Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : FitMA (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499655.0 €

Aristotle’s impact on philosophy, science, and theology has been overwhelming, especially in the late medieval and early modern periods: hundreds of Aristotelian manuscripts survive to attest how strongly his works belong to the written culture of the pre-modern intellectual world. The understanding of Aristotle’s thought was decisively shaped by Latin translations from the 12th and 13th centuries. Translators’ efforts to preserve the exact phrasing of the texts and readers’ struggles to determine the disturbingly novel meaning lie hidden in modifications and notes in the manuscripts. These have however not received the attention they deserve, leading to a significant gap in our knowledge of the medieval reception of Aristotle. FitMA aims to fill this gap through a comprehensive investigation into the new ways to read the Latin Aristotle, with a ground-breaking focus on the textual variance in the handwritten books that preserve the translations. To realize that goal, FitMA will produce state-of-the-art critical editions of Greek-Latin translations of three of Aristotle’s most influential treatises on natural philosophy: De anima, De generatione et corruptione, and De caelo. Critical editions are the established scholarly means to document the variant readings in all manuscript witnesses of an ancient or medieval text. The study of that variance across versions or textual fluidity provides first-hand evidence how readers were exposed to the recently available translations, which are fundamentally different from their Greek originals. Because every manuscript copy of the Latin Aristotle generates a different state for its medieval reception, which cannot be adequately studied from the Greek text or a modern translation, FitMA will advance the state of the art by uncovering the importance of textual fluidity in the manuscripts of these translations and developing an innovative model of interpretation applicable to other medieval translations of philosophy and science.

Mots-clés : aristoteles latinus manuscript studies translation studies intellectual history aristotle
Projet ERC : COLLAB (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1497620.0 €

As initiatives for more diversity and inclusiveness in the cultural field are gaining ground and migration becomes an increasingly important issue on the political agendas of many countries around the world, this project examines the ways in which transnational collaborations create spaces for literary participation of migrants. Situated at the intersection between international relations, comparative literature and business economics, COLLAB analyzes the notion of collaboration from a threefold perspective: 1) as a political strategy in civil society that enhances intercultural exchange and the social integration of migrants through collective storytelling, 2) as a form of co-authorship between migrants and other writers with different cultural backgrounds that gives voice to stories of migration that would often be lost without their translation, 3) as an alternative economic model consisting in peer-to-peer support that brings new voices to the publishing industry. Focusing on a broad range of non-profit organizations, collaborative texts by amateur and professional writers and crowdfunding platforms that help make migrant voices heard through literature, the project seeks to understand how collaboration changes the cultural field and impinges on migrants’ agency. It shows how social actors and institutions that are traditionally perceived as belonging outside the cultural field have become crucial players in redefining notions of authorship rooted in individual and national singularity. Challenging strict distinctions between textual and contextual dynamics, COLLAB highlights the social embeddedness of literature and builds an original framework for understanding the thematic and formal implications of transnational collaboration in literary texts. While borrowing theories and methods from other disciplines, COLLAB confidently reorients the social sciences towards the project’s center of gravity, the literary text, and shows that literature is an important tool to understand broader societal transformations.

Mots-clés : collaboration,cultural diversity,migration,literature
Projet ERC : MONSil-AD (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Université technique de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1482666.25 €

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is defined by pathological brain changes, including the accumulation of β-amyloid and tau deposits over decades. In addition, data in human patients and rodent models indicate that neuronal dysfunctions, i.e., altered action potential firing rates, are further hallmarks of AD. Two forms of neuronal dysfunctions exist - neuronal hyperactivity at early stages, followed later by neuronal silencing. The causes of neuronal hyperactivity have been widely studied. However, the mechanisms of neuronal silencing are still incompletely understood, likely due to the high complexity of interdependent brain changes in late AD stages. MONSil-AD aims to unravel the multifactorial pathways leading to neuronal silencing in AD mouse models. My preliminary data indicate that silencing co-occurs with emergent tauopathy, loss of dendritic spines, and decreased presynaptic inputs in mouse models of β-amyloidosis. Moreover, the soluble ectodomain of the microglial ‘triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2’ (sTREM2), which is upregulated in AD, suppresses neuronal activity. Based on these findings, I will investigate whether synaptic uncoupling from the circuit causes the silencing of individual neurons (aim 1) and test if intracellular tau accumulation silences neurons on a cellular level (aim 2). In addition, I will explore the contribution of sTREM2 to neuronal silencing in AD (aim 3) and the interactions between the three mechanisms. To reach the ambitious aims of MONSil-AD, I have implemented cutting-edge in vivo two-photon imaging techniques and developed specialized protocols enabling me, for the first time, to provide a comprehensive picture of the mechanisms leading to neuronal silencing in AD. In addition, MONSil-AD may have direct clinical implications as a basis for the development of an activity-based screening tool for the early non-invasive detection of AD and the development of targeted treatment strategies to prevent neuronal silencing.

