Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : EpiMoSis (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative B iology : from Genes and Genomes to S ystems
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 : 1665563.0 €

DNA replication not only involves the copying of the genome to propagate cell identity to daughter cells but also of the epigenome, where histones and their post-translational modifications (PTM) are accurately maintained in replicated chromatin. This is achieved by a strikingly coordinated process that ensures accurate, symmetric recycling of H3-H4 tetramers to both daughter strands, thus forming the basis of epigenetic memory. Recently, I identified H2A-H2B PTMs to be also symmetrically recycled in a H3-H4-independent manner. The underlying mechanism and their role in epigenetic memory remain unclear. Moreover, whether the asymmetric nature of DNA replication (leading vs. lagging strand) leads to asymmetric chromatin landscapes on daughter strands per se remains unexplored due to the current lack of technologies.  I hypothesize that propagation of cell identity to daughter cells requires crosstalk of conserved “memory modules” (on H3-H4 and H2A-H2B) to equilibrate the asymmetric mode of DNA replication. We will use both stem cell culture and fission yeast to define evolutionarily conserved concepts of chromatin restoration after replication. To this end, we will extend state-of-the-art sequencing, proteomics, genome editing, as well as established and novel nucleotide labelling approaches. First, we will address the molecular mechanism of H2A-H2B PTMs recycling during replication. Second, we will test the role of active chromatin PTMs in maintaining chromatin states, 3D chromatin organization, and gene expression after replication. Third, we will develop a novel strand-specific labelling technology to determine the composition and restoration principles of leading and lagging strand-replicated chromatin.  This proposal will directly dissect the function and relevance of epigenetic memory on H2A-H2B and active chromatin PTMs post-replication and define new concepts of how chromatin maintenance mechanisms promote symmetric cell division and support cell identity.

Mots-clés : dna replication,functional genomics,histone modifications,asymmetric cell division
Projet ERC : MELT (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
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 : 1499588.0 €

The MELT project will study the macroevolution of European literature: the overarching patterns of intertextual influences in literary fiction spanning the years 1800–2000 and including all major European languages. This project will rely on the full-text digital library of unprecedented size – HathiTrust, with over 10 million full-text books – as well as on advanced methods of computational text analysis and on novel mathematical models of cultural evolution. My interdisciplinary team, consisting of scholars of digital humanities, computational linguistics, and mathematics, will construct massive dynamic networks of book history, capturing the thematic influences between athors, the emergence of new literary communities (e.g., genres), and their decay. In this way, the MELT will essentially build a gigantic “map” of European literary history, having two dimensions: geographic and temporal. In parallel, we will simulate the evolution of books, creating artificial “authors” powered by large language models. Such simulations will allow testing the robustness of our network construction methods.  The study of this massive size and scope, employing a powerful computer cluster, will allow answering many fundamental questions about literature – but also about society and politics, since literature often reflects moods and aspirations of the day. For example, what is the role of demographic turnover in the change of literary topics? How do disruptive events – wars, pandemics, and revolutions – influence the fabric of writing? What makes certain books bestselling and, as a consequence, hyper-influential? Do literary genres gradually loose their appeal due to repetetiveness? Literature occupies a central part of culture, shaping our identities and visions of the future, but our understanding of its dynamics is limited. My expertise in both comparative literature, large-scale text mining, and mathematical modeling will allow leading a team able to answer such questions.

Mots-clés : computational humanities text mining cultural evolution literary history
Projet ERC : ToNQS (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
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 : 1364126.0 €

Analog quantum simulation protocols, which aim to use quantum hardware without performing error correction to solve large quantum many-body problems, have emerged as a near-term as well as experimentally accessible alternative to a building a fault tolerant quantum computer for these problems. However, from a theoretical standpoint, whether analog simulators can be trusted to provide accurate results for large quantum many-body problems and if they provide an advantage over classical computers remains a largely unsolved problem. In ToNQS, I aim to rigorously understand the accuracy of analog quantum simulation of many-body problems in both low-energy and high-energy physics. I will do so by developing mathematically rigorous upper bounds on the deviation of the output of a noisy quantum simulator from the target observables which will then serve as an accuracy certificate for the quantum simulator.  With this accuracy certificate, I will identify problems that can be reliably solved on quantum simulators – these will problems where the error in the noisy simulator output not grow with the problem size, and thus can be solved for large system sizes in the presence of noise. However, it is possible that problems that are stable are also classically easy and analog quantum simulators are incapable of providing speedups over classical computers while being accurate. In ToNQS, I will then aim to investigate if there is complexity-theoretic evidence for stable problems to also be hard for classical computers. This project will bring together ideas from different sub-areas of my expertise – quantum optics, many-body physics, quantum information and quantum complexity theory. If successful, this project would provide an end-to-end theoretical framework to identify problems for which a noisy quantum simulator can be trusted and reason about its quantum advantage for these problems, thus resolving a major theoretical objection to analog simulators as computational devices.

