Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : MediCoDe (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : OvGU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2490381.0 €

Cognitive control enables humans to flexibly adapt their behavior for goal achievement. Despite intensive research we still miss an overarching understanding of cognitive control and its main underlying structure, the posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC). This is due to insufficient consideration of pMFC neuroanatomy, its subregions and individual variability; low sensitivity of conventional group-level studies; diffuse use of multiple methods and paradigms in disparate studies impeding differentiation of general cognitive-control principles from study idiosyncrasies; sparsity of causal evidence in humans. This project proposes a radical shift in tackling these issues by two novel approaches: A) Within-subject multimodal dense sampling and representational modeling considering individual neuroanatomy will provide a fine-grained spatiotemporal mapping of representations of cognitive-control and decision-making variables to connectivity-based pMFC subregions and enable discriminating between competing theories. The rationale is that representations of latent constructs of cognitive control must generalize across tasks and contexts. In multiple sessions behavior, fMRI, EEG, eye movements and autonomic reactions are recorded while participants perform tasks enabling to estimate cognitive control variables (CCV) from behavior and computational models. Representational similarity analysis of CCVs across tasks and modalities in a regression framework will identify signatures of core theoretical components of cognitive control. B) A novel stimulation method using low-intensity transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) noninvasively modulates neuronal activity in deep brain structures with excellent spatial resolution. tFUS combined with EEG and fMRI will causally test the necessity of CCV representations in pMFC and its network for adaptive behavior. The project will open up new research avenues to address individual differences and pathological changes in cognitive control.

Mots-clés : cognitive control,performance monitoring,error processing,adaptive behavior,midcingulate cortex,posterior medial frontal cortex,fmri,connectivity,representational similarity analysis,low intensity transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation,model based analysis
Projet ERC : Set-to-change (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1923996.88 €

Cognitive function in old age can be predicted from how you functioned when you were young. This is remarkable, as there are substantial cognitive age changes. Are we neurodevelopmentally set to change through life in certain ways? The objective of Set-to-change is to test whether and how early life environmental factors and genetic makeup interact to regulate neurocognitive plasticity through the lifespan. Neurocognitive plasticity; i.e. changes in brain and cognition in response to environmental demands over time, shows huge individual variability, for unknown reasons. Neurodevelopmental origins of functional variation through the lifespan are acknowledged, but the pathways need to be identified. As individual constitution and environment are intrinsically correlated, to make progress beyond state of the art, this can only be tested in an experimental setting. The novelty and ground-breaking nature of the project lies in the synthesis of a targeted experimental approach testing differences in neurocognitive plasticity by training of younger and older adult mono- (MZ) and dizygotic twins (total n = 400 individuals), with varying degrees of prenatal environmental variance, as indexed by their extent of discordance in birth weight (BW). BW discordance in MZ twins enables me to disentangle early environmental and genetic influences on neurocognitive plasticity. I will employ a novel ecologically valid memory intervention utilizing navigation with true locomotion and prospective memory in virtual reality. Twins will be assessed with brain MRI, cognitive, health and epigenetic measures at multiple time points spread across 2.5 years pre- and post- 3 months intervention in a AB/BA crossover design, to investigate neurocognitive plasticity and age change longitudinally, as well as possible lifestyle and epigenetic mediators. I hypothesize that early life environmental influences will interact with genetic makeup in determining neurocognitive plasticity in adulthood.

