named gallium arsenide quantum dots (GaAs QDs). Contrary to standard QDs, GaAs QDs are free from mechanical strain. As a result, GaAs QDs have lower noise, and different GaAs QDs have similar optical properties; these are critical requirements for a scalable platform. We will use photonic nanostructures to flexibly interface GaAs QDs on a photonic chip. Such a scalable platform will be an invaluable contribution to photonic quantum technologies. As an immediate outcome, we will use this platform to deliver three novel goals: 1. Highly entangled states of photons with two-dimensional connectivity 2. First experimental studies on the interaction between photons in a strongly non-linear medium 3. Pave the way towards quantum memories based on the collective states of nuclei in a QD These achievements will be enabling contributions to quantum technologies. Two-dimensional clusters of entangled photons are indispensable resources with immediate applications in quantum communication and will open new prospects for photonic quantum simulation. Additionally, studying the interaction between photons in a strongly nonlinear medium will enable us to build number-resolving photon detectors, and in the longer term, may enable emulating many-body quantum systems on our platform.

Mots-clés : quantum information science,quantum networks,quantum photonics,atomic and molecular physics
Projet ERC : GulfFeminisms (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1399960.56 €

Abstract: Current literature have tended to analyze feminist activisms in MENA almost exclusively from the point of view of their effect on social change broadly defined, reemphasising the reifications of women as victims by sharia laws, the veil and repressive cultural and political systems. In addition, scholars have often directed their attention to visible forms of feminist activism including protesting in revolutionary countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain, among others, and have marginalised feminisms in stable countries. In this context, GulfFeminisms project is groundbreaking in three ways. First, it examines the under-studied domains of the genealogies of feminisms, and the mobilisation of the law in the three Gulf States of Saudi Arabia, Oman and United Arab Emirates. Women’s rights in all the three countries are interpretatively, but differently, operationalized under Sharia law, abridging women’s freedom to fully participate in decision-making processes at the national level. While established scholarship has provided valuable studies of how patriarchal religious and political authorities use legal and religious frameworks to repress feminists, maintain gendered inequalities and restrict women’s rights. This project shifts the established scholarly perspective by examining how feminisms in the gulf are self-motivated political movements that mobilise laws, including Sharia, to operationalise women’s agencies and practices within private and public spheres and to generate political change. Second, GulfFeminisms offers an original and leading perspective on feminisms in MENA as a practice promoting positive social and political change. Third, to analyse the relation of feminisms and the mobilising of the law, GulfFeminisms combines the multidisciplinary, novel, comparative analytical framework of Feminist Comparative Policy theory (FCP), and Epstein and Martin’s (2004) approaches to qualitative and quantitative empirical law research.
Projet ERC : PHOSCIL (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1497672.0 €

DNA damage response is a crucial function in living organisms, essential for maintaining genomic integrity. Two key processes prevent damage from propagating through generations: 1) DNA repair and 2) regulation of the cell cycle. Recent discoveries reveal that following DNA double-strand breaks, cells form biomolecular condensates at the site of damage through liquid-liquid phase separation. Another hallmark of the response is the initiation of oscillatory p53 concentration leading to cell cycle arrest. Despite being one of the most basic responses in cells, the physical mechanisms underlying this remains poorly understood as does the interplay between repair and regulation. I aim to derive the basic principles for condensates interacting with dynamical and oscillatory concentration fields. Here I will uncover how cells use fundamental mechanisms of physics to control formation and maintenance of condensates and how the emergence of oscillations can facilitate this task. The main highlights of PHOSCIL are the following: Revealing the physical mechanisms and inferring observables of condensate formation, by creating new methods for analysis, guided by theoretical models applied to novel experiments. Discovery of out-of-equillibrium phenomena of oscillatory and dynamic fields and their interactions with phase separation, generating conceptual advances in our understanding of biophysical systems. Uncovering the functional roles of phase sparation and oscillation on both repair and cell cycle regulation, advancing our fundamental understanding of, and ability to influence, cell fate decisions. To succesfully take these ambitious steps, I will combine theory and experiments that, taken together, will uncover novel concepts in the physics of phase separating systems and define a new chapter in our understanding of the DNA damage response.

Mots-clés : phase separations,dynamical systems,oscillations,cell regulation
Projet ERC : BEYOND (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499307.0 €

This proposal aims to uncover the role of visible light in driving prebiotic chemical reactions, with a focus on polymerizations and redox processes using prebiotically relevant photocatalysts. While UV light has traditionally been emphasized in prebiotic chemistry for its high energy and efficient bond-breaking properties, it can also degrade advanced organic material, presenting a central paradox in prebiotic chemistry. In contrast, visible light, when paired with photocatalysts, may drive important chemical transformations without the need for the protective mechanisms associated with UV chemistry. The project involves synthesizing a diverse range of photocatalysts to generate a computational model capable of predicting their photoredox properties. These molecules will then be investigated as photocatalysts in selected prebiotic reactions. Additionally, I will investigate key steps of a proposed prebiotic synthesis of key redox-active molecules can be initiated by visible light photoredox catalysis. Lastly, visible light-driven reactions will be benchmarked against established UV light-initiated processes to determine whether visible light can drive similar or complementary chemistry. By completing these objectives, I will provide examples of visible-light photocatalysis in prebiotic chemistry. This will impact our understanding of how visible light contributed to the formation of life’s building blocks, offering alternative pathways to prebiotic molecule accumulation and broadening our understanding of early chemical reaction networks.

