Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : FLIN (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Académie autrichienne des sciences — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ÖAW
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1994648.0 €

Families often lead time-intensive lives, having to balance the demands arising from the workplace and the family. With the recent shift towards flexible working – enabling employees to decide (partly) where and when to work – the spatial and temporal segregation of employment and family has been substantially reconfigured. Greater flexibility is one of the most important labour market transformations of our time.  FLIN creates new knowledge on how contemporary families combine employment and family in the context of flexible working. Taking a cross-national, couple-level perspective, FLIN will study the implications of flexible working for (1) family time, (2) gender equality in (un)paid work, (3) childbearing and partnership dissolution. It will also (4) monitor inequality in flexible working and (5) address the role of contextual factors. The project design is longitudinal with a focus on the “new normal” of flexible working after the COVID-19 pandemic. FLIN will generate a novel empirical and theoretical understanding of the work-family interface and its consequences, enabling policy development.  Because flexible working is mainly a privilege of higher status employees, its recent rise has the potential to exacerbate the socio-economic divide. If flexible working has predominantly positive consequences (e.g. more childcare time), higher-status families could disproportionally reap the benefits of this new development. Theoretical frameworks and past research are inconclusive as to whether flexible working leads to a better work-family balance or more difficulties in managing the work-family border. Considering that flexible working is an emerging social challenge for equality, clarification is urgently needed.  The project combines a detailed country analysis (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Norway and Poland) with a comparison across the EU. It is based on high-quality, representative data: time use surveys, register data and the EU Labour Force Surveys

Mots-clés : families,employment,flexible working,inequality,europe
Projet ERC : DYNACOF (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative B iology : from Genes and Genomes to S ystems
Entité participante : Antoni van Leeuwenhoekziekenhuis — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : AVL
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Transcription is a multi-step process involving many regulatory factors, including cofactors such as Mediator, chromatin remodelers and chromatin modifiers. Cofactors are thought to enhance transcription efficiency, but a detailed mechanistic understanding of cofactor action is still lacking. Inside single cells, the transcriptional process is highly dynamic, with regulatory factors transiently associating to DNA, and transcription occurring in stochastic bursts of high transcriptional activity, interspersed by periods of inactivity. How cofactors regulate these dynamics is so far largely unexplored. In this proposal, we aim to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of cofactor action, by combining perturbation experiments with cutting-edge single-molecule imaging techniques to measure the DNA binding dynamics of regulatory factors (input) as well as the stochastic behavior of transcription (output) in living yeast cells. First, bursting properties will be quantified at endogenous genes upon single and double cofactor perturbations to identify rate-limiting steps that are regulated by cofactors and to determine cooperativity between cofactors. Second, the DNA binding dynamics of cofactors, transcription factors and the preinitiation complex will be determined in wildtype and upon perturbations of cooperating cofactors, allowing us to construct a kinetic model of transcription. Third, building on our recently developed imaging technique, we will develop a new technology to simultaneously visualize the DNA binding of single cofactor molecules and transcriptional output at a single target locus to dissect the functional effect of cofactor DNA binding events on transcription activation. Overall, our results will provide unique insight into the composition of and transitions between transcription regulatory steps, uncovering mechanisms how cofactors increase transcription efficiency.

Mots-clés : transcription dynamics,single molecule imaging,live cell microscopy,cofactors,chromatin remodelers,chromatin modifiers,gene regulation,stochastic transcription,transcriptional bursting
Projet ERC : MINE-THE-GAP (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Université des sciences économiques de Vienne — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