Mots-clés : lifespan,neuroimaging,plasticity
Projet ERC : CoChina (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Utrecht University — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Collaborative planning has become an effective means to address conflicts of interest in urban renewal and environmental management in China. However, the egalitarian principles that ground collaborative planning theory call into question its validity in China. The theory emphasizes consensus building in which various stakeholders come together for dialogue to address controversial issues. It rests on three assumptions: democratic institutions, neutral power and communicative rationality. These assumptions, which are often debated in the Western context, should clearly be questioned in the Chinese context, due to authoritarian institutions and the challenging nature of power relations. Therefore, the aim of my project is to examine the practices of collaborative planning in China and identify the challenges to the assumptions of the theory. I will develop three novel tracks for examination and reconceptualization. The first will analyze how Chinese political and planning systems, social capital and culture affect the interactive processes. The second will apply network theory and social network analysis to analyze various types of power relations between government, planners, civil society and citizens. The third will identify various forms of online public spheres and how they interact with offline public spheres to affect communicative and agonistic approaches to collaborative planning. The research will employ an innovative mixed methods approach combining critical discourse analysis, data mining, computer-assisted content analysis, and social network analysis to research a wide range of case studies. My project will lead to a new understanding of collaborative planning in China, and a reconceptualization of the collaborative planning theory to make it suitable for authoritarian contexts.

Mots-clés : collaborative planning,authoritarian institutions,new media,power relations,public spheres,china
Projet ERC : Regen-membrane (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : University of Cambridge — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. Cambridge
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Collagen membranes are a major tool in wound regeneration, encouraging cell growth, providing barrier functions, and improving cosmetic outcomes, with the market of membranes for dental wound repair alone expected to nearly double to $200m by 2023. Currently used membranes however suffer a range of limitations in size, shape, and biocompatibility, making surgeries complex and the wound healing behaviour hard to predict. As such, there is a need for new collagen based membranes to help both clinicians and patients. We have developed a novel technology, based on electrophoretic deposition, to produce free-standing, collagen-based membranes that do not suffer from these limitations. Using our technology, rapid and simple production of large scale or complex shaped collagen membranes is possible, giving clinicians more options for difficult wound management. Furthermore, our technology allows for production of textured and curved membranes, including tubes, which currently cannot be fabricated and would be highly desirable for roles such as peripheral nerve regeneration and maxillofacial surgery. Additionally, we can open new market areas by producing membranes with aligned fibres for high suturability, and membranes with live cells embedded within that can greatly increase the rate of healing, reduce patient discomfort, and improve cosmetic outcomes. We anticipate that our cell-laden membranes will be able to be transportable in a partially dehydrated state, allowing for ease of storage and transport. Finally, our technology allows us to combine these attributes together to provide membranes tailored towards specific clinical needs, something not possible with the “one size fits all” membranes currently on the market. We believe this will make our products highly desirable and give us a significant advantage in a rapidly growing healthcare market.

Mots-clés : collagen,membranes,electrophoretic deposition,regenerative medicine
Projet ERC : EXPLORINGMATTER (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 882950.96 €

Collisions of ultra relativistic nuclei are a tool to reach huge energy densities and to form a new state of matter called Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), where quarks and gluons can move freely. A number of experiments have studied the possible formation of QGP, but the behaviour of heavy particles such as charm (c) and beauty (b) quarks when they traverse this medium is largely unknown and is the most powerful tool to prove the creation of the QGP and to characterise it. I will perform novel measurements using the LHCb detector at CERN, which covers an unique kinematic region, essential for a full understanding of QGP and nuclear matter in general. LHCb has been optimised to perform c and b quark physics measurements in proton-proton collisions. In EXPLORINGMATTER I propose to extend the LHCb programme to collect for the first time data in heavy ion collisions. Three experimental scenarios are foreseen: (1) Collisions of protons, benchmark to understand the behaviour of the c and b particles in other more complicated environments, as well as providing the final answers to the mechanism of heavy quarkonium production;(2) Collisions of protons with heavy nuclei, where cold nuclear matter effects in high-energy collisions can be studied in detail to understand lead nuclei collisions, where QGP is expected to be formed. (3) Collisions of heavy nuclei, pursued (a) by analysing heavy nuclei interactions through a dedicated setup in which gas will be injected in the LHCb interaction region, reaching energy densities typical of dedicated fixed target experiments; (b) by collecting heavy ion collision data at the LHC. This second setup, which has not been envisaged by LHCb up to now will revolutionise the measurements in this area thanks to the LHCb coverage and precision not achievable by any other experiment. My measurements will furthermore indicate the route to new experiments that could be designed on the basis of these findings.