Mots-clés : two photon imaging
Projet ERC : TMSS (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499206.0 €

This project aims to map and examine to what extent, and under what conditions, the life narratives of the Africa Great Lakes Region (AGLR) refugees evolve, travel, and transform across time and space. It will explore how these narratives shape relationships among refugees and communities in countries of transition and destination. It examines how life narratives change as the AGLR refugees encounter preconceived notions about themselves and their communities in host countries. The study will rely on innovative methodological approaches that will include multi-spatial and multi-temporal oral narratives developed via an African orature- and arts-inspired approach. Respondents will include refugees from AGLR, in both the Global North and Global South. The project will produce new theoretical and methodological knowledge combining Memory Studies and Migration Studies. This approach is designed to overcome limitations in global scholarship on the neglected narratives of millions of AGLR refugees who continue to move through the Global North and South due to insecurity in their home countries. Through both academic outputs and those aimed at a general audience, TMSS study's findings will challenge policymakers to think differently when designing programs geared towards refugees. Insights gained from studying these narratives will inspire new community visions and projects that shape relationships between refugees and their host societies in countries of transition and destination. Life narratives of refugees have been an object of scholarly and policy studies before, but existing literature fails to engage with the subjective experiences of refugees as they navigate global contexts.

Mots-clés : life narratives,african great lakes region refugees,memories,silences,secrets
Projet ERC : TIP-FRESH (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : École polytechnique de Turin — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1470641.0 €

The increasing global demand for farmland products is placing unprecedented pressure on the global agricultural system and its water resources. Landscape conversion for agriculture (of which 75% is used for livestock) and increasing irrigation demand (accounting 70% of global water withdrawals) are exacerbating water stress and groundwater depletion, while altering atmospheric moisture recycling (i.e., the process of water evaporating from land, flowing through the atmosphere, and falling out again as precipitation over land), which is vital for regulating the climate and the Earth’s system stability. To accelerate the food system transition toward sustainable diets, TIP-FRESH will pioneer a groundbreaking approach to reversing the freshwater crisis through social tipping points in the global food system. The concept of Social Tipping Points that this project exploits offers an opportunity to escape the current dominant food regime and spread the adoption of less water-intensive diets that have already been adopted in niches. Individual and collective dietary shifts can trigger cascading impacts across international trade networks and production systems, ultimately reshaping the way freshwater is consumed and preserved. By leveraging the concept of social tipping points, TIP-FRESH project will develop a novel framework integrating multidisciplinary approaches: mathematical tools will be employed to analyse dietary patterns and diagnose how tipping dynamics have manifested over past decades; hydrological modelling will provide a deeper understanding on the diets’ freshwater impacts by newly quantifying the hydrological repercussions of livestock-driven deforestation; and system dynamic model describing behavioural change will pave the way to sustainable diets and their potential to spread from niche behaviours to the dominant food regime through social networks.

