Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : CSFcheck (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : VIB
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499902.0 €

While the healthy brain is largely devoid of lymphoid cells, the surrounding cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is normally populated by lymphocytes. CSF hosts an array of threatening pathologies, including leptomeningeal metastasis with unusually poor prognosis. Despite the presence of immune cells, including CD8 T lymphocytes, this metastasis site does not respond to immunotherapy. My preliminary data demonstrate that the molecular profile and phenotypic behavior of these CSF CD8 T cells is inconsistent with conventional immune exhaustion. I hypothesize that CSF is an inherently immunosuppressive environment, protecting the brain from inflammatory insults directly by its composition. In CSFcheck, we will identify the individual components of the CSF that convey its immunosuppressive essence and manipulate the core CD8 T cell gene networks to disrupt the consequences of this phenomenon (Aim 1). We will investigate the fate, lifespan, and function of these cells after the metastasis encounter (Aim 2). Combining my experience with cutting-edge mouse immune modeling, systems-level computation, and functional assessment of human tissues, we will chart the immunosuppressive nature of the CSF and uncover the molecular pressure that CD8 T cells undergo upon entry to the CSF. This work will challenge and refine our understanding of the central nervous system immune privilege and communication with the periphery, exposing novel immunoregulatory mechanisms in metastasis that go beyond T-cell exhaustion.

Mots-clés : leptomeningeal metastasis,cerebrospinal fluid,cd8 t cells
Projet ERC : CRISP (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : ARMINES — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1184565.0 €

Can we turn the Energy Crisis into an opportunity that advances the clean energy transition? Yes, we can, and we pave the path leading to just and equitable decarbonization. Debates that followed extreme events in Europe and the US pointed to a “wind of change” for the power market design and the price discovery process. Operators are put in the corner, inheriting market schedules that they more and more amend using their judgement, whereas they are also accountable for their out-of-market decisions. The process is inherently sub-optimal and costly! Extreme events may turn annual market revenues into daily energy costs! I will explore innovative ideas in Generalized Linear Programming and adaptive robust optimization with data-driven uncertainty sets, to support network and reliability related operator decisions, and novel machine learning developments to remove computational barriers while maintaining interpretability. Tackling major obstacles that derive from non-convexities, externalities, and uncertainty (to date open problems), leveraging demand adaptability, and combining optimization with economic theory, I will break new ground by (i) defining efficient, adaptive, and robust prices that minimize the gap between market outcomes and operator decisions, and (ii) designing innovative protection mechanisms that dynamically delineate the (blurred) boundaries between systems and markets encoding crisis resilience and shielding from catastrophic financial impacts. CRISP will break the barriers that have restricted power markets to “half-markets” for more than 30 years tapping adaptable demand and set the foundations for efficient scheduling and correct investment signals in innovation, infrastructure, resource adequacy, and sustainability. The theoretical and computational breakthroughs will benefit a wide class of problems (scheduling, routing, and others) and are also relevant to integrated grids and systems hampered similarly by climate change and extreme events.

Mots-clés : power systems markets,price discovery,non convexities,externalities,uncertainty,adaptable demand,generalized linear programming,interpretable machine learning,optical classification trees
Projet ERC : NeuTrAE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : GSI
Type d'entité : Autres
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

This project NeuTrAE is aimed to advance our understanding on lingering puzzles on the flavor evolution of neutrinos and their implication in particle and nuclear astrophysics. Neutrinos are characterized by their flavors that can change as they propagate in a phenomenon known as neutrino flavor oscillations. The oscillations in vacuum and ordinary matter are well understood and confirmed by several experiments. Astrophysical compact objects, such as core-collapse supernovae and the violent merger event of two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole, are profuse sources of neutrinos. In those astrophysical environments the neutrino flux becomes so intense that the flavor interference of neutrinos with each other has to be taken into account. This non-linear effect coupling neutrinos propagating in different directions and with different energies is known as collective neutrino oscillations. Accounting for the collective neutrino oscillations in simulations of astrophysical environments requires a quantum kinetic transport. It remains a tremendous challenge due to the high-dimensionality of the problem and the vastly different scales for flavor and hydrodynamical evolution. The impact of neutrino flavor transitions on those compact objects remains elusive without efficient and sophisticated treatments. I propose the project NeuTrAE providing a pipeline to study the impact of collective neutrino oscillations in astrophysical environments. It consists of three steps: performing neutrino quantum kinetic simulations, developing numerically effective schemes that can be incorporated in state-of-the art hydrodynamical simulations, and assessing the impact of neutrino flavor transformations on heavy element nucleosynthesis and its electromagnetic signatures. NeuTrAE will also commit to significant advance on dynamical evolution of astrophysical compact objects.

