Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : FEAR (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : INGV
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1230000.0 €

Earthquakes are one the most significant hazards for human society, and at the same time, they remain the most elusive. Advancing our ability to understand their occurrence and intensity is of paramount importance for efforts to make society more resilient to the risk posed by catastrophic earthquakes. Progress in further understanding of earthquake physics is hindered by the lack of appropriate experimental facilities for observing the earthquake process at close distance and further advances will depend on the possibility to perform controlled experiments of fault stimulation and earthquake initiation at relevant depths and pressures. A new deep underground experimental facility is being constructed in the Bedretto tunnel in the Swiss Alps, offering a unique opportunity to perform fault stimulation and earthquake nucleation experiments on a scale and depth not available until now. FEAR will conduct the first-ever program to: (i) perform controlled 50-100 m scale fault stimulation experiments in basement rock at over 1'000m depth, (ii) pre-condition the stress distribution on the fault to perform real-time tests of different physical source and forecasting hypotheses, (iii) deploy data-driven approaches and real-time modelling to conduct structured prospective forecasting experiments, (iv) integrate and validate results from deep-underground experiments, experimental rock-deformation laboratories, numerical physics and dynamic modeling, and observations from natural earthquakes. The ERC Synergy framework enables to bring together the key complementary competences in Europe and to integrate them into a coherent program.

Mots-clés : earthquake nucleation,fault stimulation,underground laboratory,experimental rock deformation laboratory,earthquake source physics
Projet ERC : MiniMasonryTesting (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999477.0 €

Earthquakes are responsible for more than half of the human losses due to natural disasters. Masonry structures have been proven the most vulnerable both in the developing and in the developed world. Even though Masonry is one of the oldest building materials, our understanding of its behavior at the level of the structure (system level) is limited. Therefore, there is a need for extended shake table testing. But shake table tests are expensive and full-scale system-level testing of large buildings is only possible in a handful of shake tables in the globe – and at a huge cost. We propose to take advantage of research developments in 3D printing and develop a method to perform system-level testing at a small scale using 3D printers and a geotechnical centrifuge (to preserve similitude). The key is to print materials with behavior controllable and similar to masonry. MiniMasonry testing proposes to control the properties of masonry via controlling the geometry of a 3D printed “meta”-mortar. The method will be developed via typical static masonry tests performed on the 3D printed parts. It will be further validated via comparing shaking table tests (in a centrifuge) of miniature structures to existing results of full-scale tests. The cost of the dynamic tests is expected to be so low, that multiple tests can be performed, so that existing numerical methods can be validated in the statistical sense. As a case study, the method will be applied to explore the behavior of a low-cost seismic isolation method that has been proposed for masonry structures in developing countries. With the rapid evolution of 3D printing, it will be possible to scale-up the methods developed in MiniMasonryTesting, so that other Civil Engineering materials can be tested faster and cheaper than now. This is a game changer in structural testing, as it will enable researchers to test structures that up to now it was impossible or very expensive to test at a system level.

Mots-clés : earthquake engineering,masonry,rocking,3d printing,additive manufacturing,experimental testing,geotechnical engineering,centrifuge testing,shaking table,model validation,structural analysis
Projet ERC : EARLI (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Institut de recherche pour le développement — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IRD
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499518.0 €

Earthquakes caused nearly one million fatalities in the last two decades. The hazardous nature of earthquakes is largely due to their unpredictability. The question of whether this unpredictability is ontological (i.e. earthquakes are a chaotic phenomenon that physics cannot predict) or a consequence of our incapacity to model them is still open. In the first case, one may never hope to predict earthquakes and efforts should be focused towards developing early-warning approaches so that the population can prepare for imminent shaking and tsunami. In the second case, earthquake prediction becomes theoretically achievable. In both cases, Artificial Intelligence (AI) may lead to giant steps in anticipating destructive events. I propose here to use AI to identify weak early seismic signals to both speed up early-warning and explore the possibility of earthquake prediction. The first part of the project will be devoted to implementing an early-warning approach not based on P-waves as all current systems but on an earlier signal recently identified. This signal is due to the perturbation of the gravity field generated by an earthquake – which propagates at the speed of light – but is ~6 orders of magnitude smaller than seismic waves, strongly limiting its detection with standard techniques. AI has proven very efficient at detecting low-amplitude signals. I will implement an AI algorithm to systematically detect gravity perturbations generated by magnitude > 7 earthquakes and rapidly estimate from them the location and magnitude of the earthquake. Though the existence of earthquake precursors (i.e. signals preceding the origin of earthquakes themselves) is hypothetical, AI represents a new prowerful mean to discover them. In the second part of the project, I will adapt the AI algorithm developed in the first part to search for earthquake precursors.