Mots-clés : sustainable food system,social tipping points,freshwater sustainability
Projet ERC : MUSE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : École supérieure Sainte-Anne de Pise — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499160.0 €

People that suffer from severe muscle weakness of the (upper) limb following neurological disorders still struggle to find assistive technologies able to help them in their daily life. The most advanced technologies consist of wearable exoskeletons, either rigid or soft, that promise to support the wearer during daily living. Despite their great potential, the widespread adoption of exoskeletons where they are most needed – i.e., for continuous daily home assistance – is prevented by several flaws: limited efficiency, controllability, and lack of reliable ways to connect them to the user. MUSE (MusculoSkeletal Expansion) abandons the paradigm of wearing an exoskeleton to develop and clinically assess soft external muscles (exomuscles) intimately connected and naturally controlled by the user. The core objective is to develop innovative efficient exomuscles to support people with severe muscle weakness. With my solid experience in soft robotics and innovative materials, I will develop them by combining the extreme portability of pneumatic actuators made of textiles with the energy efficiency and promptness of non-linear elastic structures. They will be reliably connected to the user through fixtures implanted on the bones, which will grant the excellent mechanical stability of osseointegration, widely adopted in dental prosthetics and increasingly explored in limb prosthetics, but still unexplored in exoskeletons. This approach will unlock the potential of eliciting osseoperception, i.e., sensory feedback – necessary to control motion – through bone conduction. If successful, MUSE will benefit all those in need of sensorimotor augmentation, as it can be extended to all kinds of exoskeletons (from upper to lower limbs, from assistive to augmenting devices). Moreover, since MUSE connects the inner body to the external world, it may be the cornerstone to build a bidirectional gateway between them, bridging the human and the machine to a more and more intimate level.

Mots-clés : wearable exoskeletons soft robotics supplementary sensory feedback assistive technology
Projet ERC : I-BOT (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : École supérieure Sainte-Anne de Pise — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1497923.75 €

Small-scale medical robotics was born from a science fiction vision: shrinking down a group of surgeons and letting them swim to the brain to save a patient’s life. This vision calls for precision, efficiency in delivering force and noninvasiveness. Conversely, the microrobots proposed so far are only able to perform drug or cell delivery. Furthermore, their capability to keep an active configuration is strictly dependent on the presence of a certain external stimulus. In this ERC project I aim to tackle these challenges by devising new actuation mechanisms, control and imaging strategies allowing the microrobots to exert suitable forces and prolonging their lifetime. I-BOT proposes the first generation of implantable microrobots featured by a multi-material structure including a liquid perfluorocarbon core and a shape memory polymers magnetic composite skin. By exploiting magnetic material programming, microrobots will be capable of multimodal locomotion under magnetic guidance. Upon target reaching, low intensity pulsed ultrasound and alternated magnetic fields will trigger acoustic droplet vaporization and magnetic hyperthermia. This will produce simultaneous volumetric expansion of the internal chamber and deformation of the surrounding skin to allow fitting the implant site. Shape memory polymers will ensure shape locking upon removal of the triggering signals thus stable implant. Ultrasound acoustic phase analysis will allow microrobot tracking over the entire implant procedure and prolonged lesion monitoring upon implantation. The I-BOT approach will be validated in three relevant validation scenarios (ulcer filling, vascular graft and long term tumoral lesion monitoring) to demonstrate the flexibility of the approach and to unveil the potentialities and the impact of implantable microrobots. As a final step, the most promising validation scenario will be tested in vivo in large animals, as a step forward in moving microrobots from the bench to the bedside.

Mots-clés : microrobotics,medical robotics,ultrasound triggering,magnetic locomotion
Projet ERC : ETQO (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : École normale supérieure de Pise — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499850.0 €

Quantum entanglement fuels the most important quantum information processing protocols and is central to modern physics. However, the most profound questions concerning its operational meaning remain unanswered. Most importantly, we do not know how efficiently mixed-state entanglement can be (i) manipulated or (ii) detected, (iii) whether it is possible to formulate a thermodynamical theory of entanglement revolving around a unique entropic measure, and finally (iv) how entanglement can be exploited to reveal quantum features of gravity in experiments with gravitationally interacting quantum systems. A single key statement connects all these questions, the Generalised Quantum Stein's Lemma (GQSL) from quantum hypothesis testing. I have however uncovered [Lami and Regula, Nature Physics 19, 184 (2023); BBGLPRT, Nature Physics, in press (2023)] a fatal flaw in the original proof of the GQSL, which is now regarded as one of the most important open problems in entanglement theory.  This project addresses questions (i)-(iv) in a unified way through the GQSL. The road map includes five key objectives. (O1) Solve the GQSL with techniques from quantum Shannon theory. (O2) Expand its scope from entanglement to other quantum resources and from states to processes. (O3) Design new entanglement measures and use them to obtain tight constraints on entanglement manipulation. (O4) Determine the ultimate performances of quantum communication networks, and characterise entanglement in many-body systems. Finally, (O5) investigate quantum gravitational experiments systematically with the formalism of quantum hypothesis testing, formulating a complete proposal of a new type of `dynamical' quantum gravitational experiment. Thanks to my strong track record in quantum information theory, entanglement theory, and their applications to fundamental physics problems, I am in an ideal position to complete this project, whose goal is to build new bridges connecting these three key areas.

