Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : COOL (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Consolidator grants)
Entité participante : École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : EPFL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1997365.0 €

The 21st century has witnessed a steady rise in the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, creating unprecedented challenges for ecosystems. Europe, in particular, has experienced its hottest heatwaves in the past two decades, increasingly coupled with elevated vapor pressure deficit (VPD)—the atmospheric demand for water—resulting in a new form of “atmospheric droughts.” These droughts disrupt plant water relations, diminish carbon sink capacity, and trigger large-scale tree mortality. Our overarching goal is to unravel how European forests respond to rising VPD and temperature, their extremes, and compounding soil drought effects. COOL integrates innovative methodologies, including state-of-the-art laboratory experiments, the first-ever VPD manipulation in a natural forest, a pan-European monitoring network, and advancements in mechanistic modeling. We will (1) systematically assess what drives trees’ thermal and VPD tolerance, an area previously unexplored but crucial for predicting forest resilience; (2) disentangle, for the first time, the impacts of temperature, VPD, and soil moisture in natural settings—an achievement made possible by novel methodological developments; (3) investigate the role of long-term acclimation to temperature and VPD under varying soil moisture scenarios, leveraging unprecedented experimental infrastructure; and (4) quantify the consequences for forest growth, water use, and tree mortality. By combining cutting-edge approaches to collect high-resolution hydraulic and thermal data, COOL overcomes a critical bottleneck in forest research. The project will deliver groundbreaking insights into forest resilience under future climates. These results will advance climate-smart forest management, inform policy frameworks, equip stakeholders with actionable tools, and foster education in global change ecology. COOL will establish new paradigms for predicting and mitigating the long-term consequences of atmospheric droughts on forest ecosystems.

Mots-clés : tree physiology,drought,heat,vapor pressure deficit,plant hydraulics,plant thermal tolerance
Projet ERC : PEATSENSE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université de Bristol — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2223255.0 €

PEATSENSE will devise and test a ground-breaking approach to decision-making in peatland sites designated priority areas in recent climate assessments, redefining the meaning and practices of inclusion for future global climate mitigation. The project is contextualised by an important ecological challenge: we now know that although peatlands cover only 3-4% of the earth’s surface, they hold 33% of its carbon reserves. Following paradigm-shifting findings in biophysical research on the role of peatlands in the global carbon cycle, a suite of policy pathways and governance initiatives have been proposed to incentivise and monitor peatland conservation. However, many of the proposed interventions have been shaped without a clear understanding of why and how ecological degradation occurs in the first place, or how interventions will affect those living in and near peatlands. By imagining peatlands as places without people, or as inaccessible sites people do not depend upon, policymakers frame the problem of peatland conservation as a technical one. Yet the question of how to conserve peatlands is political because it is a matter of ‘who gets to decide’ how environments are managed, and in whose interests. Multinational corporations and banking institutions are major players in the investment packages on the table, and private investors stand to gain considerably from new governmental subsidies. Meanwhile, even ‘nature-based’ restoration practices such as rewetting impact on local agricultural and cultural practices in important ways. PEATSENSE will provide the missing investigation into the politics of knowledge surrounding peatland conservation to combat social exclusion and diversify decision-making processes. By analysing configurations of climate expertise in relation to proposed interventions, this project will model processes for valuing Local and Indigenous knowledge in climate futures and redefine inclusion for future mitigation strategies.

Mots-clés : peatlands,climate mitigation,biodiversity conservation,climate justice
Projet ERC : DimLearn (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Leibniz-Gemeinschaft — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : WLG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1005197.5 €