The global surge in mining, driven by decarbonisation and digitalisation, has uncovered a critical gap in our understanding of its environmental and social impacts and risks. Despite the seemingly abundant knowledge about mining operations, they remain largely unmeasured, even within the European Union, posing a challenge to sustainable development efforts. Essential indicators, such as geographical locations, waste generation, and details of extracted minerals and commodities, are surprisingly scant worldwide. Satellite images and artificial intelligence algorithms are prominent technologies to fill this knowledge gap. However, scaling the mapping of mining indicators to the global level remains a challenge due to the small size and low quality of training sets. The MINE-THE-GAP project will lay the foundations of an innovative methodology to scale up the production of mine-level indicators. Methodologically, the project presents a breakthrough by integrating high-precision data products from various satellite sources to substantially enrich training sets that will enable the creation of scalable artificial intelligence models to effectively map mine land use, waste generation, and types of extracted minerals and commodities. This approach will allow the production of mine-level indicators that are timely, locally relevant, and globally reliable, and ensure the continuous improvement of models beyond the project's timeline as new high-precision data becomes available. For the first time, MINE-THE-GAP will unlock new avenues in sustainability research, overcoming previous obstacles due to the lack of essential geoinformation on mining. The project will create the basis for scalable mining site monitoring, essential for enforcing European supply chain transparency laws and achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.
Projet ERC : C-Quest (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université de Brême — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2277248.0 €

The scientific frontier project C-Quest will study algal sugar polymers - glycans - in the ocean to resolve their contribution to global carbon cycling and sequestration. C-Quest will explore the hypothesis that marine diatoms, which fix similar amounts of carbon as tropical forests on a global scale, secrete glycan types that are stable, meaning harder to degrade for bacteria than other substrates. This stability results in glyco-carbon sequestration removing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. C-Quest will identify and quantify glycan structural types in seawater, where salt, low glycan concentration and their high molecular diversity challenge classic analytical techniques. With two articles in PNAS (2020) and Nature Communications (2021), implementing bioanalytical strategies to measure glycans in the ocean, we broke through the glyco-carbon challenge setting the stage for testing the glyco-carbon sequestration hypothesis. In the test tube, my team will reveal marine bacterial enzymatic degradation pathways that degrade diatom glycans. Our characterized enzymes will become analytical tools to identify and quantify these glycans across the ocean. In different oceanic regions, we will quantify glycan production during algal blooms, glycan export in sinking particles and glycan burial in sediments to pinpoint the types that have a high potential to sequester carbon. The outcome will be knowledge of glycan contribution to carbon sequestration shedding light into what remains a black box of the global carbon cycle to this day. C-Quest will discover enzymes new to science, explore the potential of glycans for carbon sequestration and reveal molecular principles that govern carbon sequestration in and beyond the ocean.
Projet ERC : PAR2 (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université de Groningue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : RUG
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 500276.25 €

How does life, how does a person change when one becomes a parent? Are new parents really lost as close friends? Are they actually better listeners because they have learned to put themselves second? Why are some parents caring and attuned to their children’s needs when others struggle? It is surprising that researchers have so far overlooked the transition to parenthood as a driver for social-developmental change and have hardly zoomed in on parenting as social behaviour. Like any other social behaviour, substantial individual differences can be found between parents but research has neglected various likely determinants. PAR2 changes this by 1) elucidating whether, indeed, parents develop differently in the social realm compared to people without children, and 2) using the methodological tools of social development research to test why parents differ in the ways they parent. To achieve this, we compare parents and people without children on social-emotional skills and social behaviour using longitudinal cohorts that span multiple decades across adolescence and adulthood (WP1). How parenting behaviour -as a unique social behaviour in adulthood- is being shaped under different circumstances and in different people, is central in work packages 2-4. We use longitudinal social networks (WP2), multiple-generation cohorts (WP3), and social genome data (WP4) to understand the influence of 1) family, partner, friends, and other parents, 2) social relationships prior to becoming a parent, and 3) own, partner, and child genes on parenting. PAR2 significantly innovates research on social development by explicitly conceptualizing parenthood as a crucial transition and parenting as social behaviour. Viewing parenthood as driver of developmental change and parenting as social behaviour means that PAR2 generates a novel direction in research and will result in significant theoretical and methodological innovation to our understanding of variation in human development.

