Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : GravitySirens (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : Istituto nazionale di fisica nucleare — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : INFN
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1222288.5 €

For 20 years, measurements of the Universe expansion rate from close-by and far sources are in tension hinting at the presence of new physics. Our struggle to study the Universe's expansion is due to the difficulty of observing cosmological sources for which the distance is known. Gravitational Waves (GWs) from compact binary coalescences (CBCs) are emergent cosmological probes that provide directly the distance of the source thus taking the name of Standard Sirens. Unfortunately, they do not provide the other ingredient to measure the Universe expansion: the redshift. GravitySirens is an ambitious project aiming to measure the cosmic expansion with CBCs and exploit their link with the astrophysical environment to obtain implicit redshift information. GravitySirens will focus on the population and astrophysical properties of GW sources that can allow a more precise measure of the cosmic expansion. My team and I will exploit data delivered in the next 5 years from the GW detectors LIGO, Virgo, KAGRA, the satellite Euclid, and Arrays of Radio telescopes such as HERA, MeerKAT and SKAO. By using a mixture of population synthesis codes and semi-analytical models, we will jointly infer how fast the universe is expanding and how CBCs relate to galaxies and large-scale structures (LSS). We will use state-of-the-art technologies such as machine learning and graphical process units to construct efficient algorithms for population analyses and use scientific data delivered in the upcoming years. GravitySirens will provide the most accurate and precise GW-based measures of the Universe expansion and measure the link between CBCs, galaxies and LSSs. On one hand, the cosmic expansion measures that GravitySirens will provide can potentially lead us to the discovery of new physics at cosmological scales. On the other hand, inferring the relationship between CBCs, galaxies and LSS tracers will point us to the processes acting for compact object formation.

Mots-clés : standard sirens,gravitational wave cosmology,hierarchical bayesian inference,machine learning
Projet ERC : GALA (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Sant Joan de Déu-Barcelona Children’s Hospital — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1314685.53 €

Language is perhaps the most prominent feature that distinguishes humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, many perceptual and learning mechanisms serving language acquisition are not tailored specifically to language nor to humans. Decades of research have shown that several animal species are equipped with perceptual, cognitive and neural architectures that allow to learn language but only humans end up doing so. The key features and mechanisms that make language learnable by very young humans are still unclear. The GALA project focuses on how humans begin to learn language, exploring the biological nature of the mechanisms at the ‘entry-gate’ of language through a comparative-developmental approach involving nonhuman species, human newborns, infants and adults. Syllables are essential processing units of speech at the onset of language acquisition, through which newborns and infants preferentially encode and organize the speech signal. My proposal is that the mechanisms that allow to parse syllables from speech emerge from evolutionary-ancient sensory processes that likely evolved to compute different inputs in different species. I will explore two alleged universal linguistic constraints responsible for parsing syllables, and shaping the syllabic structure: Maximal Onset Principle (Research Line 1) and Sonority Hierarchy (Research Line 2). I will test such constraints across species, and at distinct stages of human development as well as in distinct sensory modalities, with behavioral and neuroimaging techniques. The GALA project will shed light on the ontogenetic and phylogenetic origins of the mechanisms through which humans access language, and will provide invaluable new knowledge that will bring us closer to understand why are humans the only species so far able to learn language.

Mots-clés : language learning,comparative cognition
Projet ERC : EMOSKILLS (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Université de Tilbourg — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1396643.75 €

Emotional intelligence, like anticipating the emotions of others and regulating one’s own emotions, is thought to be a crucial skill to do well in the workplace. This may be especially true for strategic interactions relevant for the workplace such as cooperation, bargaining, and market interactions. From experimental studies, we know that emotions play an important role in these interactions. Yet, whether or how emotional skills influence strategic interactions is unknown. Economists and other scholars currently lack the tools and framework to systematically study the role of emotional skills in strategic settings. While we have a good understanding of other key elements of strategic interactions like social preferences and strategic reasoning, no such investigation exists for emotional skills. The goal of this project is to provide the foundation to jumpstart the study of emotional skills in strategic interactions and markets. Specifically, this project addresses three main objectives. First, I will develop a new emotional skills test, specifically designed to study the role of emotional skills in strategic interactions. Second, the newly developed test allows me to experimentally investigate how emotional skills shape outcomes and decisions in strategic interactions and markets. Third, I will study the supply of emotional labor – the requirement that workers have to display certain emotions on the job that may mismatch their own – which is associated with considerable psychological costs. Despite its importance for labor markets, evidence on the economics of emotional labor is lacking. I will include emotional labor in standard economic models and develop a new experimental paradigm to estimate the supply of emotional labor. This project will synthesize insights from psychology and management with methods of experimental economics and will provide the experimental tools and paradigms to study emotional intelligence in strategic interactions and markets.