Mots-clés : quantum entanglement,quantum communication,gravitational entanglement,quantum gravity,hypothesis testing,stein s lemma
Projet ERC : NAD-ART (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Université de Marbourg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1387292.61 €

Background: We discovered that NAD-capped RNAs can be covalently attached to specific target proteins by the phage T4 ADP-ribosyltransferase (ART) ModB, which we term RNAylation. Scientific problem: RNA therapy has almost limitless yet unexplored potential. Its translation into the clinics, however, requires optimal RNA delivery with high RNA stability, efficient cellular internalisation and precise target affinity. Hypothesis: Protein-RNA interactions are ubiquitous and central in biological control. I hypothesise that conjugating a NAD-capped nucleic acid to a protein catalysed by an ART generates a novel biomolecule – the RNAylated protein – with unique functionalities. The covalently linked protein or nucleic acid can trigger a directed intracellular delivery, where both, the protein and the nucleic acid, can become functionally active. This allows targeted modulation of translation or transcription, or editing. RNAylated proteins may provide a platform to engineer the cell and represent a starting point for the creation of next generation RNA therapeutics. Objectives: This project aims to establish RNAylated proteins as a fundamentally novel tool to regulate cellular processes. In objective 1, we will define the design principles for RNAylated proteins, allowing to control cellular processes. In objective 2, we will develop delivery strategies to transfer RNAylated proteins in specific cell types and allow for precise cellular localisation. In objective 3, we will combine the design and delivery principles for RNAylated proteins and apply them to target the tumour suppressor protein p53 by regulating translation, transcription or by editing. Impact: This project will develop RNAylated proteins as next generation RNA therapeutics and deepen our understanding of how a fundamental scientific discovery –the RNAylation of proteins, catalysed by the T4 ART ModB – can be translated into an application.

Mots-clés : rna modification,protein modification,nucleic acids,synthetic biology
Projet ERC : WRAPPED (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de Marbourg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1497540.0 €

Humans start life fully dependent on the care of others, yet we go on to acquire skills no other species is capable of. What is the biological basis of this remarkable plasticity? Animal studies suggest a critical role of myelin in learning and brain plasticity, while post-mortem assessments of the human brain show that myelin maturation, which is completed around birth in other species, continues until adulthood. How does this uniquely protracted myelin development enable and constrain our aptitude for learning? WRAPPED will answer this critical question by assessing changes in myelin during learning at different developmental stages.  Recent critical advances in MRI technology now provide the unprecedented opportunity to compare myelin levels within the living human brain over time and between individuals making it possible to probe the role of myelin in human learning for the first time. Seizing this opportunity, WRAPPED will assess learning-related changes in myelin using an innovative two-pronged approach that combines local longitudinal studies with the analysis of large-scale open data. Critically, WRAPPED will not only evaluate adults, but rather probe the entire developmental lifespan to show how myelin changes as infants learn to crawl, when children enter school, and when children, young adults, and older adults are acquiring the same novel skills (juggling and reading Chinese). This ambitious developmental focus will be transformative for our understanding of the interactions between maturational and learning-related changes in myelin. Thereby, WRAPPED will elucidate the biological basis of the unique human learning trajectory that allows us to establish and maintain complex cultures. This characterization of healthy human brain plasticity, in turn, will serve as a vital reference point for understanding psychological and neurological disorders linked to alterations in myelin, such as schizophrenia, autism, and childhood learning disabilities.

Mots-clés : development,learning,human,infancy,childhood,white matter,myelin,qmri,dmri,fmri