Mots-clés : parenting,parenthood,social development,multiple generation cohort,social network,social genome
Projet ERC : PROTECT (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Université de Linköping — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1842642.0 €

Proteases are involved in all hallmarks of cancer and are key regulators of tumor progression. The difficulties to monitor protease activity in vivo with sufficient sensitivity and selectivity make development of protease targeting cancer drugs and implementation of protease activity as a diagnostic and prognostic biomarker very challenging. The aim of PROTECT is to develop a novel comprehensive protease activity profiling platform for cancer-associated extracellular proteases that can address the main limitations of current strategies for in vivo protease activity monitoring with the ambition to enable a dramatic increase in sensitivity and multiplexing capabilities. We will design Liposomal Activity-Based Sensors (LABS) that can amplify proteolytic cleavage by triggering release of liposome encapsulated synthetic biomarkers. We will further leverage the possibilities to extract tumor specific protease profiles for development of personalized protease-triggered liposomal drug delivery vehicles (PROVES) for precision medicine. Sophisticated protease-responsive membrane active peptides (proMAPs) will be developed to couple protease activity to biomarker and drug release. Methods to correlate biomarker release patterns to protease activity profiles in 3D breast cancer models will be explored. The PROTECT platform can then rapidly be repurposed for precision drug delivery. The PROVES concept will combine the excellent properties of liposomes for drug delivery and the optimal combination of proMAPs, based on the protease activity profile retrieved from the LABS, for optimized protease-triggered liposomal drug release. Combined, the LABS and PROVES concepts represent a unique and comprehensive platform for diagnostics and personalized cancer therapy. The proposed work goes far beyond stat-of-the-art and will address a significant and real bottleneck that hampers drug development and exploitation of proteases as diagnostics and prognostic cancer biomarkers.

Mots-clés : protease,breast cancer,sensor,drug delivery,peptides,liposomes
Projet ERC : CAVMAT (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Université de Brême — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1951063.0 €

Light-matter coupling has the potential to modify functional properties of quantum materials to yield the tunability required for quantum-technological applications. However, light-matter control concepts, such as Floquet engineering and light-induced phase transitions, suffer from the requirement of strong laser driving and the lack of coherence on long time scales. Overcoming these key limitations through advancing the infant field of cavity quantum materials is the central objective of CAVMAT.  The main hypothesis behind CAVMAT is that cavity materials engineering combines the efficiency of strong-light matter coupling in cavities with the flexibility of Floquet engineering of macroscopic quantum many-body phenomena. CAVMAT aims to explore and expand this new frontier with a combined theoretical-computational effort. The three key objectives of CAVMAT are: (i) To establish cavity-driving schemes that successfully bridge the gap between quantum cavity and semiclassical many-photon Floquet limits. (ii) To propose realistic cavity quantum materials platforms providing guidance for next-generation experiments. (iii) To develop and combine numerical methods that can treat the relevant nonequilibrium electron-polariton problems at short and long time scales. These objectives will be tackled in three work packages, namely WP 1: quantum Floquet engineering, WP 2: plasmonic superconductivity, and WP 3: excited states by design.  The proposed work goes well beyond state-of-the-art in both nonequilibrium quantum many-body systems and quantum optics, and its success will be groundbreaking through providing microscopic underpinnings for pathways towards versatile solid-state platforms for cavity and Floquet physics.

Mots-clés : floquet engineering,ultrafast materials science,quantum optics
Projet ERC : CONTACT (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Groningue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : RUG
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1635118.0 €

For ten thousand years, the world was divided in two. Almost all human societies belonged to either the Old or the New Worlds. Amid this consummate isolation, the two worlds followed their own cultural and ecological trajectories. The loop was finally closed when the Norse arrived in the Americas in 1021 CE. However, the story of this closure ironically remains one of the most significant gaps in our knowledge of the past. This project addresses the timing, duration, geographical extent and lasting significance of this period of first contact. Using the newly developed tools of spike radiocarbon dating and ancient DNA provenancing, current understanding of the Norse transatlantic expansion will be both tested and extended. Data of unprecedented precision will cast the history of Greenland into sharp relief, allowing fresh insights to be gained on the role of conflict, climate and trade in the ultimate abandonment of the colony. Furthermore, by analysing artefacts on either side of the Atlantic, the true extent and temporality of the Norse presence in the New World will be unveiled. Drawing all the new evidence together, CONTACT will be able to trace the story of the period as it has oscillated down the centuries between fact and fiction. In so doing, it will establish a framework for reanalysing the earliest connections between the Old and the New Worlds.

