Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : SENSE (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 755186.0 €

What is the nature of Dark Matter? What is the origin of the neutrino mass? These are two of the most compelling mysteries, physics is facing today. Despite its tremendous success, the Standard Model of Particle Physics does not provide an answer to these questions. Since the Nobel-prize awarded discovery of the neutrino oscillations, which proofs that neutrinos have a mass, the existence of right-handed partners to the known left-handed neutrinos is a basic assumption. This minimal extension of the Standard Model provides a natural mechanism to generate neutrino masses and can lead to the existence of new types of neutrinos, so-called sterile neutrinos. With a mass in the kilo-electron-volt (keV) regime, sterile neutrinos are a prime dark matter candidate. This dark matter type is especially appealing as it can act as warm dark matter, the existence of which would mitigate problems in our understanding of large-scale structures in the cosmos. The existence of sterile neutrinos with a mass in the eV-volt (eV) regime can resolve puzzling experimental anomalies observed in short-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments. With SENSE, I aim to probe the existence of eV – keV sterile neutrino in a laboratory-based experiment with world-leading sensitivity. A unique way to perform this search is via high-precision beta spectroscopy. The novel idea of SENSE is to develop a beyond-the-state-of-the-art Silicon-Drift-Detector system, which, combined with the large-scale Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (Katrin) experiment, will open the window to sterile neutrino signals not accessible elsewhere. My role as analysis coordinator of the Katrin experiment and the expertise in semi-conductor detector technology of my independent Max-Planck-Research group put me in the ideal position to conduct this ambitious research project. The discovery of sterile neutrinos would be a breakthrough in science with far-reaching consequences for our understanding of matter and the universe.

Mots-clés : neutrinos,sterile neutrinos,neutrino mass,dark matter,single beta decay
Projet ERC : Neurolive (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : University of London — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. London
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1367046.25 €

What makes live experiences special? Liveness is not just central to the performing arts, but to political rallies, sporting events, virtual reality and distance learning in higher education. NEUROLIVE is an inherently interdisciplinary research project, that combines theoretical concepts from theatre and performance studies, artistic research in performance making, psychological experimentation and mobile neuroimaging to understand how liveness is generated and experienced. NEUROLIVE proposes that the live experience can be conceptualized and quantified as a form of sustained entrainment, in which the minds, brains and bodies of performers and spectators are linked. Across three research streams we will combine artistic research (I) and cognitive neuroscience (II) to delineate the contextual, experiential and neurocognitive components of liveness, resulting in four live performance experiments (III). These live performances will be co-developed by performing artists and cognitive scientists with a view to establish an empirically testable, ecologically valid, multidimensional measure of liveness. NEUROLIVE combines dynamic experience sampling with psychophysiology, and mobile EEG. Advanced modelling techniques from machine learning will be used to integrate information from the different experiential, physiological and neural signals. This new measure will be grounded in the aesthetic principles of contemporary live performance, yet should be applicable across artistic and non-artistic performance situations, and to digital liveness in augmented and mixed realities. In this way, NEUROLIVE implements a conceptually and methodologically novel approach to understanding what makes live experiences special.
Projet ERC : GEODAP (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Padua — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UNIPD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1862141.0 €

What was daily life like in the European Bronze Age? In contrast to large-scale narratives based on artefacts, often prestige items from funerary contexts, this project focuses on the practices of daily domestic life, recorded in the sediments upon which it took place. These constitute the domestic stratigraphic record. This project, therefore, shifts the scale and the object of archaeological investigation, and aims at bringing interdisciplinary scientific analyses into dialogue with anthropological understandings of lifeways and households. Its main objective is the formulation of an innovative narrative of the Bronze Age addressing social, economic, and environmental aspects of a culturally interconnected region of Europe. The daily practices and life histories of bronze age people will be the pixels of this new picture that challenges previous depersonalized narratives relying on material culture. The region between the Carpatho-Danubian basin, the Balkans, and northern Italy was selected due to its important cultural interactions during the Bronze Age. Ten key archaeological sites in six European countries constitute the project’s database. Its innovative interdisciplinary approach integrates geoarchaeology (micro-stratigraphic analysis), organic chemistry (biomarkers) and archaeo-botany (phytoliths, seeds, fruits, and charcoal) to reconstruct with unprecedented accuracy the daily practices from domestic stratigraphy. This information will be compared with the story told by material culture and integrated with local paleo-environmental records. The project, in fact, challenges also previous reconstructions that called in environmental mega-events (volcanic eruptions, glacial advances, aridity events) to aprioristically explain broad cultural phenomena of the Bronze Age. Their inherent complexity can only be faced by crystallizing detailed micro-histories and site-specific environmental reconstructions into a broader synthesis based on hard scientific data.

