Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : SHADOKS (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
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 : 2140937.5 €

Filtering and water purification rely traditionnally on the concept of passive sieving across properly decorated nanopores. Such basic separation principle contrasts with the highly advanced membrane processes existing in Nature, which harness the full subtleties of active transport across channels. This involves advanced functions like ionic pumps, ultra-high selective channels, or voltage-gated nanopores, which all play a key role in many vital needs and neuronal functions. The Shadoks project aims at developing the concept of artificial ionic machines, based on active nanofluidic transport. This is an experimental project targeting a fundamental proof of concept. It moreover involves a strong theoretical counterpart, essential to experimental advances and prototyping. I will investigate a wealth of strongly non-equilibrium transport phenomena occurring at the nanoscales, taking advantage of our unique know-how in building nanofluidic heterostructures, in particular made of carbon and boron-nitride. I target ionic Coulomb blockade, on/off voltage-gated nanopore, ionic pumps, dynamical osmosis. These processes allow to tune ionic fluxes against the gradients and induce out-of-equilibrium charge separation, hereby conceiving active sieving as a novel route for separation and desalination. Those new building blocks will subsequently be assembled to create advanced bio-inspired membrane functionalities. We will use ionic pumps to store and deliver charge carriers on demand, akin to the triggered electric shock of the electric eel. Furthermore we use the active nanofluidics building blocks to mimic a basic machinery of neuronal processes. I target in particular to build an artificial dendritic spine, as an ionic information transmitter. As an ultimate goal, this is a route towards elementary neuronal computational processes based on the artificial ionic machines.

Mots-clés : nanofluidics,active transport,separation and desalination
Projet ERC : GEOFIN (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
Entité participante : Trinity College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1806536.0 €

Financialisation, or the growing power of finance over societies and economies, is increasingly recognised as the key feature of contemporary capitalism. However, significant gaps in our understanding of this process remain. Indeed, despite growing recognition that financialisation is an inherently spatial process, a geographically-informed view of financialisation remains underdeveloped. In addition, and related to this, the extent and the ways in which post-socialist ‘transition’ societies in East-Central Europe have been financialised remain under-researched and under-theorised. Yet, the examination of former state-socialist societies (built on the very opposite economic logic to that of financialisation) provides an unmatched opportunity to learn about financialisation itself, how it ‘penetrates’ societies and with what social and spatial implications. East-Central Europe in this sense constitutes a unique terrain for frontier research. GEOFIN will address the above shortcomings by producing empirical and theoretical insights to develop a geographically-informed view of financialisation. The objective is to examine how states, banks and households in post-socialist contexts have been financialised and to consider what implications this has for the societies in question and for Europe as a whole. The project will pilot a novel approach based on the concept of ‘financial chains’ which are understood both as channels of value transfer and as social relations that shape socio-economic processes and attendant economic geographies. A set of interlocking case studies will be mobilised to reveal the different ways in which banks, states and households across post-socialist East-Central Europe are interconnected by financial chains with each other and with a wider political economy. GEOFIN will fundamentally advance our understanding of new geographies of financialisation, opening up new horizons in studies of finance and its future role in the society.

Mots-clés : geographies of finance,financialisation,east central europe,post socialism,economic geography,uneven development,banks,state,households,debt,political economy,regional development
Projet ERC : HOPLA (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
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 : 1499698.0 €