Mots-clés : emotions,strategic interaction,non cognitive skills,experimental economics,facial expressions
Projet ERC : EXILED-EMPIRICISTS (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université de Tilbourg — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1493680.0 €

In the 1930s, hundreds of European academics fled to the United States, escaping the quickly deteriorating political situation on the continent. Among them were a few dozen philosophers from a variety of different schools: logical empiricists, phenomenologists, and critical theorists. Especially the first group would have a tremendous impact on American philosophy. Although the local intellectual climate had been dictated by distinctively American traditions such as pragmatism, U.S. philosophers soon began to advance views that were heavily indebted to the empiricists, thereby transforming the American philosophical landscape.  Historians have reconstructed the fate of the exiled empiricists. Still, little attention has been paid to the American context in which their movement came to full bloom. This is remarkable since any account of the empiricists' success requires an explanation of why the Americans were so susceptible to their views. What explains the surprisingly positive reception of logical empiricism? And why were the Americans more receptive to empiricism than to phenomenology or critical theory? This project shifts the perspective from the migrant philosophers to the local philosophical climate by 1) quantitatively analyzing thousands of American journal publications and 2) qualitatively examining the archives of dozens of key U.S. philosophers and institutions.  Today, it seems natural to carve up the philosophical landscape into an 'analytic' and a 'continental' tradition. Yet few philosophers realize that this deeply engrained distinction is relatively new; it first became popular in the United States in the years after the intellectual migration. In studying the unique American melting pot of philosophical schools (e.g. pragmatism, logical empiricism, phenomenology, critical theory), this project offers a broader, unifying perspective on 20th-century philosophy, thereby transcending the school-based barriers that have often shaped its historiography.

Mots-clés : logical empiricism pragmatism analytic philosophy history of american philosophy
Projet ERC : 3DnanoGiant (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Materials Engineering
Entité participante : Université de Florence — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 130000.0 €

Photonics has a major impact on technological innovations and can revolutionize the field of computing and data processing due to its high bandwidth, speed, and low power consumption. This has already happened for data communication via fiber-optic connections, while light processing in embedded systems is still performed by electronics via power-hungry optical-electrical conversion.  The future development of integrated photonics is then waiting for new integrable materials that can advance the functionality of photonic chips towards all-optical signal processing at very low light intensities. While linear operations and parallel matrix multiplication can be efficiently performed by light, nonlinear optical functions are notoriously difficult to implement because they require a suitable medium for efficient photon-photon interaction. Currently, there is a lack of materials with large third-order nonlinearity, high speed and easy processability and integration in 2D and 3D structures.  3DnanoGiant aims to develop new nonlinear photonic materials that can be integrated into heterogeneous functional platforms or chiplets. To this end, I will exploit the giant optical nonlinearity of liquid crystals (ten orders of magnitude larger than that of silicon), for new formulations and lithographic strategies by which the liquid crystals will be confined in a printable nano-porous polymer network. Their 3D nanopatterning will enable the production of multidimensional hybrid nonlinear photonic devices, from all-optical 2D logic gates and ultrafast nonlinear activation functions to self-oscillating 3D photonic crystals. In parallel, the propagation, interaction and polymerization of solitons in a 3D(+1) space will lay the foundation for a new unsupervised bottom-up 3D printing technology. The goals of 3DnanoGiant will redefine the state-of-the-art in integrated nonlinear photonics with practical and versatile heterogeneous chip for fast and energy-efficient optical processing.
Projet ERC : TimedEnhancer (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative B iology : from Genes and Genomes to S ystems
Entité participante : Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HGF
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