Mots-clés : neutrino oscillations nucleosynthesis core collapse supernovae neutron star mergers quantum kinetic transport
Projet ERC : WIDOW (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Fondation nationale des sciences politiques — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : FNSP
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1463840.0 €

Widowhood is a critical event entailing profound grief. Although the frequency of this high risk event is increasing across ageing societies, many countries have cut survival benefits exposing more bereaved spouses to dire short- and long-term consequences. Despite its growing relevance, widowhood research remains underdeveloped compared to other disruptive events, such as divorce. This ground-breaking research moves beyond the state-of-the-art in at least four ways to establish a social demography of widowhood. (1) The foundation of my project lies in an innovative conceptual and methodological approach to the risk and vulnerability to widowhood. While risk aims at the probability and duration of widowhood, vulnerability focuses on its mental health and economic consequences. Current assessments of widowhood effects are limited to change in wellbeing directly after bereavement with a special focus on unexpected deaths. However, the most prevalent scenario entails a process of terminal health decline in the years before death. The consequences of the often neglected longer process of expected widowhood may be larger than the shorter process of unexpected widowhood. Three ground-breaking pillars build on risk and vulnerability to examine (2) social inequalities by socioeconomic status, race-ethnicity and nativity, social support networks, gender and age, as well as (3) country differences and (4) change over time. High-quality cross-sectional and longitudinal data sources will be harmonized and applied to an advanced set of statistical methods for up to 60 ageing countries varying in demographic trends and welfare systems from 1985 with projections to 2050. A social demography of widowhood will supplement fragmented evidence with systematic and comprehensive estimates on risk and vulnerability, provide insights into the challenges facing a growing widowed population and their family members, and facilitate new research on sustainable pension and elder care systems.

Mots-clés : widowhood,social inequality,comparative,cross national,cross temporal,social demography
Projet ERC : ALPINE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
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 : 1499667.5 €

Measuring the electrical activity of neurons in vivo is of paramount importance to understand the underlying principles of the brain. Current imaging techniques fail to capture this activity across the entire brain with sufficient spatial or temporal resolutions, while leaving brain tissue intact. Non-linear fluorescence microscopy, the most widespread optical imaging modality in system neurobiology, provides optical diffraction limited resolution and high frame rate, but is limited to shallow depth due to light scattering in tissue. Single-neuron activity in brain regions deeper than one millimeter can therefore not be probed. Combining widefield optical excitation and ultrasonic detection, photoacoustic imaging has emerged in the last decades as a powerful technique to image of optically contrasted objects embedded deep inside biological tissue. It relies on the emission of ultrasound waves upon the absorption of a light pulse. As ultrasound are only weakly scattered when propagating in soft tissue, optically absorbing structures can be reconstructed from the sole measurement of the ultrasound field at the tissue surface. The highest spatial resolution is currently achieved using optical sensors of pressure waves, which exhibit a better sensitivity to high ultrasound frequencies compared to conventional piezoelectric detectors. However, single-cell resolution is still beyond the reach of such sensors, and the underlying sequential acquisition process prevent from imaging at sufficient frame rate. To address this challenge, I will develop new sensors and associated interrogation techniques with 1) high acquisition speed and 2) high sensitivity at high acoustic frequencies, to resolve temporally and spatially the activity of single neurons. This will enable to 3) image non-invasively neuronal activity at unprecedented depth of several millimeters in vivo in the mouse brain.