Our visual system frequently has to classify complex, high dimensional inputs. A key learning objective of the brain is thus to identify diagnostic dimensions. Often, tasks require simultaneous consideration of multiple dimensions. Yet, learning many dimensions is computationally challenging. Here, I ask how the visual system tackles the challenge of learning high dimensional tasks. Some theories suggest that the brain does so by compressing dimensions, while others suggest dimensionality expansion. Yet, dimensionality compression and expansion both have advantages and disadvantages, and some studies find dimensionality compression where others find expansion. This raises the hitherto unanswered question what determines whether the brain invokes either of the two strategies. I hypothesize that instead of settling on a single strategy, the brain can reap the benefits of dimensionality compression and expansion by flexibly adjusting dimensionality to the task at hand. This entails the novel prediction of flexible neural codes that can switch dimensionality. To test this theory, I build on a multimodal, multispecies approach I have developed to study learning: using the paradigmatic case of visual category learning, I will establish the effect of task dimensionality on the structure of mental representations in behavior, I will determine how task dimensionality transforms neural activity using neuroimaging in humans, I will identify the neural building blocks of flexible dimensionality using electrophysiology and causal perturbations in rhesus monkeys, and I will unravel computational principles of flexible dimensionality with artificial neural networks. This combination of species and techniques is ideally suited to unravel the neural mechanisms for coping with high dimensional tasks. By elucidating the flexibility of mental and neural representations, I aim to reveal a hitherto unknown principle governing learning and stimulate future educational applications.

Mots-clés : vision dimensionality category learning human macaque monkey fmri electrophysiology microstimulation psychophysics artificial neural networks
Projet ERC : Heartbeat (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Materials Engineering
Entité participante : Leibniz-Gemeinschaft — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : WLG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1814936.0 €

Generating 3D in vitro functional tissues and organs in the millimeter scale remains an unmet dream of modern medicine. Irrespective of great efforts in the field of tissue engineering to design injectable/pipettable hydrogels or implantable/non-pipettable scaffolds for 3D cell growth, it is not yet possible to generate functional and personalized tissues with native-like structures and mature blood vessels. The main reason for this limitation is that current materials do not recapitulate the complexity and dynamics of the native cell environment. To create personalized human tissues, patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells can differentiate in any cell type but controlling stem cell expansion, differentiation, and organization inside the same 3D scaffold is not possible up to now, as it requires biomimetic and interactive materials beyond simple hydrogels. HEARTBEAT will break with traditional ways to make 3D biomaterials by assembling and crosslinking a variety of unique pre-programmed, rod-shaped, and interactive microgels instead of molecular building blocks. The main aim is to achieve macroporous, aligned, actuatable, and on-demand degradable constructs after automatically pipetting/mixing different microgels and cells, which is not possible with conventional hydrogels. A compatible high-throughput system will be used to screen the innumerable combinations of design parameters to systematically study (stem)cell-material and cell-cell interactions to grow complex tissue. In HEARTBEAT, I will focus on using the interactive bottom-up microgel assemblies to generate millimeter-scale vascularized beating heart tissues. The project will elucidate how material properties, architectures, and actuation affect human heart tissue formation and vascularization and how the construct has to adapt to the growing tissue over time to provide the right extracellular environment.

Mots-clés : microgels,cardiac tissue,induced pluripotent stem cells,vasculogenesis,hydrogels,tissue engineering,in vitro tissue models,high throughput screening,hts
Projet ERC : SSE1K (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Durham — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 365989.99 €

In the Mediterranean in the first millennium CE, environmental and climatic changes have been identified as causes for significant short- and long-term societal and political processes and events, such as epidemics and the rise and fall of empires. However, the effects of environmental or climatic variation on humans are substantially more complex than a narrative of causation of major events, since culturally specific perceptions and interpretations of environmental or climatic variation can have significant social, religious or political implications.  SSE1K builds on state-of-the-art research but goes beyond it to ask novel, important questions about relationships between past societies and environmental / climatic fluctuation. The project will pioneer an approach which is both multi- and interdisciplinary, centring on these questions: How did humans experience and perceive environmental and climatic variation across the Mediterranean in the first millennium CE, and how did they respond both intellectually and socially to these changing conditions? SSE1K addresses issues which have been raised as significant challenges for collaborative study of climate change but have yet to be fully addressed: it will investigate how the circulation of knowledge and adaptability intersect with sustainability and resilience in pre-modern societies, and how human perceptions and ways of thinking shaped societal, political or religious responses to environmental / climatic change.  The project will integrate textual, archaeological and environmental evidence to investigate a large geographical area (the Mediterranean) at a scale which balances human lived experience and climate trends (the first millennium CE) over macro- and micro-levels. This integration is crucial in producing a holistic picture of past knowledge, resilience and sustainability, and will change the ways that scholars understand the relationships between past humans and environmental / climatic fluctuation.