During vertebrate development, genes are regulated by distal regulatory elements, presumably via physical contacts between enhancers and transcription start sites. Alterations in enhancer sequences and/or their interactions with gene promoters can perturb gene expression, leading to developmental disorders and cancers, which argues for their pivotal role in transcription. Conversely, enhancer-promoter contacts can also be uncoupled from gene activation during developmental transitions and in single cells, where they are highly heterogeneous. Thus, the relationship between enhancer-promoter interactions and transcription is frequently indirect and the mechanisms that dictate when promoter-enhancer contacts can result in gene expression differences remain unknown. The core hypothesis of this proposal is that it is the timing of promoter-enhancer communication that instructs gene activation. Aim1 will examine whether and how the precise timing of enhancer-promoter interactions contributes to transcription. My group will determine which molecular mechanisms during transcriptional activation are regulated by enhancers contacting their target genes at different time points during embryonic stem cell differentiation.  Aim2 will investigate how present and preceding enhancer-promoter contacts relate to transcriptional activity and transcription factor binding in single cells. My group will develop a genomic approach to trace the memory of preceding interactions at gene regulatory elements, thus adding a novel temporal dimension to current single-cell methods. By longitudinally combining cutting-edge genomic, single-cell and activity perturbation assays, my group will uncover how genes integrate regulatory inputs from several enhancers and assess how the timing of genome folding mechanistically contributes to this process. This research plan will newly elucidate temporality as a powerful feature that shapes the regulatory potential of enhancers and promoters.

Mots-clés : enhancers,3d genome structure,mechanisms of gene regulation,timing
Projet ERC : 4D-therapy (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HGF
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1493711.0 €

Paediatric high grade glioma (pHGG) is the most common malignant childhood brain tumour with standard-of-care inevitably resulting in therapy-resistant relapse or disease progression. The need for new combinatorial treatments is universally acknowledged; however, modern combination therapies are sparse, include at most two modalities and have so far not been able to significantly improve the dismal prognosis of the disease. In this proposal, I conceptualize a highly targeted multimodal treatment strategy for pHGG (4D-therapy) based on complementary precision medicine approaches. The system leverages multiple inter-modal synergies, overcomes resistance to individual therapies and disperses off-targeting to different cell populations, thereby creating a large therapeutic window. Initially, we will conduct a comprehensive screen to evaluate a novel regimen of combined upfront targeted drug- and radiotherapy (RT), followed by functional validation in vitro and in vivo. In-depth molecular profiling will allow us to unravel mechanisms of radiosensitization. Further, we aim to establish an innovative gene therapy approach with unprecedented, highly specific tropism for tumour cells by combining elaborately selected adeno-associated viruses and nanocapsules with newly identified Cas-nucleases. Ultimately, we will systematically combine drug-RTs, gene therapies and existing tumour-specific CAR-T cells within a rationally designed, multimodal treatment regimen and evaluate its efficacy in a series of preclinical studies. A broad representation of patient-derived xenografts, complemented by immunocompetent allograft models will provide leading-edge predictive power and a unique dataset to investigate multimodal interactions. I expect this project to provide pioneering insights into inter-modal treatment synergies, to produce stratified treatment protocols for pHGG, directly informing clinical trials and to become a pathbreaking feasibility study for multimodal cancer therapy.

Mots-clés : multimodal therapy,precision medicine,paediatric brain tumour,preclinical evaluation
Projet ERC : CODA (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative B iology : from Genes and Genomes to S ystems
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 : 1499626.0 €

