Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : OVO-GROWTH (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Leiden University Medical Center — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LUMC
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Women who survive childhood cancer often fail to conceive because their eggs are damaged by (gonadotoxic) chemotherapy. A major breakthrough has been the possibility to cryopreserve cortical strips of their ovarian tissue for autologous transplantation later in life. This has led to over 40 successful pregnancies worldwide, the latest in the Netherlands. However, the risk of reintroducing cancer cells with the ovarian graft in patients with previous hematopoietic malignancies is too great and alternatives are needed. Here, I propose to build on my expertise in gametogenesis in mice and humans and perform a detailed study of the cellular networks and molecular pathways that control development and maturation of the oocyte within the human ovary. We have access and ethical approval for research on human foetal tissue and postnatal ovarian biopsies over a wide age range. I will use this rare material to systematically benchmark the transcriptional profile of cells in the human ovary (oocytes as well as somatic cells) during development and adulthood using Drop-seq, a novel cost-efficient single-cell technology that allows the profiling of thousands of cells in a matter of hours. Thereafter, we will apply mathematical algorithms to reveal cellular identities, developmental trajectories and signalling networks that control oogenesis. With this knowledge, I plan to engineer a human follicular niche creating a “mini-ovary” in vitro that could support the formation and maturation of the oocyte (using patient-specific cells) and to explore mechanisms of follicle maturation through a xenotransplantation mouse model. The cellular outcomes of these assays will be sequenced using Drop-seq and directly compared to their in vivo counterparts. Our approach will lead to more effective personalized-therapy for fertility preservation and contribute to the development of an in vitro mini-ovary organoid model to use in human reproductive toxicology and disease modelling.

Mots-clés : human,oogenesis,single cell transcriptomics,mathematical modelling,reproduction,vasculogenesis,in vitro
Projet ERC : APOLs (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and Immunotherapy
Entité participante : Université Libre de Bruxelles — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ULB
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2250000.0 €

Work conducted in my laboratory on the trypanosome killing factor of human serum led to the identification of the primate-specific Apolipoprotein L1 (APOL1) as a novel pore-forming protein with striking similarities with proteins of the apoptotic BCL2 family. APOL1 belongs to a family of proteins induced under inflammatory conditions in myeloid and endothelial cells. APOL1 is efficiently neutralized by the SRA protein of Trypanosoma rhodesiense, accounting for the ability of this trypanosome subspecies to infect humans and cause sleeping sickness. We found that natural APOL1 variants escaping SRA neutralization and therefore conferring human resistance to T. rhodesiense are associated with chronic kidney disease. Moreover, transgenic mice expressing these APOL1 variants exhibit an obese phenotype. Our unpublished results also indicate that APOLs control the lifespan of dendritic cells and podocytes activated by viral stimuli. Therefore, we propose that the pathology of APOL variants is due to their deregulated activity on the control of the cellular lifespan in myeloid/endothelial cells activated by pathogen detection. This project aims at characterizing (i) the molecular mechanism by which APOLs control the lifespan of activated dendritic cells and podocytes, which has direct impact on innate immunity and inflammation, and (ii) the mechanism by which APOL1 variants cause pathology. In addition, we plan to detail the physiological function of APOLs by studying the phenotype of transgenic mice either expressing human APOL1 (wild-type and variants) or devoid of APOL genes, which we have recently generated. Finally, we propose to exploit the extraordinary potential of trypanosomes for antigenic variation in order to produce SRA variants able to neutralize the pathogenic APOL1 variants. Preliminary experiments suggest that in podocytes SRA antagonizes APOL1 induction by viral stimulus and subsequent cell death, opening new perspectives to treat kidney disease.