Mots-clés : geoarchaeology,bronze age europe,paleo environment,soil micromorphology,household archaeology
Projet ERC : GEODAP (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Salento — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 45000.0 €

What was daily life like in the European Bronze Age? In contrast to large-scale narratives based on artefacts, often prestige items from funerary contexts, this project focuses on the practices of daily domestic life, recorded in the sediments upon which it took place. These constitute the domestic stratigraphic record. This project, therefore, shifts the scale and the object of archaeological investigation, and aims at bringing interdisciplinary scientific analyses into dialogue with anthropological understandings of lifeways and households. Its main objective is the formulation of an innovative narrative of the Bronze Age addressing social, economic, and environmental aspects of a culturally interconnected region of Europe. The daily practices and life histories of bronze age people will be the pixels of this new picture that challenges previous depersonalized narratives relying on material culture. The region between the Carpatho-Danubian basin, the Balkans, and northern Italy was selected due to its important cultural interactions during the Bronze Age. Ten key archaeological sites in six European countries constitute the project’s database. Its innovative interdisciplinary approach integrates geoarchaeology (micro-stratigraphic analysis), organic chemistry (biomarkers) and archaeo-botany (phytoliths, seeds, fruits, and charcoal) to reconstruct with unprecedented accuracy the daily practices from domestic stratigraphy. This information will be compared with the story told by material culture and integrated with local paleo-environmental records. The project, in fact, challenges also previous reconstructions that called in environmental mega-events (volcanic eruptions, glacial advances, aridity events) to aprioristically explain broad cultural phenomena of the Bronze Age. Their inherent complexity can only be faced by crystallizing detailed micro-histories and site-specific environmental reconstructions into a broader synthesis based on hard scientific data.

Mots-clés : geoarchaeology,bronze age europe,paleo environment,soil micromorphology,household archaeology
Projet ERC : MiLifeStatus (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Maastricht University — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UM
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1604889.46 €

When does citizenship provide a boost to migrant integration? A fast-track to citizenship can maximise the potential for settlement success, though too short a pathway can disincentivise integration. Not all migrants have an equal interest in naturalising and some are discouraged by restrictive policies. Yet little is known about why, how and for whom legal status transition matters and, especially, how policy variation impacts on this relation. Which migrants are most discouraged by stricter requirements for naturalisation? For whom carries citizenship the largest pay-off? Does it still matter if a migrant acquires citizenship after a long waiting period? This project combines for the first time the ideas that a) migrants have different motivations to naturalise; b) legal status transitions are conditioned by the institutional and socioeconomic contexts in origin and destination countries and c) the potential ‘integration premium’ associated with naturalisation is conditioned by the trajectory into citizenship. The innovative project contributions are: 1. modelling migrants’ legal status transitions as life course events, which are shaped by migrants’ origin, their family context and societal structures and institutions; 2. analysing the relevance of citizenship for work and income, living conditions, health status and out-migration among immigrants and for educational attainment among their descendants; 3. developing novel methodologies to analyse step-to-citizenship trajectories and the impact of policy changes on status transitions and related outcomes among migrant groups and cohorts; 4. testing models on the basis of a unique combination of longitudinal register-based and survey-based micro-data in 8 European and North American countries, which provide the comparative context to analyse the impact of institutional variation; 5. yielding information for targeted citizenship policies to maximise settlement success for immigrants and their children.