Across the tree of life, genetic conflicts between hosts and pathogens have fueled the diversification of intracellular defenses that collectively define innate immunity. While prokaryotic and eukaryotic immunity have long been considered distinct, the recent discoveries of multiple defense systems protecting bacteria against viruses called phages have profoundly challenged this paradigm. In particular, some components of eukaryotic innate immunity were shown to have a deep evolutionary origin in bacterial defenses. The existence of ancient immune components suggests that phage-bacteria interactions can illuminate the genetic conflicts between hosts and pathogens across the tree of life, which I propose to explore through two angles. Firstly, I propose to discover novel players of innate immunity based on bacterial defenses. A bioinformatic pipeline will systematically predict protein domains that trigger immune cell death in bacterial defenses and are conserved in eukaryotes. These effectors will be biochemically characterized in bacteria and beyond to unveil novel immune strategies disseminated across the tree of life. We will then exploit this evolutionary conservation to engineer novel immune proteins in human cells based on effectors found in other kingdoms of life. Secondly, I hypothesize that phages and eukaryotic viruses in turn evolved similar strategies to evade immunity. We aim to discover new anti-defenses in phages and to translate them to the world of eukaryotic viruses. To do so, we will implement high-throughput screens to test the anti-defense activity of thousands of small phage genes. We will also conduct structural homology searches to reveal anti-defense mechanisms shared between phages and eukaryotic viruses and characterize them experimentally. Altogether, this project will reveal novel molecular mechanisms of defense and anti-defense in bacteria and beyond, shedding light on the principles of host-pathogen interactions across the biosphere.

Mots-clés : bacterial immunity phages evolutionary genomics cell death immune evasion
Projet ERC : ThoughtOrigins (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
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 : 1499558.0 €

How do human infants and non-human animals think? Fodor famously framed the idea that human minds operate in a language-like format, a “language of thought” (LoT), where mental representations compose in the manner of formal language symbols, allowing us to build arbitrarily complex mental structures out of a small set of initial primitive operations. Through all areas of cognitive science, there has been rich evidence supporting the idea that a LoT could explain many facets of human cognition. Do infants and animals also have a LoT? While the existence of a LoT in the absence of language has been questioned for centuries by philosophers, psychologists and linguists alike, little direct behavioral evidence has been offered for it and these investigations have mainly been confined to close relatives of humans (i.e., great apes). The overarching goal of this project is to adopt a broad comparative approach to study the developmental and evolutionary origins of the LoT. Our approach is at the intersection of linguistics and psychology: we identify the primitive operations of thought from formal semantic principles and operations realized in language, and empirically test them in human adults and infants, baboons (Papio papio), and honeybees (Apis mellifera). We study the computational architecture of the LoT of infants and animals, starting from their ability to perform simple computations using only a few symbols to the more complex abilities to use functional operators, such as logical connectives, quantifiers and modals and to apply pragmatic operations. The outcome of this project will be an unprecedented cartography of possible LoT primitives, and of where they are found in human ontogeny and animal phylogeny.

Mots-clés : language of thought semantic universals animal semantics
Projet ERC : ViDaMa (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
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 : 1499196.0 €

Giant Viruses (GVs) encode thousands of ORFan genes but their study has been nearly impossible due to the lack of genetic tools for reverse genetics. The aims of ViDaMa and the tools I designed will shed light into this Viral protein Dark Matter. Particularly, I will study how new genes from Mimivirus were engineered during evolution to acquire nuclear-like function for their Viral Factories (VFs). VFs physically separate viral DNA replication and transcription from translation and likely segregate DNA into active and silent. How these functions are accomplished remains elusive.  I will demonstrate causality of liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) for the acquisition of nuclear-like functions of the Viral Factories (VFs) of Mimivirus. To do so, I will: 1) Generate genome-wide loss-of-function screens for the identification of gene function and proteome-wide localization of virtually all Mimivirus and its host Acanthamoeba proteins. 2) Combine biochemistry and cell biology to dissect the nature, functions and components of the VFs of Mimivirus. 3) Strip down VFs to their minimal components in order to utilize them to improve production efficiency and purity of mRNA during in vitro transcription. ViDaMA will empower the GVs scientific community with genome-wide and proteome-wide data of gene function and protein localization. It will transform the field from mostly descriptive to allow the dissection of the molecular mechanisms behind viral phenotypes. ViDaMa will also address the molecular mechanisms that allow the VFs to acquire nuclear-like functions, directly tackling the viral eukaryogenesis theory. The new classification of VFs as membrane-less organelles and the study of the molecular mechanism behind their biogenesis and functions will shed light into general mechanism of LLPS. The generation of in vitro VFs promises an optimization of in vitro transcription systems with tremendous impact on mRNA therapeutics at the development and production level.

Mots-clés : giant virus,mimivirus,liquid liquid phase separation,in vitro transcription,genome wide screening,orfan,protein dark matter