Mots-clés : prebiotic chemistry,photochemistry
Projet ERC : ModelFutures (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498765.0 €

Welfare systems rely on extensive knowledge about the population to plan, finance, and expend limited resources in a targeted manner. In view of their often-fragmented national identification and statistical systems, Africa’s emerging welfare states are thus facing significant challenges in their capacity to establish categories of welfare entitlement and to target groups for intervention. Led by the PI, ModelFutures’ team will carry out ground-breaking, comparative ethnographic research at the statistics-welfare nexus of four African country cases – Ghana, Senegal, Kenya and Botswana – to understand: How do states generate truths about future welfare in contexts of uncertain knowledge about the population and its wellbeing? The project’s threefold objectives aim to (1) trace statistical modelling practices in the context of multi-facetted uncertainties about the population and its environs; (2) analyse the impact of adaptations and creative data practices on quantitative truth claims; and (3) connect statistical future-making and anticipatory welfare politics in sites of statistical innovation. ModelFutures’ ambition significantly extends beyond the state of the art of our understanding of statistical world-making by developing a novel concept of vernacular prediction that attunes to experts’ skilful adaptations of globally circulating computational models and standards, while attending to their modelling practices’ co-constitution with symbolic commitments and situated infrastructural arrangements. Combining expertise from anthropology, science and technology studies, and population statistics, ModelFutures generates novel theory on the production of evidence-based welfare policies in contexts of contested claims to the validity of data, methods, and the anticipatory politics that play out between short-term mitigation efforts and the pursuit of long-term dividends.

Mots-clés : sociology of quantification,politics of numbers
Projet ERC : SOLID (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1496394.0 €

Thousands of people have died in the attempt to migrate into Europe through irregular channels. In fact, 2023 has seen the highest number of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean since 2017 . We only ever see very few of these bodies. Some die in the deserts of Sudan and Libya never to be found, others get stuck inside shipwrecks at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Even the dead bodies that end up on the shores of Europe often remain unknown and thus socially obscure. However, in their local communities left behind, the dead and missing continue to hold great social importance. SOLID presents an innovative theoretical and methodological approach to understanding the social life of deceased migrants by employing a research strategy that is ethnographic, global and collaborative. The aim is to promote the humanisation and social visibility of deceased migrants by creating a broader understanding of the human lives behind the tragic statistics of migrant deaths. The SOLID research project introduces the analytical lens of social anatomy, which refers to the configurations of social arrangements that emerge around missing or deceased migrants as various people and organisations employ practices of determination to identify, understand and/or keep indeterminate who has passed away and how. By bringing together forensic, social, economic, humanitarian, political and criminological actors and perspectives on the same unidentified bodies of deceased migrants, SOLID pursues an innovative analytical approach to the anthropology of death, and specifically to dying in anonymity. It highlights the social importance of missing and deceased migrants in their communities as well as in Europe by tracing the social concerns left behind in Somaliland, Morocco, Greece and Spain through the innovative methodological approach, generative collaborations. This method captures the multiple configurations of knowledge and practices as different actors respond to the same dead bodies.

Mots-clés : criminalization,irregular migration,migrant deaths,anonymous death,missing migrants,social life,identification practices,eu policies
Projet ERC : MOSHOT (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1470201.0 €

This project is centered on the field of algebraic geometry and involves homotopy theory and analytic geometry. The overall goal is to unveil the underlying principles of a large variety of cohomology theories in algebraic and analytic geometry and develop robust foundations that facilitate the study of those cohomology theories from the vantage point of homotopy theory. This will be achieved through innovations of motivic stable homotopy theory beyond the current technical limitations of A1-homotopy invariance. In addition, its interdisciplinary perspective will be advanced, especially in relation to p-adic geometry and complex geometry. The research proposal consists of 5 main objectives, which are organically related to each other. The first objective is to establish a six functor formalism, which would be the most important challenge in non-A1-invariant motivic stable homotopy theory. The second objective is to investigate the kernel of the A1-localization and aims to describe it in terms of p-adic or rational Hodge realization, following the principle of trace methods of algebraic K-theory. In particular, in the p-adic context, this will lead to the p-adic rigidity, which will conclusively connect motivic homotopy theory with p-adic geometry. The third objective is to find out the potential of unstable motivic homotopy theory and develop calculation techniques. The forth objective is to establish a general and universal construction of motivic filtration of localizing invariants, such as algebraic K-theory and topological cyclic homology. The last objective is to explore the analogue in complex geometry, which is an interesting unexplored subject that will pave the way for further developments of motivic homotopy theory for a broader range of analytic geometry.
Projet ERC : Fashioning Sudan (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499876.0 €