Mots-clés : earthquakes,machine learning,early waning,prompt elasto gravity signal
Projet ERC : MARIX (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Radboud University Nijmegen — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : CO-PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 6516885.0 €

Earth’s geochemical evolution was shaped by an enormous microbial metabolic diversity. One of the urgent scientific grand challenges is to decipher the key geochemical pathways involved in those 4 Gy of evolution, with the ultimate aim to obtain a truly predictive understanding of the response of the Earth System to global change. Rapid advances in geochemistry and microbiology have revealed the unique and critical role of sharp redox transitions in marine environments as prime sites for the removal of toxic ammonium and the greenhouse gas methane. Yet, the redox reactions, microbial players, and key controls remain largely unexplored. Our ERC synergy project MARIX will unite the complementary expertise required to gain a fundamental and mechanistic understanding of the geochemistry of these redox zones and the complex in-situ microbial interactions that together strongly impact our environment. By combining highly innovative fieldwork, cutting-edge laboratory experiments and state-of-the-art modeling for a range of carefully selected and representative coastal ecosystems we will: 1. Unravel the geochemistry and novel microbial pathways that remove methane and ammonium through oxidation with metal-oxides. 2. Determine the impact of the novel microbial pathways of methane and ammonium oxidation on the dynamics of nutrients, oxygen and other key elements. 3. Develop innovative gene-centric biogeochemical models for coastal sediments and overlying waters, to improve projections of the impacts of eutrophication and climate change. MARIX will bring together two outstanding and complementary groups located within easy travel distance, allowing excellent synergistic coupling of infrastructure, personnel and resources on a daily basis. Our project will lead to major breakthroughs in the understanding of the key role that microorganisms play in modulating Earth’s biogeochemistry with far-reaching implications for a wide range of research fields.

Mots-clés : eutrophication,deoxygenation,geochemistry,redox reactions,discovery,methane,anammox,nitrogen cycle,nitrification,ocean,sediment,climate change,field studies,fuel cell,nitrogen removal,wastewater,ammonium,earth science,new microorganisms
Projet ERC : COEVOLVE (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : University of Naples Federico II — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2080438.0 €

Earth’s geosphere and biosphere have coevolved over time, influencing each other’s stability and keeping our planet habitable over the last 4 billion years. Biogeochemical cycles are crucial in this mechanism, connecting long-term geological cycles and the much faster evolution of the Earth’s outer envelopes. A small set of microbial-encoded proteins containing a redox-sensitive transition metal as their core catalytic center carry out the majority of the key biogeochemical reactions. Metals such as Fe, Co, Ni, Zn, Mo, Mn, W, V, and Cu are used in these proteins to access diverse redox couples as a function of what the planet has provided to biology over time. Despite the importance of this process, the relationship between metal availability and metabolism evolution and diversity has not been investigated in detail. COEVOLVE will elucidate the impact of transition metal availability on microbial functional diversity in deep time, combining fieldwork, laboratory experiments, and computational approaches. COEVOLVE will: 1) investigate the relationship between the availability of trace metals and microbial functional diversity in extant ecosystems and organisms; 2) link metabolic diversity and metal availability to different geological, geochemical, and mineralogical conditions; 3) link metabolic diversity and dependence on metal availability to the emergence and evolution of different metabolisms; and 4) determine the timing of major steps in metabolic evolution and link them to geochemical proxies of planetary surface redox change. Understanding the role of trace metal environmental distribution and availability in influencing microbial functional diversity might hold the key to understanding the co-evolution of life and our planet, unlocking a number of important discoveries at the core of diverse fields such as earth sciences, astrobiology, microbial ecology, and biotechnology.