Mots-clés : photoacoustic imaging functional calcium imaging
Projet ERC : BEAMS (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
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 : 1499878.0 €

The project explores a new class of silicon photonic devices and circuits in a three-dimensional integration technology for the generation, control, and reception of free-space laser beams. This research is motivated by the surging importance of communication, sensing, and imaging applications exploiting optical beams propagating in the free space and their urgent need for compact and flexible devices. Currently available integrated solutions based on planar integration technologies are fundamentally limited by either narrow operational bandwidth and reduced shaping capabilities or small apertures and limited steering ranges.  The original idea of the BEAMS project is to overcome these limitations by developing multi-layer antenna arrays, metasurfaces, and photonic control circuits exploiting an approach based on three-dimensional integration. This multi-pronged concept will enable unmatched performance in aperture size, efficiency, bandwidth, control flexibility, and power which cannot be achieved by currently available scientific and technological solutions, enabling the development of integrated photonic devices for long-range and broadband free-space applications. Exploiting these new capabilities, the project will demonstrate in particular innovative photonic devices for optical communications, targeting a kilometer-long communication link in free space with multiple wavelength channels.  Through its research program, the BEAMS project will combine the fields of integrated and free-space photonics, opening a plethora of new possibilities with a large impact on science and society.

Mots-clés : silicon photonics,phased arrays,photonic circuits
Projet ERC : WoodCulture (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : ministère de l'Éducation, de la Culture et de la Science — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MINOCW
Type d'entité : Organismes publics (hors enseignement & recherche)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1662450.0 €

Woodlands in the continental Euro-Atlantic region became heavily exploited from the Late Middle Ages onwards. The timber demand of growing cities and fleets promoted changes in oak (Quercus sp.) forestry practices and long-distance timber trade, aiming to provide a fast and sustainable turnover of construction wood. Progressively, changes in timber-framed buildings and ship designs took place during the 15th and 16th centuries, concurrently with shifts in woodworking techniques. Whether and how these changes and shifts in wood culture were interrelated, is still a debated question. Dendrochronological datasets biased towards wood from old trees, limited archaeological records, and fragmented historiography have hampered thus far finding the answer. WoodCulture aims to explain changes on and redress biased perspectives about domestic forests, timber supply, building activity patterns and technological innovations in the continental Euro-Atlantic region during the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (c.1300-1600 CE). I will retrieve the currently missing wood archive of young and fast-growing oaks from managed forests, along with its associated historical, technological and environmental context, combining isotope dendrochronology, archaeology and history with 3D scanning, AI and GIS. This ground-breaking interdisciplinary approach will provide a novel, empirically-founded narrative about changes in woodlands and interdependencies between timber products, construction designs and technological innovations in the continental Euro-Atlantic region. Moreover, it will reveal whether domestic forests became sustainable suppliers of construction timber at local/regional scales, putting the magnitude of timber trade into perspective. The developed set of tools will revolutionise fields of study beyond material heritage (history, archaeology, geography), allowing the systematic analysis of hitherto unstudied timbers in historic buildings and archaeological sites.

Mots-clés : dendrochronology built heritage shipbuilding forest history history of wood technology late medieval period continental euro atlantic region
Projet ERC : DECODE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UKE
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 343514.0 €

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a surgical treatment for Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. By applying pulsed, alternating electric currents to targets deep in the brain, DBS induces widespread changes in neural network activity. Although motor symptoms can be reduced by DBS in most patients, some patients suffer from severe side effects or insufficient symptom relief. Many attempts have been made to optimize the therapeutic effects of DBS, but these attempts have been restricted by a lack of understanding of how DBS exerts its therapeutic effects. Various therapeutic mechanisms have been proposed, but none have fully explained all of the complex effects of DBS. These theories have focused on direct and indirect effects of the strong electric fields near the stimulation contact. I propose a radically new hypothesis on the therapeutic mechanism of DBS that harnesses current insights from noninvasive brain stimulation. Weak electric fields during noninvasive brain stimulation have recently been shown to desynchronize neural activity from the surrounding network activity. I suggest that weak electric fields during DBS desynchronize cortical activity, which can, in combination with the effects of strong subcortical electric fields, reduce pathological synchrony in motor system networks and thereby restore motor control. DECODE will integrate large-scale volume conduction modeling to estimate and steer personalized electric fields, biophysical neural network modeling to understand the physiological consequences of weak fields and their interaction with strong field effects, and EEG measurements in humans to verify these models. Finally, based on the obtained knowledge and computational tools, DECODE will clinically test the hypothesis in patients with Parkinson’s disease. If successful, DECODE will start a new era in our understanding of the therapeutic network mechanisms of DBS and trigger clinical breakthroughs to optimize DBS therapy.