Mots-clés : environmental history environmental archaeology historical climatology history of science intellectual culture climatology and climate change
Projet ERC : TerraForm (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Durham — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 135416.0 €

Human-modified landscapes modulate the effects of climate change on human societies. For example, concrete surfaces increase flood risks and dense cities exacerbate the effects of warming. However, urbanisation is not the only major form of landscape modification. Agricultural terraces represent one of the largest-scale human modifications of the planet, and have many positive effects for cultivation, soil retention, carbon and water storage, and biodiversity. Despite their profound importance for soil modification and a sustainable future, the causes, chronology, and consequences of terracing are all poorly understood, as is the impact of their growing abandonment. This limits our ability to understand how climate change will impact human societies, and the extent to which terraces can help build resilience and sustainability. Pilot research suggests that terracing may have had a uniquely early development on the Maltese Islands, which ultimately became one of the most heavily terraced landscapes on Earth. TerraForm will therefore use Malta as a model system for understanding the evolution and consequences of terracing, from inception to abandonment, alongside societal feedbacks over time. Through its small size, remote location, and limited soil development, Malta offers controlled conditions for such a study. As Malta sits at the front line of climate change, understanding terracing here also has urgent implications for soil erosion, food security, and flooding - both regionally and in areas facing analogous futures. Finally, many of Malta’s terraces have recently been abandoned and are rapidly collapsing, resulting in the loss of an important archive for climate mitigation. Using Malta as a model system is therefore timely, and as the most intensive single-locus study of terracing ever conducted, TerraForm will generate multidisciplinary data and transferable methodologies to ultimately inform sustainable land use policies and improve planetary health.

Mots-clés : anthropocene archaeology archaeology of climate change mediterranean history mediterranean prehistory archaeology of terracing geoarchaeology island archaeology
Projet ERC : REMIX-TUNE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université de Southampton — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2829726.0 €

Turbulent mixing controls the pace of ocean ventilation, the rate at which the ocean interior is filled up with water, heat and chemicals from the ocean’s surface. This process governs the ocean's ability to store atmospheric heat and greenhouse gases, exerting a profound impact on Earth's climate and moderating the rate of human-induced climate change. However, the role of mixing in ocean ventilation remains poorly understood, due to the scarcity of direct observations and the inability of numerical models to capture small-scale turbulent dynamics. Our limited understanding can be rationalised around three major questions: 1) How does the interplay between advective and diffusive processes control ocean ventilation? 2) What is the role of mixing in the water-mass transformations sustaining the ocean’s overturning circulation? 3) What is the relative importance of the two primary regimes of ocean turbulence (the mesoscale and microscale) for the ventilation of climate-critical tracers?  REMIX-TUNE addresses these questions through an innovative approach founded on two pillars: 1) Deploying the first large fleet of autonomous profiling floats equipped with microstructure turbulence sensors in key ocean ventilation regions; and 2) pioneering a novel theoretical approach to quantify mesoscale and microscale mixing using float microstructure observations and existing hydrographic data from the Argo programme. With this strategy, REMIX-TUNE will generate the first comprehensive, observation-based global database quantifying the role of mixing in ocean ventilation. This understanding will then be used to develop a new framework to assess and ground-truth the representation of mixing in the next generation of ocean-climate models. Thus, REMIX-TUNE will elicit a step change in our rationalisation of ocean mixing, and its integration into numerical models, and will leave a lasting impact on mixing research by revolutionising the methodologies employed in the field.

Mots-clés : ocean circulation and climate,ocean mixing,ocean technology
Projet ERC : AT_SCALE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1995000.0 €