Fine-tuning of our sensory systems, learning, memory and cognition rely on neuroplasticity, the capability of our brain to change in response to environmental pressures. Neuroplasticity is maximal during development, underlying the peak of our ability to learn in early childhood and also allowing us to adapt to the external world. As we age, the plastic potential of the brain decreases, especially for sensory cortices. The classical view is that the sensory brain becomes hard-wired after the temporal window of maximal plasticity called critical period (6-7 years in humans). As a consequence, the ability of our sensory brain to react to injury, sensory loss and to recover from conditions established during development becomes limited in adulthood. In my previous research I have shown that a particular form of neuroplasticity called homeostatic plasticity is relatively preserved beyond the critical period, opening new horizons on adult sensory plasticity. Building on these observations, in project HOPLA I will unravel the multifaceted nature of sensory neuroplasticity in adult humans, elucidate the underlying mechanisms and explore new forms of plasticity. The project is articulated around four unresolved issues: 1- What is the relationship between Hebbian and homeostatic plasticity? 2- What is the role of excitation/inhibition balance in enhancing and consolidating homeostatic plasticity? 3- Is it possible to elicit new forms of visual and auditory homeostatic plasticity? 4- What is the interplay between neuroplasticity occurring between and within sensory modalities? To address these questions, I will combine classic behavioural measurements of visual and auditory perception with state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques and virtual reality environments both in healthy and clinical populations (amblyopic and deaf adults). The proposed research is based on strong theoretical hypotheses and has outstanding applications for neuro-rehabilitation in adult humans.

Mots-clés : visual perception,binocular rivalry,neuroplasticity,psychophysics,magneti resonance spectroscopy,amblyopia,deafness
Projet ERC : PORTWINGS (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : University of Twente — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2800000.0 €

Flapping flight is one of the wonders of nature and has been vastly studied by biologists and fluid dynamicists. Many artifacts that mimic biological systems have been built at different scales. For example, we have managed to create a system that resembles the steady flapping behaviour of its biological counterpart and can fly untethered, stably up to 80 km/h in up to 5 Beaufort wind speed. This is the Robird developed at the University of Twente, which got the 2016 ERF Tech Transfer Award, and is commercially exploited by Clear Flight Solutions. Even if this technology and results are unique and recognised worldwide, we still do not fully understand flapping flight to the scientific depth needed to go even further. The Robird cannot take off on its own, cannot perch, uses symmetric flapping, steers using a number of manifolds placed on the tail and has a minimal autonomy and a restricted operation time due to power consumption. In this project I propose to gain a much deeper structured understanding of flapping flight and experimentally validate these understandings. This will be done using port-Hamiltonian (PH) system theory and its physically unifying character, which will couple fluid dynamics theory to dynamically changing surfaces and their actuation. Once models will be validated by wind tunnel tests with flow visualisation, numerical optimisation will be used to fine tune models and search for uncertain parameters. Based on these findings, artifacts will be built to validate the generated models with real systems. Based on the insight gained, a new robotic bird will be realised with unprecedented flight dexterity, able to flap asymmetrically, adapt to the flow and take off and land as birds do, in order to validate the scientific understandings.
Projet ERC : DEFTPORE (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1482862.0 €

Fluid flows through soft porous media are ubiquitous across nature and industry, from methane bubbles rising through lakebed and seabed sediments to nutrient transport in living cells and tissues to the manufacturing of paper products and many composites. Despite their ubiquity, flow and transport in these systems remain at the frontier of our ability to measure and model. A defining feature of soft porous media is that they can experience deformations that transform the pore structure. This has profound implications for the transport and mixing of solutes and the simultaneous flow of multiple fluid phases, both of which are strongly coupled to the pore structure. The goal of this project is to shed new light on flow and transport in soft porous media by studying a series of three canonical flow problems (tracer transport, miscible viscous fingering, and two-phase flow) across soft adaptations of three classical model systems (a soft-walled Hele Shaw cell, a quasi-2D packing of soft beads, and a cylindrical 3D “core” of soft beads). These flow problems and model systems have been thoroughly studied in the context of stiff porous media, allowing us to leverage decades of previous work and focus exclusively on the new behaviour introduced by “softness”. We will collect an extensive set of new, high-resolution experimental observations in each of these model systems, and we will reconcile these observations with mathematical models based on the traditional approach of upscaled constitutive functions. By updating this traditional approach to account for deformation, we will provide a new, pragmatic class of continuum models that capture the leading-order features of flow and transport in soft porous media. Our results will jumpstart the field of flow and transport in soft porous media, breaking open a vast new realm of research questions and applications around understanding, predicting, and controlling these complex systems.