Mots-clés : quantum simulation,many body physics
Projet ERC : QuSimCtrl (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
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 : 1500000.0 €

The ability to control quantum matter in a state of equilibrium is a milestone of 20th-century physics. A major goal of modern physics is to extend this knowledge to out-of-equilibrium systems. Located at the boundary between equilibrium and nonequilibrum, quantum simulation appears particularly suitable for this purpose. Using periodic drives, quantum simulators can experimentally emulate phenomena hitherto inaccessible in conventional materials, such as artificial gauge fields or topological and dynamically localized matter. However, our understanding of how to manipulate systems exposed to intense nonequilibrium drives is in its infancy, especially regarding strongly interacting models. We propose to overcome the current limitations by combining ideas from quantum control and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. We will develop a new theoretical framework for nonadiabatic many-body state control on top of strong periodic drives underlying the optimal manipulation of ordered prethermal states of matter without equilibrium counterparts. Understanding this many-body dynamics will improve cutting-edge manipulation techniques in cold atoms, trapped ions, superconducting circuits, and quantum solids. We will add reinforcement learning (RL), one of the most promising techniques in AI, to the quantum entanglement control toolbox. Deep RL has the potential to push the state-of-the-art of (dis-)entangling quantum states since it is capable of identifying effective degrees of freedom even when no underlying physical structure is immediately obvious. Discovering guiding principles of physics for many-body control away from equilibrium has the potential to reveal new connections across quantum dynamics, statistical mechanics, optimal control, and machine learning. The proposed research establishes a missing link on the roadmap for designing future materials and technologies based on nonequilibrium processes in condensed matter, quantum optics, and quantum computing.

Mots-clés : periodically driven systems,floquet systems,nonequilibrium quantum many body dynamics,prethermal steady states,reinforcement learning for quantum control,shortcuts to adiabaticity
Projet ERC : ORION (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting 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 : 1749203.75 €

Electrochemistry provides direct control over the electron free energy and thus a path to electrically probe and drive chemical reactions. In strong contrast, no versatile technique exists that controls the free energy of a specific ion directly and in isolation. This has led to poor understanding of interfacial ionics. Take for example water dissociation , which is of key relevance for many energy technologies, such as for producing green H2 in alkaline conditions or bipolar membranes (BPMs) that generate acid and base using (renewable) electricity in electrodialysis. BPMs are unique, because they isolate water dissociation spatially at a junction between two electrically-isolating, but ionically-conducting polymers. However, macroscopic BPMs do not provide x-y-z resolution. These geometric constraints limit our scientific understanding about the fundamental underpinnings of WD. It is not still clearly understood what causes the kinetic barriers of WD at heterogeneous interfaces, let alone the influence of the catalyst’s surface structures or local electrostatics. In Orion, I want to scale down the ion-selective contacts of the BPM and develop “ionomer pipette microscopy”. By forming and controlling a microscopic BPM junction, we will resolve and study WD activity as a function of crystal facets, metal oxide clusters and bias-dependent surface speciation. In general, water dissociation serves us as ionic test reaction to study the impact and link between local electrostatics and local acid-base chemistry, which is fundamentally important for interfacial ionics in general. More broadly, developing a table-top setup to control the free energy of specific ions with microscopic precision could have tremendous impact across the disciplines. Example include interfacial ion transport in solid-state electrochemical systems, (de)hydrogenation in organic chemistry and enzyme function, proton gradients and action potentials in biochemistry.

Mots-clés : water dissociation,ionic interface processes,bipolar membrane,scanning ion conductance microscopy,electrocatalysis
Projet ERC : cQEDscope (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
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 : 1480000.0 €

Superconductivity is a remarkable phase of matter which has advanced a wide variety of fields, including particle accelerators, biomedical imaging tools, and quantum computers. However, there are fundamental open questions about the nature of the superconducting state in many materials, with new ones being discovered every year. Understanding their structure can help unravel the dynamics of interacting many-body quantum systems, and lead to a next generation of technological innovations. Superconducting circuits are macroscopic tunable quantum devices which can interact strongly while maintaining high coherence, making them a leading quantum computing platform. These advantages also make them excellent quantum sensors, and as they are entirely superconductor-based and operate at microwave frequencies well below the gap energy of most materials, superconducting circuits are ideally suited for the exploration of novel superconductors. cQEDscope will utilize superconducting circuits to expand our understanding of superconductivity in three ways: 1) using strong coupling to kinetic inductance, we will probe the structure of the superconducting order parameter in micron-sized samples (such as flakes of layered materials), orders of magnitude below current techniques; 2) using nonlinearity, we will implement a microwave analogue of Raman spectroscopy, allowing us to probe a wide frequency range and observe collective modes within the superconducting phase; 3) using quantum coherence, our circuit will interact with the Higgs collective mode to create the first Higgs-polariton, a novel quantum system by itself and a new path to study the superconducting structure. In addition to our contribution to the understanding of novel superconductors, cQEDscope will also develop a new quantum sensing tool for material exploration, and a promising new class of hybrid superconducting circuits with potential quantum technology applications.