Mots-clés : apolipoproteins l,kidney disease,innate immunity,trypanosome
Projet ERC : WorkFREE (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
Entité participante : University of Bath — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1239953.0 €

WorkFREE builds on the widespread empirical observation that everywhere people who are stuck in indecent, exploitative or ‘unfree’ work nevertheless choose that work because doing so represents their best available option, and asks a simple yet potentially revolutionary question: What happens if we just give them money? It will answer this question by creating a world-first social experiment. This will involve a community in the Indian city of Hyderabad typically associated with indecent or exploitative work – waste picking. Members of this community will receive 18 months of unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) and also engage in Participatory Action Research (PAR) with the WorkFREE team. WorkFREE will thus become the first project anywhere to combine research on cash transfers (CTs), PAR and labour (un)freedom. It will also innovate methodologically, employing a unique combination of ethnography, surveys, and participatory qualitative techniques. This will allow the WorkFREE team – myself (the PI), the in-country Research Manager, a post-doctoral evaluation specialist, two anthropology PhD students, and a number of junior researchers at the project’s Indian partner research university – to answer a question at the heart of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): What can cash transfers contribute to the fight for decent work? It will further enable the co-creation of grounded theory around concepts central to the SDGs, including freedom, slavery, consent, coercion, vulnerability, exploitation, emancipation and (in)decent work. This, in turn, could call into question prevailing, hegemonic theorisations of these concepts, along with mainstream approaches to generating those theorisations and the policies with which they are associated. In this way, WorkFREE will push the empirical, theoretical and political boundaries at the intersection of development studies, labour studies, social theory and social policy. Given its focus and approach, it will also contribute to cognate debates around Social Protection (SP) and Unconditional Basic Income (UBI), positioning Europe at the forefront of contemporary efforts to achieve social justice in globalised market society.

Mots-clés : modern slavery,unconditional cash transfers,participatory research,unfree labour,labour exploitation,social experiment,development,sdg 8
Projet ERC : DeepStore (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1926325.0 €

Working memory excels in keeping ready the momentary contents of all of human higher cognition despite being strictly limited in storage capacity. How the brain accomplishes this feat, beyond the temporary maintenance of just experienced information, is hardly understood. An emerging view suggests that working memory storage is topographically distributed according to the information’s endogenous level of abstraction. However, very little is known about how such distributed storage is orchestrated spatiotemporally, that is, how representations at different levels of abstraction are structured dynamically in time to suit current demands. In DeepStore, we use tailored experimental designs and newly developed multivariate analysis techniques to explore for the first time directly the depth-dimension of working memory storage, in terms of dynamic levels of abstraction. Combining functional imaging, magneto-/electroencephalography, and invasive neural recordings will make it possible to track levels of abstraction spatiotemporally, with millisecond precision. In three ambitious experimental series, DeepStore will shed new light on long-standing open questions about working memory storage, including how it is modulated by attention, inattention, and distraction, and how multiple contents are stored simultaneously. The work will shape a new theory of the neurocognitive capacity limit in working memory. We will further test novel hypotheses about how working memory interfaces with long-term memory, and how it develops over the lifespan. Finally, we will combine our innovative human neuroimaging approach with direct electrophysiological recordings in non-human primates during the same task, to disclose the fine-grained neural mechanisms of dynamic abstraction down to the single-cell level. DeepStore is anticipated to provide fundamentally new insights into the dynamic and multi-layered nature of working memory, beyond the number and precision of items it can hold.