Mots-clés : life and planet coevolution,redox,metalloproteins,transition metals,geothermal environments,microbial diversity,biogeochemistry
Projet ERC : EPHEMERAL (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Université Claude Bernard - Lyon 1 — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : Lyon I
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

Earth’s lower atmosphere is oxidative and its chemistry consists of reactions of short-lived chemical compounds called radicals, controlling the abundance of key compounds, such as of ozone and greenhouse gases. In spite of decades of investigation many atmospheric observations indicate that important aspects of this radical chemistry remain ill-understood, in particular in the reactions of the multitude of organic radicals present in the atmosphere, peroxy radicals (“RO2”) and Criegee Intermediates (“CI”). Detailed investigations of these reactions have been limited for over 50 years by instrumental challenges, in particular by the lack of technique detecting individual radicals (”speciation”). Recently, the Nozière group achieved an important milestone by developing the first technique, based on Chemical Ionization Mass Spectrometry or “CIMS”, speciating the volatile RO2 that are important for the atmospheric oxidation cycles. The objective of EPHEMERAL is to solve key questions in atmospheric radical chemistry by overcoming the long-standing instrumental challenges with cutting-edge developments based on this new technique. Three strategic directions will be pursued: - in laboratory, the detection of CI will be investigated and gas-phase reactions of RO2 and CI studied, - an instrument will be built to detect individual RO2 and CI in the atmosphere, thus achieving a historical milestone, - the reactivity of these radicals at/with surfaces will be investigated in laboratory, assessing for the first time the role of clouds and aerosols in the oxidation cycles and setting the bases for next-generation challenges. The fundamental knowledge and atmospheric observations resulting from this project will dramatically improve the understanding of the oxidation cycles and the predictions of the atmospheric chemical composition, from the regional to the climate scale. EPHEMERAL will thus place Europe at the leading edge in the discipline, scientifically and technologically.
Projet ERC : SEPtiM (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Institut de physique du globe — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : IPG de Paris
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 198750.0 €

Earth’s mantle was extensively molten in its first 100 million years. Its solidification left a strong compositional and structural imprint on the mantle, still observable today in the geochemical and geophysical record. Isotopic variations in basalts and ancient crust reveal the existence of one or more mantle reservoirs that formed early in Earth’s history, and never fully remixed. Seismic tomography reveals large, chemically distinct, thermochemical structures in the lowermost mantle, anchored to the source of these anomalous basalts. These observations leave no doubt that the mantle still bears differentiated regions that preserve signatures of its solidification. However, their formation mechanisms and compositional evolution are still unknown. Unravelling those opens a new window in understanding the early stages of Earth and planetary evolution. The overarching question of this proposal: how did the primitive molten Earth solidify to form a tectonically and geomagnetically active planet? My goal is to address this question by investigating mantle crystallisation in the laboratory, by combining experimental petrology, thermodynamical modelling, and geodynamical simulations in a self-consistent fashion. I propose to assemble a multidisciplinary team to: (1) experimentally study the crystallisation sequence of relevant silicate melts in the laboratory under P-T conditions extending to those at of the depth of the core-mantle boundary, using a newly developed protocol in the laser-heated diamond anvil cell; (2) use these results to constrain a thermodynamical model of phase relations and compositions, and trace-element partitioning between solids and melts; (3) use DFT calculations to calculate the density and relative buoyancy of these solids and melts; (4) feed the thermodynamics and buoyancy as input to mushy two-phase 3D fluid dynamics simulations, to realistically simulate the dynamical and thermochemical evolution of Earth’s mantle as it solidified.

Mots-clés : experimentation at high pressure and temperature,ab initio calculations,thermodynamic modelling,geodynamical modelling
Projet ERC : NewEat (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Salzburg — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : PLUS
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1327016.25 €