Mots-clés : citizenship,naturalisation,migration,immigrant integration,life course
Projet ERC : UltimateCOMPASS (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : University of Edinburgh — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 188923.75 €

When lost in the desert at night, or in dense forests, people tend to walk in circles. This is because the seemingly simple act of walking in a straight line involves a complex interplay of various sensory modalities, the motor system and cognition. A ball-rolling dung beetle released in the same type of uncharted territory, does not walk in circles, but rather keeps steadfastly to a chosen bearing. The main goal of this project is unravel the sensory and neuronal architecture of the newly discovered ‘snapshot compass’, that supports orientation over all continents and terrestrial habitats on earth (except Antarctica). This goal will be realized through a fusion of biology, bio-informatics and mathematics. A quickly growing pool of studies indicates that neuronal networks are modulated in a context-dependent manner. Therefore, to truly understand how this compass works, and to formulate the core computational algorithms underlying this remarkable system, I aim to obtain the first ever brain recordings from the compass of a freely orienting insect. Is this possible? Certainly! But only in an animal with a robust orientation behaviour, and that is strong enough to carry a little backpack of electronics. The large dung-beetles, with their easily manipulated orientation behavior, offers a unique opportunity to attain this holy grail of neuroethology. The beetle’s compass makes use of a large range of celestial cues, which can vary drastically in availability and strength. While the challenge of cue integration has been solved effectively in the compass system of the beetles, it remains a key problem within the field of cognition and perception, as well as for the design of artificial intelligence systems. Taken together, almost two decades of studies of the dung beetle compass system have paved the way for this timely and unique opportunity, that will impact the advancement of science well outside the field of biology.

Mots-clés : navigation,insect orientation,visual ecology
Projet ERC : MOLUSC (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : Université de Strasbourg — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UNISTRA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1356250.0 €

When molecules or molecular materials are placed in the confined field of an optical mode which is resonant with a molecular transition, new hybrid light-matter states can be formed through strong coupling. This can occur even in the dark due to strong coupling with the vacuum electromagnetic field. The hybrid light-matter states are collective states involving a large number of molecules and they strongly modify the energy levels of the system. While light-matter strong coupling has been extensively studied in optics and quantum physics, the consequences for chemistry and molecular material properties are just beginning to be investigated. The overall aim of this proposal is understand in greater detail the fundamental properties of the hybrid light-matter states and to investigate the implications for the properties of molecules and materials. More specific objectives are: 1) Deepen our understanding of the hybrid light-matter states from a physical chemistry perspective, including the dynamics and the thermodynamics. This is absolutely essential to develop this subject into a useful tool for chemists and materials scientists. 2) Demonstrate that the chemical reactions, including enzymatic ones, in the ground state can be modified by selectively coupling individual vibrational modes involved in the chemistry. This could have consequences for site selective chemistry, homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis among others. 3) To further enhance molecular material properties, in particular functional solid state materials such as for organic electronics and photovoltaics. Here the key property is the extended nature of the hybrid light-matter state and the associated change in energy levels which modifies the absorption spectrum. 4) Explore the possibilities of modifying phase transitions of materials under strong coupling and of playing with the quantum features of the hybrid states such as their entanglement to study molecular processes with entangled molecules

Mots-clés : light matter interactions,strong coupling,molecules,material properties,chemical reactivity
Projet ERC : NP-QFT (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : SISSA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1552458.0 €

When the degrees of freedom that constitute a quantum physical system are strongly coupled among each other, their collective low-energy behaviour can exhibit a plethora of exotic, surprising and unconventional phenomena. At the same time, however, our most sophisticated tool to describe the quantum world - quantum field theory - becomes extremely difficult to use. This problem appears across the board in many areas, from particle physics, to condensed matter physics, to astrophysics: strong coupling is an intrinsic complexity of quantum systems, whose solution can benefit disparate fields. A large variety of examples is provided by deconfined quantum states of matter, in which the collective behaviour gives rise to emergent low-energy degrees of freedom, often strongly coupled. Another context in which decrypting strong coupling can be the key to a breakthrough is quantum gravity: by the celebrated AdS/CFT correspondence, we can describe gravity in Anti-de-Sitter space in a fully-consistent quantum fashion, in terms of an ordinary - but strongly coupled - quantum field theory in one dimension less. The ambitious goal of this project is twofold: first, to develop innovative techniques to tame strong coupling; second, to exploit those techniques to discover new deconfined phases of matter on one side, and to unravel mysteries of quantum gravity and the quantum physics of black holes on the other side. I will follow several avenues in the quest for new computational tools at strong coupling, such as refining the concept of symmetry, developing supersymmetric localization, probing Borel summability of certain gauge theories. Applying these and other methods, I will systematically explore three-dimensional gauge theories with bosons and fermions, landscaping their phase diagrams and deconfined critical points. Meanwhile, I will extract the quantum entropy and other properties of black holes, exploring signatures of quantum effects to be compared with future experiments.