Mots-clés : cognitive neuroscience,working memory,memory,abstraction,aging,numerical cognition,mvpa,neural oscillations,fmri
Projet ERC : Worlds of Lithium (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : University of Amsterdam — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UvA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Worlds of Lithium is a multi-sited and transnational study that examines how the strategic replacement of fossil fuels with electric transport powered by lithium-ion batteries is taking place in Chile, the largest lithium producer worldwide, China, the world leader in lithium-ion battery production, and Norway, likely to become the world’s first ‘zero emission’ electric vehicle country. The overall research questions of the project are: How do planetary strategies to decarbonize transport act upon the landscapes and societies where a) lithium is extracted, b) turned into technology and c) used and potentially reused and recycled? How can the different ways in which these strategies take place inform non-destructive approaches to collaborative responsible actions to phase out fossil fuels—or decrease their utilization? Worlds of Lithium will innovatively answer these questions through a transnational documentation of the knowledges and practices through which scientists, grassroots communities, policy makers, and lithium-ion battery producers are differently responding to ecological transformations and disruptions at stake in transitions to sustainable societies. The project will explore such knowledges and practices with a special focus on the effects strategies to respond to global warming have on existing socio-economic and eco-political planetary inequalities. By studying how planetary efforts for decarbonizing transport trigger different processes in resource-making, the project will not only enrich the anthropology of natural resources, but it will also create ground-breaking conceptual tools to support, think, and document emerging collaborations for sustainability capable of powering planetary eco-responsibility. Thus, the project will innovatively theorize new imaginaries to think about what counts as sustainable transitions in times of enhanced ecological sensitivity.

Mots-clés : anthropology of resources,lithium,decarbonizing strategies,realities in practice
Projet ERC : FRAGILE (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : University of Erlangen-Nuremberg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : FAU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499950.0 €

Worldwide glacier retreat outside the two large ice sheets is increasingly tangible and the associated ice-loss has dominated the cryospheric contribution to sea-level change for many decades. This retreat has also become symbolic for the effects of the generally warming climate. Despite the anticipated importance for future sea-level rise, continuing glacier retreat will affect seasonal freshwater availability and might add to regional water-stress in this century. Here, I envision a novel self-consistent, ice-dynamic forecasting framework for global glacier evolution that will lift the confidence in forward projections for this century to new heights. For the first time, each glacier on Earth will be treated as a three-dimension body within its surrounding topography without using any form of geometric simplification. The heart of the framework is the systematic utilisation of the rapidly growing body of information from satellite remote sensing. For this purpose, I intend to pass on to ensemble assimilation techniques that transiently consider measurements as they become available. This will streamline and increase the total information flow into glacier models. In terms of climatic forcing, global products will be replaced by regional forecasts with high-resolution climate models. Moreover, a more realistic representation of the local energy balance at the glacier surface is pursued that ensures multi-decadal stability in the melt formulation. The envisaged 3D finite-element modelling framework also allows a direct integration of iceberg calving, which is, on global scales, an often-unconsidered dynamic ice-loss term. To this day, a key limitation of glacier projections is the poorly constrained ice volume and its distribution at present. Here, I put forward a promising remedy that builds on multi-temporal satellite information to calibrate a state-of-the-art reconstruction approach for mapping basin-wide ice thickness on virtually any glacier.

Mots-clés : glacier,modelling,ice dynamics,data assimilation,global
Projet ERC : BROWSE_PLUS (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Eindhoven University of Technology — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TU/e
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Worldwide, wireless communication traffic is growing at a staggering pace. Driven by digitalization of nearly every aspect of our lives and by the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the numbers of mobile broadband devices as well as the proliferation of small sensing and actuating devices (the ‘Internet of Things’) are exploding. The vast majority of wireless traffic is generated indoors, and radio-based wireless networks such as Wi-Fi are getting into severe states of traffic congestion. By means of Optical Wireless Communication (OWC), vast new spectrum bands can be opened without licensing needs, which provides relief to the use of congested unlicensed radio-spectrums. We have developed OWC by means of ultra-high capacity 2D-steered narrow infrared optical beams. Our research group recently made a breakthrough by improving the download speed of indoor Wi-Fi by a factor beyond 300x compared to conventional Wi-Fi via radio waves. In our approach, we can devote and guarantee the full capacity to each separate device in the room. This is an extensive improvement to the current technologies, which are allocating the available capacity among all the users in a shared fashion. The technical and pre-commercialisation work in this PoC project will equip us with the sufficient IP protection strategy, patent portfolio, business plan, industry and application piloting networks, initial contacts with funding bodies and make our technology more mature, ready-to-be-taken out from the laboratory to real-life experiments. By commercialising our novel innovation, we aim for strong global impact by developing dramatic improvement in wireless connectivity. This will concretely lead to an orders-of-magnitude higher wireless capacity per user, reduced energy consumption, improved privacy, improved resources utilization by novel networking dynamics and avoiding radio spectrum licensing issues.