Mots-clés : porous media,poromechanics,transport,multiphase flows
Projet ERC : nanoEARTH (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Utrecht University — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1572500.0 €

Fluid-driven mineral reactions chemically modify enormous portions of the Earth’s crystalline lithosphere. These reactions drive fluid-mediated rock transformation processes that governs the stability of mountain belts, the formation of hydrothermal mineral deposits and the sequestration of anthropogenic CO2 as well as many other processes. I propose that contrary to our current thinking, the re-actions themselves are driven by self-promoting nanoscale transport phenomena. Existing geological frameworks lack a quantitative understanding of mechanisms that control the rates of reactive fluid-rock interaction. This is because they do not account for the pervasive influence of nanoscale dynamics on the redistribution of elements within geological materials. The nanoEARTH project will solve this by defining the predominant transport processes occurring in mineral nanopores and the dynamic behaviour of fluid-rock interaction. To achieve the nanoEARTH aims and break through current limitations in our understanding of fluid-rock interaction, I will use my expertise in the multi-scale physics of geological processes. I will combine (1) novel nanoscale experiments that will establish transport mechanisms through natural and synthetic mineral nanopores and (2) unique in operando observations of fluid-driven mineral transformations at multiple length scales with (3) molecular-to continuum-scale transport modelling that is (4) constrained by geological observations. Through this integrative strategy, I will deliver new knowledge to redefine how the reaction of fluids with minerals self-generates a mode of transport that mobilises elements and controls the rates of fluid-driven transformation. This will impact geoscience research well beyond the project duration and bring the nanoscience of geological processes a quantum-leap forward in defining it as an integral part of solid Earth science.

Mots-clés : fluid rock interaction,nanogeoscience
Projet ERC : NanoCellActivity (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KUL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1368250.0 €

Fluorescence microscopy is the tool of choice for live-cell imaging. Its usefulness has been further enhanced by the availability of genetically-encoded biosensors, which enable the visualisation of when and where a certain activity arises. In addition, the development of diffraction-unlimited imaging has dramatically improved the spatial resolution of fluorescence imaging. However, these techniques have had difficulty working with biosensors, largely limiting the information to the spatial location of the labels. This project seeks to develop diffraction-unlimited imaging of biosensors, creating activity maps with a diffraction-unlimited spatial resolution in living systems. I propose to meet this challenge using a two-pronged approach, focusing both on the development of labels and sensors as well as new imaging tools and strategies. Based on existing scaffolds, we will develop sensors that display strong photochromism, providing reversible fluorescence dynamics intrinsically suited to superresolution imaging. In tandem, we will develop imaging strategies that focus on robustness and work well in living systems, in exchange for a spatial resolution of a 50 to 70 nm and a temporal resolution of a few seconds or less. We will use these developments in the study of the nanoscale spatiotemporal regulation of G-protein-coupled receptor (GCPR) signalling in living systems. By extending sub-diffraction imaging to the molecular environment, this project will contribute new insights into long-standing research questions that directly involve the health and well-being of all of us, while also enabling exciting prospects for further research.
Projet ERC : BrightEyes (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Italian Institute of Technology — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1861250.0 €

Fluorescence single-molecule (SM) detection techniques have the potential to provide insights into the complex functions, structures and interactions of individual, specifically labelled biomolecules. However, current SM techniques work properly only when the biomolecule is observed in controlled environments, e.g., immobilized on a glass surface. Observation of biomolecular processes in living (multi)cellular environments – which is fundamental for sound biological conclusion – always comes with a price, such as invasiveness, limitations in the accessible information and constraints in the spatial and temporal scales. The overall objective of the BrightEyes project is to break the above limitations by creating a novel SM approach compatible with the state-of-the-art biomolecule-labelling protocols, able to track a biomolecule deep inside (multi)cellular environments – with temporal resolution in the microsecond scale, and with hundreds of micrometres tracking range – and simultaneously observe its structural changes, its nano- and micro-environments. Specifically, by exploring a novel single-photon detectors array, the BrightEyes project will implement an optical system, able to continuously (i) track in real-time the biomolecule of interest from which to decode its dynamics and interactions; (ii) measure the nano-environment fluorescence spectroscopy properties, such as lifetime, photon-pair correlation and intensity, from which to extract the biochemical properties of the nano-environment, the structural properties of the biomolecule – via SM-FRET and anti-bunching – and the interactions of the biomolecule with other biomolecular species – via STED-FCS; (iii) visualize the sub-cellular structures within the micro-environment with sub-diffraction spatial resolution – via STED and image scanning microscopy. This unique paradigm will enable unprecedented studies of biomolecular behaviours, interactions and self-organization at near-physiological conditions.