Project AT_SCALE will develop the most scalable and reliable techniques for the automatic discovery, diagnosis, and repair of security flaws in software systems to-date. AT_SCALE will make fundamental breakthroughs in empirical methods for reasoning about software systems as they are running in production.  Existing scalable techniques for automatic vulnerability discovery and detection provide unreliable results, which limits their utility and threatens the security of our digital world. Static analysis reasons over a model of software executions; it reports too many bugs that do not exist (false positives) and fails to report those that do (false negatives). Fuzzing reasons over artificial executions and thus misses critical security flaws. Statistical claims about the absence of bugs are fundamentally limited to the set of artificial executions.  These challenges will be effectively tackled by in-vivo software analysis. Our approach is inspired by the in-vivo approach in biology. A biologist studies complex organisms like we study software systems, either by analyzing a model or under artificial lab conditions. Yet, some behavior is difficult to induce artificially. An in-vivo approach allows us to make empirical statements about properties of a system of arbitrary size within its natural environment. However, unlike in biology, we can clone the entire, running system millions of times per second to run as many concurrent experiments with no impact on the original system.  In 2024, the global, annual cost for cybercrime is expected to exceed 10 trillion EUR, highlighting the need for scalable and reliable software security analysis techniques. AT_SCALE will deliver effective technology to fortify Europe’s digital infrastructure against cyberattacks.
Projet ERC : QUADYMM (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Molecular materials are often present in forefront technologies targeting new sustainable energy alternatives. However, most of these alternatives currently fall short of the needs of industry and society. QUADYMM will investigate new fundamental mechanisms that could lead to paradigmatic changes in the design of such technologies. We will explore two main thematic avenues, from a theoretical perspective: 1) tuning the atomic and electronic properties of molecular materials in confined structured environments, and 2) realizing nonequilibrium molecular material states for dynamic control of stable and reactive phases of matter. From a large pool of areas where these concepts can be applied, QUADYMM will focus on water interfaces with inorganic materials and on aromatic hydrocarbon interfaces with 2D materials, because of their fundamental impact on electrochemistry and optoelectronics. The state of the art of computer simulation in this area is still based on classical mechanics of nuclei or simplified models, especially for nonequilibrium and nonadiabatic processes. Once successful, QUADYMM will provide new first-principles methodology to treat electronic and nuclear nonequilibrium dynamics, changing the predictive capacity of computational simulations of important processes, such as water-splitting and vibronic energy transport. Crucially, we will develop novel protocols for the inclusion of external stimuli in quantum dynamics simulations, bridging electronic and vibrational time scales and reaching the thermodynamic limit. This will be achieved by new techniques joining machine-learning methods with first-principles electronic structure and trajectory-based path-integral approaches. The resulting framework will elucidate the nonequilibrium quantum dynamics of complex weakly-bound systems containing thousands of atoms, and provide new structural and electronic phase diagrams to aid vibrational design.

Mots-clés : quantum mechanics,density functional theory,quantum dynamics,molecular dynamics,atomistic simulations,machine learning,non equilibrium
Projet ERC : DeWireMetab (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Systemic metabolism has to be constantly adjusted to the internal variance in nutrient availability. Therefore, the brain integrates multiple signals related to energy balance and coordinates alterations in energy intake with fuel distribution by precisely fine-tuning feeding, hormone release, and autonomic output. Cell-specific investigations have shown that this involves various molecularly distinct neurons that are distributed throughout the nervous system, each encoding different aspects of behavior and physiology. However, it has not been possible to comprehensively assess the circuit organization of these functionally distinct cells due to the enormous neuronal heterogeneity and anatomical complexity of the regions they reside in. Addressing this issue would have fundamental implications for elucidating the information network flow within the brain that ultimately orchestrates metabolic processes across cells, tissues, and organ systems. Thus, the proposed research program will employ a newly developed approach for the unbiased identification of the molecular profiles of connected neurons. This knowledge will then be used for targeting engineered neurobiological tools to newly identified neurocircuits in order to characterize their integrative features and metabolic functions with unprecedented precision. This multidisciplinary combinatorial approach will be employed to (1) unravel hypothalamic neurocircuits that integrate hormonal signals, (2) identify the neurocircuits that relay nutrient signals from the gut, and (3) define convergence of hormonal and vagal inputs in distinct neurocircuits. Collectively, the proposed research program will provide a more holistic insight into the integrative wiring diagram of metabolism-regulatory neurocircuits, which could provide long-elusive insights into how their disruption is linked to metabolic disorders, and may even lay the foundation for developing new druggable targets to better treat specific metabolic disorders.

Mots-clés : neural control of metabolism hypothalamus gut brain communication