Eating disorders such as Anorexia Nervosa (AN), Bulimia Nervosa (BN), Binge Eating Disorder (BED) and overweight/obesity are highly prevalent in the EU and worldwide. They cause tremendous suffering, elevate suicide rates, and account for multiple organic effects that increase all-cause mortality. Etiological and maintenance factors are not well understood and transdiagnostic theoretical models across eating and weight disorders are largely missing. The present project aims to develop an integrated theoretical framework by studying psychological factors that contribute to non-homeostatic eating across the full spectrum of eating-related disorders. It is proposed that high levels on psychological traits such as restraint eating (i.e., chronic dieting behaviour), emotional eating (i.e., eating in response to negative emotional events rather than hunger), craving/food addiction (i.e., intense and chronic urge to consume palatable foods), impulsivity (i.e., inadequate food consumption planning and low self-control), and low self-esteem influence neural systems that balance appetitive (mostly bottom-up) with regulatory (mostly top-down) processes. This model is tested in the four patient groups and healthy controls utilizing an integrated set of assessment methods, involving psychometric testing, smartphone based ambulatory assessment, and neurocognitive laboratory measurement. Derived from this model, novel behavioural interventions such as smartphone based stimulus control and cognitive inhibition training will be developed. Results will have implications for theoretical models of eating and weight disorders as well as for neuroaffective models of appetite regulation. Smartphone technology might usefully complement current interventions in supporting an effective transfer to daily life and help alleviate the burden for patients with eating-related mental and physical diseases.

Mots-clés : bulimia nervosa,anorexia nervosa,binge eating disorder,obesity,overweight,fmri,food,eating,restraint eating,emotional eating,impulsivity,self esteem,craving,food addiction
Projet ERC : HEED (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
Entité participante : University of Essex — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 115455.0 €

Economic determinants, such as income and employment, are key drivers of population health and health inequalities, but have rarely been included in modelling studies to inform policy. This innovative project will develop the Health Equity and its Economic Determinants (HEED) model to investigate the impacts of taxation and social security policies on population health and mortality across Europe. There are 4 phases: 1) creating effect estimates for model inputs, 2) developing the model, 3) trialling policy simulations in one European country (UK), and 4) Europe-wide policy simulations. In phase 1, we will use causal approaches to analyse longitudinal data (the UK Household Longitudinal Study and Swedish registers), to estimate effects of changes in household income and employment status on health status (SF-12), mental health (GHQ-12 and psychotropic medications), life satisfaction and all-cause mortality. In phase 2, we will build a microsimulation policy model based on a representative synthetic UK population. We will develop projections for one, five and 10-year time periods, accounting for pre-existing demographic, epidemiological and economic trends. We will validate HEED by comparing projections with data not used in model construction. In phase 3, we will model the health equity impacts of alternative income tax and social security policies, developed with policymakers. Probabilistic sensitivity analyses will test key model assumptions and uncertainties. In phase 4, we will adapt the microsimulation model for implementation across a further 23 European Union countries. We will populate the model using available survey and demographic data to study impacts on levels of and inequalities in all-cause mortality, self-rated health, depression (PHQ-9) and life satisfaction over one and five years. Ex-ante impacts of reforms, as well as contemporaneous policy swaps, will be investigated to understand how best to reduce health inequalities across Europe.

Mots-clés : mesh terms  health status disparities,social welfare,computer simulation,epidemiology
Projet ERC : EvolvingEconomics (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
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 : 1550891.25 €

Economics provides decision-makers with powerful tools to analyse a wide range of issues. The methodological unity of the discipline and its quest for a general understanding of market as well as non-market interactions have given the discipline great influence on policy. A core component of economics is its assumption that individuals act as if they each had some goal function that they seek to maximise, under the constraints they face and the information they have. Despite significant advances in behavioural economics, there still is no consensus as to whether and why certain preferences are more likely than others. Further progress could be made if the factors that shape human motivation in the first place were understood. The aim of this project is to produce novel insights about such factors, by establishing evolutionary foundations of human motivation.The project's scope is ambitious. First, it will study two large classes of interactions: strategic interactions, and interactions within the realm of the family. Second, to obtain both depth and breadth of insights, it will consist of four different, but inter-related, components (three theoretical and one empirical), the ultimate goal being to significantly enhance our overall understanding of the factors that shape human motivation. The methodology is ground-breaking in that it is strongly interdisciplinary. Parts of the body of knowledge built by biologists and evolutionary anthropologists in the past decades will be combined with state-of-the-art economics to produce insights that cannot be obtained within any single discipline. Focus will nonetheless be on addressing issues of importance for economists.The proposed research builds on extensive work done by the PI in the past decade. It will benefit from the years that the PI has invested in understanding the biology and the evolutionary anthropology literatures, and in contributing towards building an interdisciplinary research ecosystem in Toulouse, France

Mots-clés : preferences,behavioural economics,altruism,morality,game theory,evolutionary game theory,natural selection,cultural evolution,strategic interactions,intra family sharing,mating systems