Mots-clés : strong coupling,symmetry,supersymmetry,duality,quantum phase transitions,topological phases of matter,quantum gravity,black holes
Projet ERC : TB-ACCELERATE (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Spanish National Research Council — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1275875.0 €

When the scale of the tuberculosis (TB) epidemic was highlighted by its declaration as a "Global Emergency" by WHO in 1993, it was envisaged that the efficient use of existing tools would result in a progressive decline towards eradication. This has not occurred. At the current pace of decline in TB incidence the Millennium objective to eradicate it by 2050 will not be met. Predictions of epidemiological models were inaccurate and current control programs and technologies have shown their limitations to control the transmission of the disease. To overcome these limitations we need a technological, methodological and conceptual leap forward that can reveal the unknowns of TB epidemiology. I propose whole genome sequencing (WGS) as the technology that can mediate this advance. While WGS has been applied mostly to retrospective datasets I propose to use it in prospective samples from a low-burden region at a population scale. Genome information will fill the gap between epidemiology and evolution to have a direct impact on public health. This will allow to develop innovative methodologies to describe transmission at an unprecedented resolution and as a consequence to differentiate among risks factors associated to the bacteria, the host, the environment and their interactions. Elucidation of these factors will lead to better models used to design new strategies and accelerate global TB eradication. In addition, I will show how the real-time integration of data in public eHealth systems combined with in situ interventions will accelerate TB eradication. The strength of the project resides in its multidisciplinary approach to TB epidemiology that will provide answers to yet-out-of-reach questions. It will lead to improving health status at the local level as well as to epidemiological and control programs at a global scale. In summary, the project will open new ways to foster the long sought outcome of the tuberculosis community: TB eradication.

Mots-clés : whole genome epidemiology,tuberculosis transmission
Projet ERC : FEATHERS (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : Leiden University — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999996.0 €

When we look at a text, we think we know who wrote it. Indeed, Paradise Lost was authored by John Milton; the warrant of execution for Mary, Queen of Scots by Elizabeth I. The writers of these texts, the pen wielders, however, were Deborah Milton, and W. Davidson with Burghley. Manuscript production was a collaborative or ‘socialised’ enterprise that often involved secretaries and scribes who physically wrote what the author dictated. Sometimes, however, they contributed rather more. Google, MS Word and even dictation software help us write emails – a traditional secretary silently corrects grammatical errors, suggests changes and even creates texts from notes ready for the employer’s authorising signature: the early modern scribe fulfilled some or all of these roles. To distinguish between authorial and scribal voices the project will analyse 3 distinct manuscript types: Historical letters, Legal documents, and Literary works. In doing so it will address 3 questions: who were these scribes; what was their role or function, and where did their influence end and their employer’s begin? Experiences of scribal publication differed along gender and class lines as while high-born men were drawn to it, women and the lower-born were mostly confined to it, rarely holding a pen themselves for reasons as diverse as seemliness and illiteracy. Impacting the fields of literature, cultural history, and digital humanities, this cutting edge project will forever change the way we think about early modern authorship, adding many texts to the canon by authors hitherto marginalised, such as women and the lower-born. The project will create a model applicable to multiple political periods and countries by concentrating on England between 1558 and 1642 (the beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign to the English Civil War), a time when the centres of power were stable enough to allow for relatively constant employment, making individual scribes easier to identify, and with that their influence.

Mots-clés : early modern women authors,scribes,manuscript studies,non canonical english texts,women s history,epistolary studies