Mots-clés : superconducting circuits,quantum sensing,unconventional superconductivity,collective modes,microwave spectroscopy
Projet ERC : COLVET (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université nationale d'Irlande à Maynooth — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1196801.0 €

COLVET will develop the first comprehensive and comparative account of colonial veterancy in what was the foundational era for modern conceptions of the veteran, the interwar period. Grounded in a collaborative and comparative methodology, the project will trace and analyse the contrasts and commonalities in the evolution and reception of veteran policy within, across, and between the French Empire, the Italian Empire, the American colonial empire, British-ruled East Africa, and British-ruled India. This innovative research will not only deepen our understanding of veteran history around the world in the period but also help us reimagine the concepts we use to analyse veterans and their stories so they can better capture the diversity of veteran experiences. The project has four principal aims: 1. To trace and compare the history of veteran experiences and policy across colonial contexts and imperial polities.  2. To use veteran policy and the responses it elicited to explore the nature of colonial rule across interwar empires. 3. To expand the imagined geography of veteran history in the period to include colonial veterans.  4. To reimagine the conceptual framework of veteran history so it can better incorporate colonial veterans alongside veterans from the rest of the world. To achieve these aims, the COLVET team will explore key questions around the definition and regulation of veterancy, the political recognition and mobilisation of veterans, and the systems set up to cater for and control veterans across a range colonial territories and imperial polities. The project design ensures that the original research this generates will then be put into dialogue with scholarship on and scholars of veterans in other contexts, colonial and non-colonial. This collaborative and comparative approach will allow the team to co-produce a new analytical framework that will facilitate the writing of a truly global history of the veteran.

Mots-clés : veteran history,history of the welfare state,imperial history,military history,anti colonialism
Projet ERC : PHYCOSPHERES (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
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 : 1499544.75 €

Microscopic algae release organic compounds to the region immediately surrounding their cells, known as the phycosphere, constituting a niche for colonization by heterotrophic bacteria. These bacteria consume algal photoassimilates and provide beneficial functions to their host, in a process that resembles the establishment of microbial communities associated with the roots and rhizospheres of land plants. Phycosphere communities have been well studied in aquatic environments, where they are known to play important roles in nutrient and energy fluxes. For many species of algae, interactions with their associated phycosphere bacteria can also provide beneficial functions, often mediated by metabolic exchanges. Despite the known importance of these associations in aquatic environments, their role in terrestrial ecosystems and parallels with the root microbiota of land plants have not yet been resolved.  The goal of this project is to employ a newly developed reductionist host-microbiota system based on the model chlorophyte alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii to study the structure and functions of terrestrial phycospheres and identify the core ecological principles that explain the overlap between the root and phycosphere microbiota. Using a variety of gnotobiotic systems and synthetic communities composed of phycosphere bacteria, we will study the genetic and molecular mechanisms that drive host-microbiota interactions in C. reinhardtii and as well as their evolutionary origins and conservation in other lineages of green algae and land plants. Finally, we will design and build synthetic phototrophic microcosms based on terrestrial phycospheres using bioreactors to explore the ecological and molecular mechanisms underpinning microbiota diversity, stability and functions. This project has the potential to reveal fundamental, quantitative principles governing the dynamic behaviour of host-associated microbial communities.

Mots-clés : microbial ecology,microbiota,algae,phycosphere,chlamydomonas,plant microbiota
Projet ERC : 3DNanoQuant (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
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 : 1500000.0 €

Quantum nanomaterials are highly relevant for today’s society, playing a key role in existing technologies, and promising revolutionary changes addressing global issues, with the possibility for new computing architectures, and highly efficient devices. Until now, most studies of quantum nanomaterials have been two dimensional. Extending to three dimensions results in opportunities for increased density and interconnectivity, with the possibility to go beyond the physics of planar systems. This has recently been exemplified by nanomagnetism, where advances in methodologies have driven breakthroughs in our physical understanding, leading to the discovery of exotic spin textures, non-reciprocal dynamics and curvature-induced effects. However, the extension of a wider range of quantum nanomaterials to 3D geometries faces experimental challenges. In this ERC project I propose to explore the physics of quantum nanomaterials in three dimensions, developing state-of-the-art experimental techniques, establishing a common experimental methodology, to study the fundamental physics of 3D quantum nanomaterials. This project will address three scientific cases. First, I will develop 3D antiferromagnetic imaging to explore the formation of topological textures in antiferromagnets, and their current-induced dynamics. Second, I will measure the dynamics of 3D nanomagnets, realising non-reciprocal domain wall motion and spin waves in a low-symmetry 3D geometry. Third, I will harness new nanofabrication capabilities to explore the physics of 3D superconducting nanocircuits, achieving local control of the state, as well as exploring the behaviour of superconducting vortices. This project will lead to advances both in experimental capabilities, and in our understanding of the influence of 3D nanogeometries on the physics of quantum materials. The project will facilitate a change of paradigm for quantum nanomaterials, impacting both fundamental research and technological applications.