Mots-clés : super resolved microscopy,sted microscopy,image scanning microscopy,fluorescence lifetime,fluorescence correlation spectroscopy,single molecule tracking,image deconvolution
Projet ERC : FLUFLUX (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Universität Innsbruck — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 721821.2 €

Fluvial ecosystems are an important element in the global carbon cycle metabolizing large amounts of terrigenous organic matter (tOM). This contributes to CO2 evasion fluxes that are under continuous reevaluation at the global scale. In contrast, research on the underlying processes is concentrated at the local ecosystem scale. This scale-gap seriously hampers process understanding across scales, limits upscaling accuracy, and reduces our scope of reaction strategies. Here, I suggest ground-breaking research on ecological processes at the intermediate ‘regional’ scale of the ‘fluvial network‘ to create a deeper mechanistic understanding of biogeochemically relevant carbon fluxes. My starting point is trifold: (1) detrital tOM has extremely high molecular-level diversity that requires consumers of equally high biodiversity for efficient respiration; (2) exactly this biodiversity of heterotrophic microbes, fungi and insects is constrained by metacommunity dynamics unfolding at a larger regional scale; and (3) the rules by which the conspicuously dendritic structure of the fluvial network shapes a metacommunity differ fundamentally from those governing regional diversity patterns of tOM resources. I hypothesize regional carbon dissimilation in ‘fluvial metaecosystems’ to be the interactive product of spatially partitioned resource and consumer diversities. I posit that this coupling of metacommunity structure to metaecosystem function is influenced by fluvial network topology, anthropogenic network fragmentation, and terrestrial matrix variation. Research will combine experiments in innovative lab-scale metaecosystems, spatially explicit modelling using cellular automata, and field studies spanning gradients of regional anthropogenic impact in real fluvial networks. I expect this cross-disciplinary research at the crucial landscape scale to generate novel mechanistic process understanding behind fluvial carbon fluxes in a world changing at ever faster pace.

Mots-clés : metacommunity,metaecosystem,limnology,biodiversity,spatial ecology
Projet ERC : SUPERFOAM (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : University of Erlangen-Nuremberg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : FAU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 352305.04 €

Foams are of enormous importance as we find them in many technological relevant applications and food products. Foams as hierarchical materials are dominated by the arrangement and distri-bution of gas bubbles on a macroscopic scale, as well as by thickness and composition of lamella on a mesoscopic scale. Liquid-gas interfaces are, however, the building block of foam with over-whelming importance as their molecular properties easily dominate hierarchical elements on larger length scales. In order to formulate foam with specific properties, its structure must be controlled at the molecular level of a liquid-gas interface. Here, the molecular composition, molecular order and interactions such as electrostatics dominate, and thus must be addressed with molecular level probes that can provide access to both interfacial solvent and solute molecules. Specifically, mo-lecular structures of aqueous interfaces can be modified by adding different mixtures of surface active molecules such as proteins, surfactants and polyelectrolytes, and by adjusting electrolyte properties. This is achieved by varying pH, introducing ions at different ionic strengths as well as by changing viscosities. Such model systems will be characterized with nonlinear optical spectroscopy amongst other surface sensitive probes. The gained information will be used to deduce properties of structures on larger length scales such as lamella, bubbles in a bulk liquid - as a precursor of foam - and finally macroscopic foam. For each length scale, experiments will be performed to gain access to molecular buildings blocks at liquid-gas interfaces and their effects on other hierarchical elements. These experiments thus provide essential information on foam stability and bubble coalescence, they can be used to verify structure-property relationships and to advance our understanding of foam on a molecular basis.