Mots-clés : optical wireless communication,optical beam steering,congestion free high speed communication
Projet ERC : INSCRIBE (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : University of Bologna — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UNIBO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1463337.0 €

Writing must rank among mankind’s highest achievements. Yet the factors that enabled its invention independently in different parts of the world have never been subject to an analysis from a multidisciplinary and comparative perspective that encompasses both deciphered and undeciphered scripts. INSCRIBE takes such an approach, combining a study of the world’s first instances of writing, including the earliest in Europe, through the lens of archaeology, anthropology, cultural evolution, cognitive studies and decipherment strategies. This methodology involves three strands of research. First, it will consider the original inventions, all of which are image-based, from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Mesoamerica and China, and other debated cases. The objective is to characterize their conception in terms of visual cognition (why are signs shaped as they are?), archaeological setting (what are the contextual preconditions, why does writing emerge when it does, and only four times in history?), application of use (what are its initial purposes?), and language notation (what are the paths to registering sound?). Second, it will explore the earliest scripts in Europe from the second millennium BC Aegean, whose initial phase is highly iconic. The three undeciphered Aegean scripts (Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A and Cypro-Minoan) will be analyzed for the first time from a multistranded perspective that will shed unprecedented light on their creation and development. The objective is to analyze the relationship between these scripts and to apply a multi-stepped (and already successfully piloted) decipherment strategy. Third, INSCRIBE proposes to go beyond the traditional standards applied to the corpora of inscriptions by producing the first complete digital corpus of all three Aegean undeciphered scripts, with 3D interactive models accompanied by a multidimensional interface tagging inscriptions, types of inscribed objects, provenance, archaeological contexts and functions.

Mots-clés : decipherment strategies,writing systems
Projet ERC : PAGES (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : Sapienza University of Rome — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2486375.0 €

Written at the beginning of the 6th century AD in the bilingual context of Constantinople, the Ars Prisciani, in 18 books, is the last and greatest Latin grammar handbook of Antiquity. Bringing together the inheritance of Latin and Greek grammatical traditions, it stands as a milestone in the history of linguistic speculation and is an important source of fragments of lost literary works. The deep impact of this text on European culture falls beyond its original scope. Conceived to teach Latin to Greek speakers, in the early Middle Ages (8th-10th centuries) and during the Renaissance (15th-16th centuries) the Ars turned out, due to its great amount of Greek passages, to stimulate the study of Greek by Western scholars. The peculiar East-Western transmission of the Ars can now be exploited and thoroughly illustrated thanks to the progress of digital philology. PAGES aims both to supersede Hertz’s outdated and unreliable edition (1855-59) and, in a broader perspective, to reconstruct Priscian’s key role not only in the revival of Latin in 9th-century Europe but also in the practice of Greek script and language in Carolingian scriptoria, in the renaissance of Greek philological studies in the Humanistic Age, and in the history of linguistic education in Europe. The project tackles these challenges with a multidisciplinary approach, gathering experts in textual criticism, digital humanities, palaeography and multispectral imaging, history of linguistics, and medieval and humanistic scholarship. PAGES will build an open source digital scholarly resource on the text, the tradition, and the reception of Priscian. The infrastructure will make available the results of the systematic census of medieval manuscripts and early printed editions, including the comprehensive inquiry about the Greek script and glosses in Priscian’s 8th-10th-centuries manuscripts as well as about the emendations and interpolations in 15th-16th-centuries manuscripts and printed editions.

Mots-clés : ancient grammarians,digital philology,late antiquity,latin language and literature,greek and latin fragmentary texts,ancient and medieval bilingualism,carolingian studies,renaissance studies,history of scholarship,history of linguistics