Mots-clés : heavy nuclei,quark gluon plasma,quarkonia
Projet ERC : Smartphon (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2181250.0 €

Colloid and polymer science allows the engineering of acoustic and optical material functionalities of hierarchical structures on various length scales commensurate with and well below the characteristic length scales of phonons and photons. Periodic structures act as both hypersonic phononic and visible light photonic crystals (phoxonics). We recently extended the decade-old field to hypersonic phononics. Many important questions in this young field are just being raised and require new conceptual and technical approaches to address them. Powerful synthesis and assembly methods are able to create novel structures to host unconventional properties of flexibility and multi-functionality, locally resonant hypersonic soft metamaterials and topological phononic insulators. To complement our best world-wide Brillouin spectroscopy for retrieving the dispersion relations in transparent structures, two new experimental techniques based on laser-induced high frequency phonons and tapered fiber optomechanics will be implemented to engineer strong wave-matter interactions. Band structure calculations will be used as tools to model and predict the acoustic wave propagation in composite structures of varying symmetry, architecture and topology of the building components. Our novel approach, together with intricate methods of processing such materials at a large scale, shows the outline of the emerging field of polymer-and colloid-based phononics. Promising applications range from tunable responsive filters and one way phonon waveguides to compact acousto-optic devices and sensors and from hypersonic imaging to materials and devices, which allow for directed heat flow and recovery. To access such fundamental concepts a detailed understanding of phonon propagation in nanostructured media is a precondition. This proposal ensures that we will hear much more about currently unknown and unexpected properties and functions of soft phononics and will open up many new lines of research.
Projet ERC : CROME (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Coimbra — Pays : Portugal — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1478249.0 €

Colonial-Liberation Wars generate plural memories, conflicting evocations and persisting amnesias. The project’s main challenge is to produce innovative knowledge about the memories of the wars fought by the Portuguese state and pro-independence African movements between 1961 and 1974/5. The approach chosen is simultaneously diachronic and comparative, inasmuch as it contrasts changes that took place between the end of the conflicts and nowadays, regarding how wars, colonial pasts and anticolonial legacies have been remembered and silenced in Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Principe. The key hypothesis is that wars - as pivotal moments that ended the cycle of Empire in Portugal and started the cycle of African independences in the former Portuguese colonies - triggered memorialisation and silencing processes which had their own historicity. CROME is divided into two strands. The first one, named ‘Colonial Wars, Postcolonial States’, looks at the role played by the states under consideration in mobilising, articulating and recognising the past, but also in actively generating selective representations. ‘Memory as a battlefield’ is the second strand, which will highlight distinct uses of the past and dynamics between social memories and individual memories. The project intends to demonstrate how wars gave rise to multiple memories and conflicting historical judgements, mostly in Portugal, but also to examine how the specific nature of the (post-)colonial histories of each African country has generated different ways to summon war memories and (anti-)colonial legacies. CROME will, thus, put forward a ground-breaking perspective in terms of colonial-liberation war studies, and will be instrumental in dealing with such traumatic experience, for its comparative approach might help overcoming everlasting constraints still at play today, caused by the historical burden European colonialism left behind.

Mots-clés : memory studies,war memories,oral history
Projet ERC : PLASTICAN (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Georg Speyer Haus — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Colorectal cancer (CRC) belongs to the most frequent tumor entities in both men and women. Although early detection and certain therapies have improved, the prognosis for patients with metastatic diseases is dismal and survival rates are below 10% at 5 years after diagnosis. Colorectal carcinogenesis is greatly dependent on the plasticity of both tumor cells as well as surrounding stromal cells within the tumor microenvironment. Among the latter, both T cells as well as mesenchymal cells substantially contribute to the survival prognosis. Importantly, mesenchymal cells are very heterogenous and various subtypes have been recently described in other tumor entities. Most likely these subtypes rather represent different activation states and have the capacity to interconvert, however, their precise functional role is unknown. Thus, a detailed mechanistic understanding about the cancer-stromal cross-talk as well as the stromal plasticity in CRC, particularly during late tumor stages and the relevance for metastasis development is lacking. Here we aim to perform well-defined hypothesis driven approaches to characterize the plasticity of both tumor and stromal cells and to develop innovative tools that will allow the functional analysis of distinct cell types in the stroma of primary tumors as well as in the pre-metastatic niche in the liver. This will be complemented by unbiased in vivo screens to identify novel pathways involved in plasticity of tumor epithelia and hepatocytes contributing to metastasis formation. Collectively, the combination of these comprehensive approaches that are based on sophisticated novel in vivo models as well as functional analysis of patient samples will ultimately aid the development of novel therapeutic strategies for late-stage CRC patients.
Projet ERC : VADEMECOM (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Université Libre de Bruxelles — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ULB
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499110.0 €