100 years of archaeological research along the Middle Nile has yielded partial knowledge of the history of Sudan and Nubia. To date, the focus has been on the public life of the sedentary elite. Other identities remain invisible and cultural frameworks tend to be restricted to binary oppositions (e.g. sedentary vs. nomads, Pharaonic vs. African influences). Going beyond the monumental remains, the Fashioning Sudan project will focus on a long-neglected and much more intimate aspect of the Sudanese material world: dress practices. This pioneering approach will merge different academic fields such as archaeology, textile and animal skin research, palaeoproteomics, and socio-cultural theory. Thanks to its arid climate, Sudan is one of the rare places on Earth where archaeological textiles and skins are well preserved and in remarkably high numbers; but despite its potential, this treasure trove of information is seldom exploited by historians or archaeologists. Fashioning Sudan will use garments as a privileged medium to reveal past identities, bringing new and more representative knowledge about the populations of ancient Sudan and highlighting the entanglement of dress practices in the fabric of society. The project will encompass the high-resolution analysis of textile and animal skin garments from the Bronze Age to the Late Medieval period, in close connection with their archaeological context. The results will reveal which animal and plant species were exploited, as well as skills and craft dynamics. It will then question how to use clothing and socio-cultural theories to reveal previously unknown aspects of past Sudanese lives. Fashioning Sudan will renew our academic approach to past identities along the Nile thanks to interdisciplinary research uniting under-exploited material sources (dress & craft) to innovative methods at the forefront of natural sciences and cultural studies.

Mots-clés : sudan and nubia,textiles,leather,dress practices,materiality and identities
Projet ERC : NEURO-FUSE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Université de médecine de Vienne — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499508.0 €

Understanding how the coordinated activity of neurons in multiple brain regions achieves robust behaviour is one of the most fundamental questions in neuroscience. Although recent single-cell technologies enable addressing this question by recording from large neural populations, they are limited to surveying focal brain regions and superficial cortical layers. Without an analytical framework to jointly model isolated measurements, we cannot hope to understand and quantitatively model how single-neuron dynamics give rise to distributed computations. I hypothesise that global brain dynamics fall on distinct attractor states during a given stimulus or task. Attractors naturally give rise to invariant representations, dynamical motifs independent of the sampled neurons’ identity. Inferring these invariances would allow reconstructing activity in extended regions from incomplete local recordings to reveal brain-wide cognitive processes. Further, composing invariances would provide insights into the neural correlates of generalisation, with a broad impact on neuroscience and machine learning. I propose a novel mathematical theory combining abstract combinatorial dynamical systems theory and modern machine learning to infer and compose invariant latent dynamics across measurements. We will use this theory to unify large-scale cell-resolution recordings of the mouse and macaque cortex into a common model to make cell-specific predictions across several brain regions. Our results could fundamentally challenge our view on distributed cognitive computations by revealing moment-by-moment single-neuron dynamics in spatially distributed neurons. Further, my theory will help understand how the brain generalises knowledge across tasks by composing and repurposing invariances. More broadly, my theory will open new avenues for machine learning and neuroscience to interact through sharing and shaping the dynamical processes that underpin neural computations in vivo and in silico.

Mots-clés : dynamical systems,distributed neural computation,compositional generalisation,invariant neural representations,data driven modelling,single neuron recordings,transfer learning
Projet ERC : EXODOSS (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498943.0 €

The ongoing discovery of ever-more Earth-like exoplanets raises the question how these planets form. Answering this question requires a breakthrough in our understanding of terrestrial planet formation, since this topic has previously been studied almost exclusively in the context of the Solar System and with an emphasis on the late-stage giant-impact phase. However, recently, a window into the very earliest stages of planet formation has opened through radio observations of protoplanetary discs around young stars that reveal large reservoirs of mm-sized pebbles. In EXODOSS, I will model the full planetary growth process, starting from these primordial pebbles, in order to improve our fundamental understanding of terrestrial planet formation. In order to do so, I will develop a first-of-its-kind GPU-accelerated N-body simulator that models planetary growth and composition in a protoplanetary disc where angular momentum is transported by disc winds. The code will follow the growth of the first pebbles and km-sized planetesimals to larger protoplanets, up to the late dynamical evolution of fully-grown planetary systems. Additional supporting hydrodynamical simulations will provide much needed accurate prescriptions for the evolution of the protoplanetary disc and for the accretion rates of pebbles and gas onto the cores and atmospheres of young protoplanets. Taken together, I will establish a self-consistent model of planet formation capable of addressing how Earth-like planets form, with results that can be confronted against dynamical and compositional constraints from the Solar System and the growing population of well-characterized Earth-like exoplanets. These theoretical investigations are needed in the broader context of humanity's search for habitable Earth-like exoplanets in our galaxy, our desire to understand their formation, and as a first step in tracing the origin of the elements, such as water, required for the development of life as we know it.

Mots-clés : terrestrial planet formation,earth like exoplanets,solar system,protoplanetary discs,planetary composition