Mots-clés : chronology,radiocarbon dating,norse expansion
Projet ERC : InOGeM (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Université de Brême — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1981875.0 €

Optical metrology is driving our society forward and has strong impacts on manufacturing, mobility, medicine and fundamental science. This is highlighted by the SI revision in 2019 and the Nobel Prize winning microscopy with visible light in the nanometre range in 2014. Optical techniques allow fast and precise geometry measurements, but only if sufficient light energy is reflected from the object’s surface to the photo detection unit. For this reason, specific measurement approaches for each surface type had to be developed such as deflectometry for highly reflective surfaces. To provide one single measurement approach applicable to any surface and with the potential of sub-micrometre resolution, InOGeM will initiate a paradigm shift: instead of measuring the object’s surface, the geometry of the surrounding gas is measured. The surrounding gas is detected optically by using tiny, well-controlled, fluorescent particles or molecules, a confocal microscope and a model-based signal processing, which enables sub-micrometre resolution. This will break new grounds for assessing additively manufactured parts and lightweight components made of fibre-reinforced composites, because the indirect measurement is less sensitive regarding the varying optical properties of the measurement object’s surface and material. Furthermore, indirect optical geometry measurements are possible at strongly curved or translucent objects even through a limited access, which is currently considered impossible. Such challenging conditions occur e.g. for gears and additively manufactured parts, so that InOGeM has a large potential for low-noise gears (e-mobility) and fuel cells (hydrogen). As a result, fast geometry measurements with a today unachievable precision below classical limits are achieved in the nanometre range for a wide range of applications. By developing the framework of a new class of measuring instruments, InOGeM takes the field of optical geometry measurements to the next level.

Mots-clés : optical measurement system,dimensional metrology,measurement uncertainty
Projet ERC : EDRIVE (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Université Aalto — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999318.0 €

Inspired both by Nature and the success of macroscopic machines, molecular engineers have been exploring various approaches for the realization of nanoscale artificial molecular machines (AMMs), i.e., molecular constructs capable of controlled mechanical actuation. Despite the great promise of AMMs and the tremendous progress in the field, especially on the synthesis side, multiple conceptual and technical challenges, and open questions, e.g., related to AMMs fabrication, implementation of actuation and, most important, AMMs functionality, still remain. Here, I will combine i) the DNA origami technique with its ability to construct well-defined complex three-dimensional nanostructures, and guide the assembly of functional nanoscale objects with unprecedented precision; and ii) electromechanical actuation, to build fast, remotely controlled artificial molecular machines with functionalities far beyond the state of the art. First, I will fabricate AMMs that translate external stimuli into well-defined spatial reconfiguration of metal nanostructures. I will use such AMMs to build i) active plasmonic surfaces with fast remote modulation of optical responses, and ii) plasmonics probes with single-molecule detection sensitivity. Second, I will design AMMs that can exert forces on single molecules; such AMMs will be used to fabricate i) nanoscale robotic arms, i.e., devices that can pick-up, transport and release cargo (molecules and/or nanoparticles) in multiple cycles, and ii) molecular motors, i.e., devices capable of performing useful chemical or mechanical work and driving chemical systems out of their intrinsic equilibrium. Fabrication of artificial nanoscale molecular motors has been a long-standing dream of molecular engineers.  Results of this project will pave the way towards practical applications of DNA-origami-based machines and might lead to a paradigm shift in approaches to fabrication of artificial molecular machines and motors.

Mots-clés : artificial molecular machines,dna nanotechnology,active plasmonics,molecular motors