Combustion science will play a major role in the future quest for sustainable, secure and environmentally friendly energy sources. Two thirds of the world energy supply rely on combustion of fossil and alternative fuels, and all scenarios forecast an increasing absolute energy supply through combustion, with an increasing share of renewables. Thus, combustion will remain the major actor in transportation and power generation as well as in manufacturing processes, like steel and glass. Nevertheless, combustion science will need profound innovation to meet future energy challenges, such as energy efficiency and fuel flexibility, and ensure future generations with affordable and sustainable energy and healthy environment. In this context, MILD combustion represents a very attractive solution for its fuel flexibility and capability to deliver very high combustion efficiency with virtually zero pollutant emissions. Such a combustion regime is the result of a very strong interaction between turbulent mixing and chemical kinetics. The fundamental mechanism of this interaction is not fully understood, thus justifying the need for experimental and numerical investigations. The overall objective of the present research proposal is to drive the development of modern and efficient combustion technologies, by means of experimental, theoretical, and numerical simulation approaches. New-generation simulation tools for MILD combustion will be developed, to reduce the dependence on sub-grid models and increase the fidelity of numerical simulations. High-fidelity experimental data will be collected on quasi-industrial systems, to disclose the nature of the interactions between fluid dynamics, chemistry and pollutant formation processes in MILD combustion. Experiment and numerical simulations will be tied together by Validation and Uncertainty Quantification techniques, to allow the ground-breaking application of the developed approaches and promote innovation in the energy sector.

Mots-clés : combustion,computational fluid dynamics,flameless combustion,mild combustion,oxy flameless combustion,oxy mild combustion,turbulence,chemistry interactions,validation
Projet ERC : Imaging-XChem (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Autonomous University of Madrid — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UAM
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Commercial quantum-chemistry computational packages are widely used in science and chemical industry to predict the properties and reactivity of molecules and to design new compounds and drugs that can eventually be synthesized in the laboratory. The software developed in the framework of the ERC AdG project XCHEM is aimed at providing a full quantum mechanical description of a large variety of chemical processes that cannot be addressed by standard quantum chemistry packages, namely those processes in which molecular ionization takes place. An accurate description of molecular ionization is crucial to develop new applications and make reliable predictions in emerging scientific disciplines, such as attochemistry, single-molecule imaging, and coherent attosecond control of chemical reactions. As it happened with traditional quantum chemistry packages, there is now the need to produce a documented and friendly version of this newly developed software in order to facilitate its widespread use by other scientists, either theoreticians or experimentalists working at huge European infrastructures, and by private sector companies and other stakeholders. This project aims at providing a powerful tool to describe molecular ionization by attosecond laser pulses by transforming the outputs of the ERC AdG XCHEM project in a service-oriented software system. Main efforts will be directed to (i) document, optimize and test the codes under different architectures, (ii) implement a user interface in order to simplify its future use, (iii) explore different itineraries to ensure a proper exploitation of the product, and (iv) prepare training sessions and material to facilitate the incorporation of this new technology to less expert users.

Mots-clés : service oriented software,x ray free electron lasers,attosecond chemistry,time imaging of molecular changes,attosecond control of chemical reactions,radiation induced damage