Mots-clés : deep brain stimulation transcranial alternating current stimulation biological neural networks plasticity
Projet ERC : BryoFit (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
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 : 1498110.0 €

Natural selection is a pillar of evssNatural selection is a pillar of evolutionary biology: it tends to fix beneficial mutations and remove deleterious ones. But the factors that determine selection efficacy are yet poorly understood. A proposed factor is the interaction between mutations? dominance and ploidy level: recessivity should reduce selection efficacy in diploids but not in haploids. Methodological limits make this challenging to test in species with a diploid-dominant life cycle. Yet, a whole phylogenetic clade under-explored in genomics gathers all the attributes to tackle this question: Bryophytes. Their life cycle is characterized by alternating a long haploid phase (gametophyte) with a short diploid phase (sporophyte), both phases being macroscopic. It is ideal for shedding light on what drives selection efficacy within and between species; thus, improving our understanding of adaptation and speciation.  1 How ploidy affects the efficacy of adaptive and purifying selections within species? Using comparative genomics, I will empirically test i) if selection is more efficient for haploid-biased genes (i.e., expressed primarily in the gametophyte) than diploid-biased genes, and ii) if that difference is reinforced in species with a more complex sporophyte.  2 How ploidy affects the efficacy of selection against hybridization between species? With theoretical developments, I will quantify the extent to which the length of gametophytic and sporophytic phases influences the rate of accumulation of reproductive barriers against interspecies introgression. These predictions will be confronted with genomic estimates by developing a statistical inference method.  3 How efficient is selection in non-recombining genomes? I will take advantage of the Bryophytes? U/V sexual system to assess the extent to which selection efficacy is reduced on their sex chromosomes. I will also tackle an overlooked issue: are U/V sex chromosomes efficient barriers to introgression?
Projet ERC : COMSCAL (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : Université de Potsdam — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1329469.84 €

Questions involving the scalar curvature bridge many areas inside mathematics including geometric analysis, differential geometry and algebraic topology, and they are naturally related to the mathematical description of general relativity. There are two main flavours of methods to probe the geometry of scalar curvature: One goes back to Lichnerowicz and uses various versions of index theory for the Dirac equation on spinors. The other is broadly based on minimal hypersurfaces and was initiated by Schoen and Yau. On both types of methods there has been tremendous progress over recent years sparked by novel quantitative comparison and rigidity questions due to Gromov and by on-going attempts to arrive at a deeper geometric understanding of lower scalar curvature bounds. In this proposal we view established landmark results, such as the non-existence of positive scalar curvature on the torus, together with the more recent quantitative problems from a conceptually unified standpoint, where a comparison principle for scalar and mean curvature along maps between Riemannian manifolds plays the central role.  Guided by this point of view, we aim to develop fundamentally new tools to study scalar curvature that bridge long-standing gaps in between the existing techniques. This includes a far-reaching generalization of the Dirac operator approach expanding upon techniques pioneered by the PI, and novel applications of Bochner-type methods. We will also study analogous comparison problems on domains with singular boundary motivated by a first synthetic characterization of lower scalar curvature bounds in terms of polyhedral domains, and by the general quest for extending the study of scalar curvature beyond smooth manifolds. At the same time, we will treat subtle almost rigidity questions corresponding to the rigidity aspect of our comparison principle.

Mots-clés : riemannian geometry,scalar curvature,mean curvature,comparison geometry,rigidity,dirac operators,bochner method,index theory